Team Moon

Thimmesh, Catherine. TEAM MOON How 400,000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.
ISBN:0-618-50757-4

Summary:

Team Moon is a photo essay about the Apollo 11 mission, which landed the first man on the moon. What stands out about this book is how seamlessly Thimmesh weaves in direct word-for-word quotations from the people who were involved along with all of the pictures and captions, and dates that would need to be in such a book. She makes this watershed event in human history, not just an event, but something personal and meaningful to a variety of people (virtually anyone who actually was involved . . . factory workers to rocket scientists), and she includes their individual roles, as well as their feeling in the overall telling of the Apollo 11 mission.

Telling the story of the two Bobs in mission control, Themmesh describes the tense scene--

Thirty seconds!
Now would not be the time for the two Bobs to miscalculate, miscount, or lose their superhuman powers of concentration. They could not afford to be wrong.
“When we tripped the low level, things really got quiet in that control center,” recalled Bob Carlton. “We were nervous, sweating. Came to sixty seconds, came to thirty seconds, and my eyes were just glued on the stopwatch. . .”

Reviews:
From launch to splashdown, Thimmesh gives names and voices to the 400,000-strong army that got Neil Armstrong and company to the moon and back. Taking as her organizing principle the journey itself, she describes how each element was made possible by NASA and its many contractors. Thus readers learn about the 14,000 people at North American Rockwell who built the command module Columbia, the 17,000 people at NASA's launch operations, and so on, from the women who sewed the spacesuits to the engineers who designed the re-entry parachutes.
Horn Book (July/August, 2006)

With exciting you-are-there language and stunning historical photographs, this book captures the excitement of the Apollo mission to the moon. It lives up to its subtitle; besides the astronauts, it tells about the work of the contractors who built the rocket and the lunar module, the computer gurus who programmed the equipment, the crew in Mission Control who guided the machines, the seamstresses who constructed the spacesuits, and many more.


Library Media Connection (February 2007)
Enrichment Activity:
This would be a great book to pair with a book like The Apollo 13 Mission by Donald Lemke to compare the two missions which were meant to be similar. Seeing all of the components that are part of Team Moon, should show the students how little room for error there is in a mission. Reading about Apollo 13, and showing movie clips from the film, might make the danger seem more real. As a class, a Venn diagram could be used to find the similarities and differences of the mission.

Another activity would be to look at the different vocations involved and do a job study, helping students see what they might be good at. Once they have decided on a type of job they are interested in, they could write a short “what if” essay describing how they would have impacted the Apollo 11 mission with their vocation.