THE RACE: The Uncensored Story of How America Beat Russia to the Moon.

THE RACE: The Uncensored Story of How America Beat Russia to the Moon By James Schefter Doubleday, $2495

THOSE OF US WHO STARTED space and science reporting after Apollo know we missed something special. Not that a space shuttle launch isn't a stupendous thing. But reporters watching one with their mouths agape tend to get a slightly pitying look from old-timers who saw the Apollo moon rockets take off. Some say these were life-changing, almost religious experiences. Schefter describes the first one: "The ground beneath the reporters' feet began to tremble. It shook. It amplified. Reporters felt the Saturn 5 long before they heard it. All one thousand of them were screaming and yelling, `Go! Go! Omigod! Omigod!' ... No one was ready for this." When the sound finally hit them, the air crackled like nonstop thunder and roared like 1,000 hurricanes. It was more than noise; it was a force. "Reporters leaned into the shove and craned to watch that omigod rocket pitch over on cue to a straight east heading." When the rocket and its three crewmen were gone, "the reporters looked at each other and shivered."

What a difference a few decades makes. As the 30th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing came and went on July 20, morose old astronauts remarked in various ways that it has been an awfully long time since people wearing spacesuits did anything really new, adventurous, or heroic up there. They're right. The few missiles sent moonward since Apollo have been small, automated probes--the most recent mission was a little 350-pound craft called Lunar Prospector that culminated its mission August 31 in a deliberate nosedive into the lunar south pole. The hope was to spot water vapor in the puff of dust, a discovery that might make a longer stay on the moon more feasible some day. Don't hold your breath. Lunar Prospector's biggest achievement was its low cost: $63 million. When it comes to tax dollars, such economy is undoubtedly good, but it also shows how things have changed. When President Kennedy vowed in 1961 to nut a man on States had yet to put a man in orbit at all. Everybody knew it would be god-awfully expensive. It was, too: Well over $100 billion when corrected for inflation.

James Schefter covered NASA from 1963 to 1973 for the Houston Chronicle and Time-Life. He got to know the astronauts and the NASA officials who ran the manned spaceflight program and has kept in touch since. He watched intimately the many ups and downs of the program and the fierce infighting behind the scenes as various schemes and designs were adopted, rejected, and refined. He also has gone through recently available Soviet archives and spent hours with new U.S. citizen Sergei Khruschev, whose father gave the green light to Moscow's early space successes and its failed effort to send cosmonauts to the moon. This is a book by a fan who reveled in Apollo. Don't read it for philosophical or political analyses of the value and rewards of rocketships. Schefter is not a historian, sensitive to subtleties or paradox. The book reads a bit like a pulp detective story, larded with short, declarative, emphatic sentences that add up to urgent, self-consciously manly writing. It is a paean to mechanical ingenuity and uncomplicated courage.

Despite his failure to grapple with the most important questions about the Apollo program, Schefter's account is well-reported and in long sections, grippingly told. It starts sensibly with the embryonic space programs in both the United States and U.S.S.R. in the '50s. The reader meets such major characters as the then-shadowy "Chief Designer" of Russia's rocket forces, Sergei Korolev, and in the United States the Nazis' former rocketman von Braun and Schefter's personal hero Bob Gilruth, head of NASA's manned Spacecraft Center. Nearly the entire tale is familiar, including the media frenzy around the original Mercury seven astronauts, the embarrassments of the Vanguard program whose rockets blew up repeatedly while the first Sputniks beeped on by, and on through tragedies and triumphs until Armstrong made his small step from the Lunar Module Eagle. In his telling, the Soviets no more stood a chance of beating the American space juggernaut than Japan did of defeating U.S. industrial might in World War II. The account of a Soviet program that had only one thing going for it--huge rockets built to carry oversized nuclear warheads--rings true. He is very persuasive in explaining how Soviet technology fell hopelessly behind the sophisticated space hardware that NASA developed for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs.

That said, the book doesn't live up to its subtitle. The "Uncensored" story? Schefter takes delight in describing the off-hours hijinks of the early astronauts, most of which involved jumping in bed with parades of women picked up in bars, at the space center, on the road, and everywhere else. This, however, is not a revelation, and the book shows the good sense not to provide raunchy details (like other such accounts, it depicts John Glenn as a choir boy compared to his hormone-addled test pilot colleagues). More important, sections on the Soviet program are too sketchy, interspersed in brief breakaway vignettes that interrupt the U.S.-based narrative without adding useful context. This book, like earlier efforts, recognizes that Kennedy's clarion call was driven by politics and Cold War fears, not science. The absence of a larger justification for Apollo other than to beat the Russians set the stage for the continuing hiatus in long-range human space exploration. Schefter portrays the United States as having been hoodwinked by Soviet propaganda into a moon race. This implies we should have done it differently. Yet his book implicitly celebrates Apollo as a sublime achievement. He does not grapple with the central question about Apollo: Was it a mistake? Even if it was, should we thank the Soviets for bamboozling us? Who were the smart people? While the book seems scornful of opponents of the moon program in the early '60s, it seems even in this account that their skepticism was well-grounded in fact. Those who demanded a mighty U.S. counterblow to seeming Soviet technological superiority were in fact wrong--Moscow was mostly bluffing. While the U.S.S.R.'s space program achieved many glorious firsts it did not represent a fundamental threat to America. Schefter paces along from incident to incident, with little scrutiny of their pattern.

In fairness, many Americans still see the space program as the most amazing, impressive thing America has done in the last half century and Schefter does capture that sentiment. He has gathered plenty of facts about the moon race, which was not really a race at all. It was a remarkable series of events; his readers will have to reflect for themselves on its meaning.

CHARLES PETIT is a senior writer at U.S. News and World Report.