APOLLO: The Epic Journey to the Moon.

By David West Reynolds. Harcourt. 272 pp. $35

Late this year, a sad little anniversary will likely pass without much notice. On December 14, 1972, Eugene Cernan took one last look around the dark lava plains of the Taurus Mountains, near the Littrow Crater. The golf-cart–like lunar rover stood 500 feet away, ready to send Earth live television images of his departure. He gazed down at the plaque on the spider-legged lunar excursion module, which, like the rover, would be left behind: "Here Man completed his first exploration of the Moon/December 1972 a.d./May the spirit of peace in which we came be reflected in the lives of all mankind." Cernan boarded the Command Service Module and, with fellow astronaut Harrison Schmitt, lifted off to begin the journey home. No one has been back since.

If you get a little teary eyed over that vignette, with its simultaneous evocation of enormous achievement (the U.S. space program of 30 years ago) and enormous disappointment (the U.S. space program of today), then you will take a bittersweet pleasure in Apollo: The Epic Journey to the Moon. Reynolds describes the Apollo program, which put 12 men on the moon from 1969 to 1972, as "an unprecedented new kind of project for our culture. We must look to the pyramids of Egypt or the cathedrals of Europe to find parallels." Despite the current stagnation—circling the Earth in a shuttle or space station hardly counts as progress—he believes the best is yet to come: "One day, the achievements of Apollo will inspire us to find our astonishing strengths again."

Alongside hundreds of photographs, Reynolds recounts the history of the Apollo project, from the tragic Apollo 1, which caught fire during premission testing in 1967, killing the three astronauts inside, through the successful Apollo-Soyuz Earthorbiting collaboration of 1975. He provides a fascinating back story, too, including a reputation-burnishing account of Wernher von Braun, the rocket boy turned Nazi munitions maker turned American NASA-meister. The book lovingly reproduces von Braun’s sketches for rockets from the 1920s to the 1960s, as well as the see-the-future-now paintings that, in his postwar incarnation as public-relations whiz, he inspired in Collier’s and other popular magazines.

The author of five books on the Star Wars movies, Reynolds naturally emphasizes the fantastical origins of the space program. In From Earth to the Moon (1865), Jules Verne posited Florida as a launch site; the pioneering French science-fiction writer knew that Earth’s faster rotation near the equator would help a rocket achieve escape velocity. Reynolds rescues from obscurity Fritz Lang’s 1929 silent movie Frau im Mond (Woman in the moon), which benefited from the technical advice of rocketeering visionary Hermann Oberth. "In some major ways," Reynolds observes, "the look and feel of Apollo began with Fritz Lang and Frau im Mond."

The Star Wars movies are perhaps the best portal for kids who might grow up to take humanity beyond Apollo, but when the young and curious are ready to move from fiction to fact, they should pick up this book. For everyone else, Apollo will make a handsome, informative addition to the coffee table.

—James Pinkerton