Hidden Figures - Margot Lee Shetterly

in the trenches of Mission Control. Still,
the broadcasters knew—everyone in the
audience knew—that even with twentysix
manned flights under NASA’s belt,
this was different, and they struggled to
come up with superlatives to capture the
moment. Cronkite gushed unabashedly,
putting the magnitude into the context of
the great machines of war and
transportation that had transformed the
American century: the mighty Saturn V
rocket consumed the equivalent of ninetyeight
railroad cars’ worth of fuel; it
propelled a craft that weighed as much as
a nuclear submarine with the equivalent
thrust of 543 fighter jets. The United
States would spend $24 billion on
Apollo, in order to plunge the sword into
the heart of the Soviet Union’s ambitions
in space.