Of a Fire on the Moon Norman Mailer

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Library book

34 "The horror of the 20th Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation. "
Wow! Great line Norman.

43 After seeing how smooth Armstrong was for the cameras, Mailer comments on the selling of the program with,"a new species of commercial.was being evolved. NASA was vending space. Armstrong was working directly for his corporate mill." I guess we'll read all about this when we get to Marketing The Moon.

BOOK Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program
David Meerman Scott, Richard Jurek

44 mailer on Frank Mcgee from NBC tv. He calls him "the very ring-tailed hawk of waspitude" LMAO!

58 he estimates a million people came to clog the roads around Cape Caaveral. The in July and the following month kids would gather in a farmers field  in upstate New York.

60 Mailer says there was a big auto- camping trend going on in American at the time.

61 I love his description of the common people that came to the launch. His description has a sort of Woodstock feel to it. And how many would be born nine months after an event like this. Its like early redneck tailgating.

70 "Tell me Dd Von Braun whats to keep it (the Saturn  V ) from hitting  London." Supposedly asked of Von Braun at the press conference.

71 Dr Debus, Von Braun's counferpart said of Wehrner,"Just give him the Nazi salute and he'll yell Heil Hitler!"

109 Between launch and landing on the moon; Chappaquiddick.

188 Boy this is really some tone of this book. Only Mailer can write about going go the moon with no jingoism.  Apollo 8 was the one were they circled the moon and Frank Borman read lines fron Genesis on Cristmas Eve.

191 Here comes Apollo 11 out of the  VAB. A 363 ft 6 million pound rocket riding on a 13 million pound turtle that creeps along at top speed (1 mile an hour) toward the launch pad. "Over half a million gallons of fuel will be burned in the first two and a half minutes." Its really more like a "controlled explosion." And if the astronauts survive these first two and a half minutes their chances of survival go up precipitously.