There are those who still hold that the Americans never went to the moon at all, but filmed the whole thing on a disused Hollywood backlot. At the end of the 1960s, the decade that made paranoiacs feel their time had come at last, it was perhaps inevitable that the Apollo missions would be viewed with suspicion. The technology was about as advanced as that used by the Watergate burglars.
Yet what an extraordinary adventure the moonshot was. How could we not be impressed by the jaunty optimism of it all? How could we not be charmed by the down-home ordinariness of the astronauts and the nail-chewing fervour of the ground control staff, with their crew cuts and short-sleeved shirts and awful ties? What was most remarkable about the endeavour was the - well, the mundaneness of it. For, as it turned out, the real object of the exercise was not the moon at all, which might as well have been made of green cheese for all we cared, but the earth, this poor misused raddled old planet which we saw again "with an innocent eye" through the cameras on board the Apollo capsule.
Full Moon, by the wonderfully named Michael Light, is a narrative in photographs that takes the reader/viewer on a ravishing journey with the Apollo crew from blast-off to splashdown. NASA gave permission for Light to take 900 master negatives from the space mission, which had been kept in cold storage since 1968, and scan them electronically to produce what the publishers rightly describe as "the sharpest images of space that we have ever seen". This is a wonderful document that will entrance those too young to have experienced the moonshot, and win round those old sceptics who sat in front of their televisions night after night that scorching July 30 years ago as the spacemen jumped over the moon, took a momentous step, and returned to find, as Wallace Stevens has it, our "unique and solitary home".