The Authors

Harold D. Beck. Hal Beck is an aerospace engineer who joined the Langley Research Center in 1959. In 1961, he transferred to the Mission Analysis Branch of the Space Task Group and subsequently to the Mission Planning and Analysis Division at the Manned Spacecraft Center, where he remained in successively more senior positions until the Division was disbanded in 1990. During Gemini and Apollo, Beck was head of the Lunar Trajectory Section, dealing with development of guidance and control software, maneuver targeting, rendezvous and docking operations, spacecraft communi­cations, translunar injection targeting, and lunar orbit maneuvers.

Kenneth A. Young. Ken Young is an aerospace engineer who joined the Manned Spacecraft Center in June 1962. He was assigned to the Rendezvous Analysis Branch to develop the new space disci­plines of rendezvous and orbital mission planning, dealing with rendezvous and orbital trajectory analyses, computer software development, mission designs, plans, and real-time flight operations support. During the Apollo missions, Young was head of the Mission Design Section of the Orbital Analysis Branch. He retired from NASA in 1987 as head of the Flight Planning Branch for the Space Shuttle.

Charles A. Murray. Charles Murray is the F.A. Hayek Emeritus Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the co-author with Catherine B. Cox, of Apollo: The Race to the Moon (1989). Among his other books are Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 (1984), The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (with Richard J. Herrnstein, 1994), Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960­–2010 (2012), and Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class (2020).