Dear Dr. Hansen,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was inspired to read your book<\/a> after seeing First Man in the theater this year. I didn\u2019t realize your Auburn connection<\/a> until reaching the end of the afterword.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As I read the book I kept remarking to my wife how impressed I was with the phenomenal level of detail you wove into the story. It grabbed me from the moment I picked up the book in the bookstore: I opened it to a random page that happened to be the LM descent, and found myself breathlessly reading about the alarms and fuel and landmarks and preparation and professionalism and touchdown. In the end I had to read your book one chapter at a time, stopping at each new chapter heading from the exhaustion of detail I felt. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve abstractly known what it meant for hundreds of thousands of people to have worked on the Apollo and earlier programs but it finally clicked into concrete realization as I read your descriptions of guidance alignments and overpressurized fuel lines and crushed foam and low sun angles and loping gaits \u2014 how teams of teams, collectively of incomprehensible size, engineered<\/em> those landings. Your research and writing transported me to the 1960s, sitting in an offsite support room with a slide rule and earnestness and na\u00efvet\u00e9 and a mission, in much the same way that reading Patrick O\u2019Brian transports me onto the deck<\/a> in a rolling sea at the height of the Napoleonic Wars. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And, as someone who wanted to be an astronaut his whole life, I walked away from your book understanding for the first time the terrible burden that \u201cheroism\u201d placed on the astronaut corps of that era. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I commend you on your work. Thank you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear Dr. Hansen, I was inspired to read your book after seeing First Man in the theater this year. I didn\u2019t realize your Auburn connection until reaching the end of the afterword. As I read the book I kept remarking to my wife how impressed I was with the phenomenal level of detail you wove […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jlg.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jlg.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jlg.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jlg.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jlg.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1100"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/jlg.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1101,"href":"http:\/\/jlg.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100\/revisions\/1101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jlg.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jlg.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jlg.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}