"Conceived primarily as a political statement, Apollo achieved much more than its original goal," Beattie, a geologist and former project manager of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments, writes in this valuable addition to the literature on America's race for the moon. When President John F. Kennedy issued his mandate in 1961 to put an American on the lunar surface before the end of the decade, the objective was to beat the Soviets, whose space program at the time was two years ahead of our own. Kennedy's mandate did not specify what the astronauts should do once they got there; simply getting there was enough.