When We Walked on the Moon

More than 5,000 rockets have been blasted into space, but only 12 people have ever been lucky enough to walk on the Moon and look up at Earth. So begins this fascinating human story of the seven Apollo missions and the people involved.

There’s a lot of information about what happened on each mission in each chapter: from Apollo 13’s disastrous oxygen cylinder explosion that forced its three astronauts to improvise a drastic survival solution, to Apollo 17 (the final mission), during which Harrison Schmitt took the now famous “Blue Marble” photograph of Earth from the Moon.

We also have a profile of each Apollo crew at the end of the book, meaning that Neil Armstrong isn’t the only astronaut name that kids are likely to know after reading the book (though the pictures of the seven crews does highlight the fact that all the Apollo missions were manned by white men – fortunately, now, astronaut crews are more diverse).

The book also contains quotes from the astronauts themselves, showing us how they felt during these dangerous and exciting missions, which lends a touch of relatability to these remarkable events.