Before The Moon

Before astronauts could survive space, they had to survive Earth. Before the Moon is the companion book to the documentary film of the same name, uncovering a largely forgotten chapter of American space history. Long before rockets thundered off launch pads, the human body was being pushed to its limits on the ground. In a quiet corner of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, scientists, engineers, physicians, and technicians at the Naval Air Development Center developed the research that made human spaceflight possible. Drawing from firsthand interviews, oral histories, archival documents, and original research, filmmaker and author Jason Sherman traces the human preparation behind spaceflight, connecting work done in Bucks County with parallel efforts at NASA centers in Houston and Florida, including Johnson Space Center and Kennedy Space Center. Voices throughout the book include NASA flight directors, astronauts, engineers, and trainers such as Gene Kranz, Jerry Ross, Chris Ferguson, and others whose careers spanned Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Shuttle, and the modern era of human spaceflight. The book also includes stories that could not be included in the film, expanding the record beyond the limits of the screen. These accounts focus on preparation, discipline, and responsibility, on centrifuges, human endurance, and the invisible infrastructure that kept astronauts alive when everything else went wrong. The original soundtrack is included with this book and was composed to accompany each chapter of the Before the Moon documentary. Each piece is designed to deepen the atmosphere of the story and transport the listener into the era, locations, and emotional undercurrents of early spaceflight. The music can be experienced alongside the chapters or on its own. Spanning early American innovation, Cold War secrecy, the Apollo era, and today's return to the Moon through Artemis, Before the Moon reframes the space race as a human story rooted on the ground.