To spend 4 years researching and writing Rocket Men, day after day in libraries, archives, home alone and staring at screens, and then begin a book tour by doing 70 interviews in 4 days means coming out of a cave and learning all over again that the world exists. I'm feeling blinded by the light!

Almost all the press has been incredibly informed and enthusiastic, but of course what sticks in the mind is a young radio interviewer from the South who, after I explained the birth of the Moon as a eons-old collision between the Earth and a body the size of Mars which flung debris that coalesced into our silvery light, she paused and said, "But I thought God created the Moon!"

Craig Nelson, Rocket Men, Apollo, NASA, moon landing, Penguin Books