Man in the Moon

At the ripe old age of 22, James Schefter got bored with his job
covering the real estate beat for the Houston Chronicle. Not only
was he bored, but he complained about his boredom to his bosses. Soon he
was called into the executive editor’s office. Was he going to be fired?

“Hey, they’re starting this NASA thing down south of town,” Schefter’s
editor said to him. “Wanna open up a Clear Lake bureau?” Boredom would
plague young James no more. It was 1963, and NASA was “nothing more than
two holes in the ground.” But the Russians had put America to shame with
the launch of Sputnik six years earlier, and the space race was on.

Schefter watched the scientists and astronauts move into town and
became “as much of an expert as there was” in the news media. In 1965
Time and Life magazines made him their NASA correspondent,
and Schefter was granted exclusive access to the astronauts’ families and
their traumatic training sessions, such as the Jungle Survival School.

But just because Schefter saw a lot doesn’t mean he was able to print a
lot. The space program’s defeats, infighting, political maneuvering and
astronaut escapades were voluntarily ignored by the media of the day.
“There was an unwritten rule,” says Schefter. “If an astronaut didn’t get
booked into jail, we didn’t run the story.” And despite his blood-alcohol
content, an astronaut never got booked into jail.

Of course, these days there are no such unwritten rules. Schefter’s new
book commemorating the 30th anniversary of the lunar landing is called “The
Race: The Uncensored Story of How America Beat Russia to the Moon,” and he
happily reveals the debauchery of death-defying astronauts (with the
notable exception of Boy Scout John Glenn). But Schefter is most proud that
his book reveals the behind-the-scenes poker game be-tween mysterious
Soviet “Chief Designer” Sergei Korolev and Bob Gilruth, father of NASA’s
man-in-space program.

Without Bob Gilruth, I don’t know when we would have gotten to the
moon,” Schefter says. “And nobody knows his name.”