Francis French is the director of education at the San Diego Air and Space Museum and the coauthor with Colin Burgess of Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961–1965, available in a Bison Books edition. Colin Burgess is a former flight service director with Qantas Airways and the editor of Footprints in the Dust: The Epic Voyages of Apollo, 1969–1975 (Nebraska 2010). Walter Cunningham was a NASA astronaut from 1963 to 1971 and a crew member on the first manned Apollo flight.

"[A] readable introduction to the first years of America's leap into space."—Publishers Weekly "Authors Burgess and French are even-handed and equitable, and have done an excellent job in covering a vast expanse of material. . . . The opportunity to get the true stories from the astronauts themselves is a luxury that will sadly not be available forever, and In the Shadow of the Moon has done an excellent job in gathering and eliciting the stories of these men, not just the 'official reports,' but the personal touches that render them more human. . . . The authors have a touch for weaving revealing and captivating personal narratives amidst the nuts-and-bolts space history."—Michael Patrick Brady, PopMatters.com "French and Burgess present a first-rate, detailed, and very personal account of the space race to the moon . . . . Strongly recommended both as a study of the social interactions among this unique group of people and as a gripping series of anecdotes that describe the exciting, dangerous steps behind the successful moon landing."—CHOICE "This book has everything you ever wanted to know about the astronauts that paved the way for the first Moon landing. Rarely does one get the entire information of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programmes, encased in one book, about the men who entered the dangerous and untried realm of flying off the Earth."—Jeff Green, Liftoff

• List of IllustrationsForewordAcknowledgments1. Gemini Raises the Bar2. A Rendezvous in Space3. The Ballet of Weightlessness4. The Risk Stuff5. The Astronaut Enigma6. Starting Over7. Leaving the Good Earth8. A Test Pilot's Dream9. The Highest MountainEpilogueReferencesIndex