This book provides a unique look at NASA in the years leading up to the Apollo 11 landing. Brian O'Leary was chosen as a part of NASA astronaut group 6, the second group of scientist-astronauts. O'Leary gives engaging descriptions of the NASA selection process and the astronaut office of the 1960's, which I really appreciated.

It seems like the biggest reason why O'Leary quit was the flying requirement. He fixates on the odds of being killed in a jet crash. He is sent to flight school with fellow scientist-astronaut Charlie Parker. O'Leary describes struggling a great deal in flight school, and winds up quitting (While Parker finished and got to fly two Shuttle Spacelab missions.)

That, coupled with his growing awareness there will be no money for all of NASA's post-Apollo grand scientific plans, put the final nail in the coffin. Section IV of the book is O'Leary's retrospective look at Apollo. He is very critical of NASA for sending pilots instead of scientists. He describes some of the early moonwalkers as untrained buffoons, which I think is unfair. He eventually takes the attitude that manned flights are wasteful, and NASA should concentrate on using unmanned probes to accomplish actual science.

In the end, I'm not sure O'Leary had the right temperament to be an astronaut. Knowing he went off the deep end later in his life, eventually dying of untreated cancer, colors my interpretation of his personality.

On a side note, this book was published in French under the title: J'ai refusé d'aller sur la lune. This translates to I Refused To Go To The Moon. Ha! As if Deke were standing by the capsule hatch, waving him in, but O'Leary says "Nope, I don't want to go." The first astronaut in his group didn't fly until 1982, 10 years after the last manned lunar landing. ( )

Fascinating alternative tale of being an astronaut. Brian O'Leary was quietly dropped from the program and wrote this book to explain himself. I saw this in a bookstore, didn't buy it, then found it later on Amazon.

Deke referenced this book in "Deke!: An Autobiography", attributing it to a failing in the psychological screening. This book doesn't tell the official story that all of the flown astronauts tell in their autobiographies, it tells Brian O'Leary's tale of being a scientist and thus a misfit in a world of macho space pilots at NASA. Of realizing that he was going to miss out on his opportunities to be a scientist if he was going to be waiting for some vague promise of a Mars or Skylab mission that history eventually showed wasn't going to happen anyway.

After writing the book, the author went a little nuts in all sorts of ways, fell in with the magical hippie crowd... which is too bad, because I think this tells a better tale of how things happened in a way that didn't happen again until Mike Mullane's "Riding Rockets" ( )

Read this book in HS. Bit of an eye opener--a scientist astronaut who decides not to be an astronaut. He was put off by the "right stuff", test pilot emphasis of NASA, and the comparative lack of support for science. ( )