From the Inside Flap:
"Dave Scott and Alexei Leonov have each borne the enormous responsibility of commanding spacecraft and of representing their respective countries in the most fascinating and most expensive race in human history. This is their transcendent recounting of that competition."
- Neil Armstrong, from the Foreword
"Leonov and Scott have gone to extra lengths to explain the inexplicable in Two Sides of the Moon. And thank goodness they have. Theirs was a gamble taken voluntarily and eagerly with the single-minded pursuit of earning the assignment and then getting the job done. Sometimes they were first. Often they were best. Always they were colorful. And yet each time they returned, neither man claimed to have come back a changed man who had gone into space and seen the spirit of the universe. They came back from their missions in space having seen the spirit of themselves as even more of the human beings they were before leaving our world of air, land, and water.... Leonov, the artist and Scott, the engineer/dreamer. The two of them-the Cheaters of Death."
- Tom Hanks, from the Introduction
"What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon, but that they set eye on the Earth."
- Norman Cousins
About the Author:
DAVID SCOTT is one of the twelve men to have walked on the moon. He was born at Randolph Air Force base, Texas, educated at West Point and received his pilot winds in 1955. He studied at MIT and graduated from the experimental test pilot school, before being selected as an astronaut by NASA in 1963. He flew three space missions: as Pilot of Gemini 8 in 1966, then as Command Module Pilot on Apollo 9 in 1969 and finally as Commander of Apollo 15 in 1971. He subsequently became closely involved in the joint USA/USSR Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, and from 1973-1977 worked as Director of the NASA Dryden Flight Research Centre. He went on to found two private companies, applying his technological expertise in the arena of commercial space, and has also acted as technical adviser on the film Apollo 13 and Tom Hanks' award winning televisions series, 'From The Earth To The Moon'. ALEXEI LEONOV was born in Siberia in 1934 and graduated from the Chuguyev Higher Air Force School in the Ukraine in 1957, before serving as fighter pilot in East Germany in 1959. He was amongst the first group of cosmonauts selected in 1960 and flew two space missions: as Pilot of Voskhod 2 in 1965 and in 1975 as Commander of Soyuz 19 during the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. In 1966 he was appointed Commander of the lunar training group and would have been the first Soviet cosmonaut on the moon. He became Deputy Director of the Gargarin Cosmonaut Centre and was promoted to the rank of major general. He is currently vice-president of Russia's Alpha Bank.
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