Countdown: 2979 Days to the Moon
by Suzanne Slade (Author) and Thomas Gonzalez (Illustrator)
Booktalk: In 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced that the United States would try to land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. During the two thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine days following his speech, eighteen astronauts climbed into spaceships; three of them died before even leaving the ground. Eight rockets soared into space. And four hundred thousand people?engineers, technicians, scientists, mathematicians, and machinists?joined Project Apollo in hopes of making the dream a reality.
Illustrated free verse tells the true story of the American effort to land the first man on the Moon.
Snippet:
Determined to win this Space Race,
the Apollo team begins their herculean task:
designing, building, and testing four new crafts–
each with its own important role–
that must work flawlessly together.
The command module
will carry the crew to the Moon and back.
The service module
will provide electricity, oxygen, and other supplies.
The lunar module
will land on the Moon and provide a home there.
And the mighty Saturn rocket
must launch the entire mission into space.
It’s STEM Friday! (STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)
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