SCIENCE used for the Right Stuff: T-Minus, The Race to the Moon

After thinking long and hard about how science can be used for ill, I wanted to take a step back and revel in the joy of what science can accomplish. It’s even better when those accomplishments are taken for real life rather than the imaginations of creators. I love the pure fantasy stories too, but there have been times in history when the minds of man reshaped how we look at the reality around us, and one of my favorite  era when that happened was right after WWII when a handful of scientists, some smuggled fresh out of Germany, helped the Americans and the Soviets fight for control of the cosmos in a time now known as: The Space Race.

The Space Race is something I’ll never get tired of learning about. My dad was in the Air Force and has an unquenchable thirst for all things plane and rocket related, so I guess he passed that interest onto me. The confluence of events that allowed the United States to land the first person on another world are astounding (and yes, we really did land there, which maybe should count as a spoiler warning for this book).

I’ve enjoyed reading comic stories from that era such as Laika by Nick Abadzis and First in Space by James Vinning, not to mention watching The Right Stuff, Apollo 13 and other films innumerable times and the great thing is that they all work together beautitfully since no two works cover exactly the same thing. That’s why I was so excited when I saw the old faithful team of Jim Ottaviani along with Xander and Kevin Cannon team up for T-Minus, The Race to the Moon, the most recent book I’ve read on this topic and thus the one I’ll be focusing on primarily in this column. I’ve featured this team before when I wrote about Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards, which is a story about one of the most exciting times in my own field of paleontology, but for some reason even that couldn’t capture my excitement the same way T-Minus was able to.

The book follows both the Russians and the Americans as their governments try to push their scientists and engineers to do what had barely been conceived of before. It is a testament to how big a scientist can dream when given the opportunity to do so. They had crazy ideas like electrical computers, as opposed to rooms full of women doing calculations by hand, and even crazier ideas of satellites being used to relay communications around the entire globe. But like any great endeavor frought with big ideas, there were a lot of failures along the way, including some legitimate tragedies, and this book does a nice job of balancing just how much the Americans and the Soviets sacrificed as they raced each other and time.

It’s not 100% accurate, which is done by design to keep a stronger narrative, but I know enough about the actual history to affirm that big pieces are all in play in the right way and it is a joy. The story is structured as a countdown, and while the exact moment it’s counting down to should be obvious, I won’t say it here just in case. In anything, the countdown is an awesome mechanism for driving the reader because the pace increases as the clock get's closer to zero. It's like the doomsday clock in Watchmen but exciting instead of ominous.

Even though it leaves some of the history out, which is by no means a sin of omission. The team clearly had a goal for the story they wanted to tell and I’m kind of glad they left a few pieces on the drawing room floor. Not every book needs to be From Hell. I know the history, so I could fill in some of the blanks, but someone who was less aware would likely not even notice that things were missing, and if anything this book should whet your appetite to go and learn those things on your own. Regardless, Ottaviani puts in plenty of extra facts nested between the panels, so be careful reading this book near someone else because you’ll probably keep annoying them by butting in to tell them, “Did you know Cosmonauts sometimes carried handguns and one time when they crash landed in Siberia they were attacked by wolves?” If your friend is worth anything they will have already known that, but if not they should at the very least appreciate the information (because it is objectively awesome).

The art is really interesting in that it’s basic cartoony black and white drawings, which as an avid indie comic reader I don’t mind in the slightest. The more I think about it the more I realize what an accomplishment the artwork is. This book must have been a pain to draw. Unlike superheroes, you have a bunch of white men in shirts and ties arguing about engineering, and sometimes one of them puts on a spacesuit and gets in a rocket, which all seemed to be portrayed accurately, and is sent headfirst into the sky. Going from the sterile consoles in Houston to the first time a human saw the earth as an entire object is quite a transition, and I’m sure what I think of as a hassle probably came as a welcome challenge. The layouts are complex and usually work even if sometimes they’re a bit busy.

This book chronicles a time in history where men left earth only less than 60 years after the Wright brothers invented the first plane. So suffice it to say that some of these characters seem larger than life, and very likely were. Hard-nosed no-nonsense pilots staring in awe at the earth below them, reading from the Bible on TV during Christmas while orbiting the moon, or getting in a rocket that wasn’t safe to fly to prevent your friend from having to do so himself. These are just some of the true stories you learn when you explore a time when science was valued and people dreamed big and it worked. I think it was the catharsis I needed after spending 3 weeks talking about where it goes wrong.

Ryan Haupt still kind of wants to be an astronaut, but probably won't both until there's a good planet to go find fossils on. Until he leaves earth, go hear his big ideas spouted in podcast form on Science… sort of.