I had been involved in a first autobiography thinking about a second autobiography. When are we gonna do it? We put this into a movie that has the drama, and then we’ll fill in the details later in a book. I favored that initially but I was overruled, and we wrote the book first. And now we’re looking for maybe a movie to help spread the word about the details that are in the book. But while we’re doing this, it appeared to an individual of great artistic ability who had done quite a few children’s books that my story would make a wonderful children’s book. So we got together and wrote Reaching for the Moon which was the first book primarily about me from the age of moving into a house, growing up in a house and staying in that same house until I went away to school and all the things that I did.
And really what it I hope accomplished — and this was the purpose — was to take an historical figure of some celebrity status, that people don’t get to know, and then to bring that person down from the pedestal into an ordinary, young person growing up making the decisions and giving a familiarity to the young people who would be reading the story of the evolution of a person’s life. Successful, very successful up to the point of reaching that wonderful objective of landing on the moon and what that meant and how that fit into things. And having written that story, it was sort of selfish because that was just about me. Why, the artist and I felt that now let’s take something and look at all the people who contributed in their different ways from the very beginnings of looking at the stars and Look to the Stars and what has that been able to accomplish from the first people that started looking at the stars — the astronomers. And then the people who began advancing technology into flying airplanes, flying across the ocean, flying supersonic and then rocket travel and rocket travel going to the moon and then the future of potential rocket travel and spacecraft going to other objects like Mars.
And of course, in the back of my mind was the fact that we will look to the stars, but some day we will travel to the stars. That’s not in this book but maybe that’s the next one that’s obviously science fiction or technology projection.
