More than fifty years have come and gone since the first people landed on the Moon. The year 2019 spawned a flurry of retrospectives, some seeking to understand why we went to the Moon in the first place, others seeking to mythologize the Moon landings and the space race – a mythology that has become crucial to future efforts to land on the Moon.

Scanning over the deluge of Moon-related books, films and television shows raises questions about who these books are written for and why. Launius's slim, short volume recalls the mythology that has crystallized around the history of the space race – but also questions the value of that mythology.

Rather than beginning with the US–USSR space race, Launius chooses to start by telling the story of the USSR's chief designer, Sergei Korolev, and his colleague/rival Valentin Glushko. This serves to decentre the United States and contrast it with the USSR; this contrasting of the two different space powers is repeated throughout the book and is one of its great strengths. Instead of focusing on US supremacy, Launius acknowledges that the US and the USSR both influenced and reflected on each other. The brief glimpses – as this is only a brief book – into the history of Soviet space science are intriguing and Reaching for the Moon could have benefited greatly from expanding on Soviet space history.

Shifting the focus away from the US to examine both US and Soviet space history also allows Launius to question some of the myths that have sprung up around the space race. The first chapter, ‘Sputnik winter’, traces the legacy of the first artificial satellite around Earth – and while it presents sputnik as the satellite that truly started the space race, it also makes a compelling case that sputnik was not initially linked to public ideas of the Cold War. Launius uses contemporary studies, including some by respected cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, to argue that the American public initially saw sputnik not as Cold War gunboat diplomacy but as a scientific triumph. This complicates the neat narrative of sputnik as an unproblematic start to the space race.

Launius also complicates other aspects of the space-race narrative; in particular, he portrays Kennedy not as a space-struck visionary, but as a hard-nosed man of realpolitik who saw expanding the space programme as vital to maintaining the Cold War balance of power. This framing of the US space programme as one of scientific diplomacy, and specifically as a kind of scientific diplomacy contingent on the actions of the USSR, is significant because it allows Launius to argue that the Moon landings were not inevitable but were a product of a unique set of circumstances. The Bay of Pigs fiasco, the advances made by the USSR in human space flight, and Kennedy's desire to use a human Moon landing as a show of US technological prowess all combined to make a Moon landing politically viable when it could easily not have been. In addition, Launius discusses what could have been different; for example, he presents evidence that as late as 1963, two months before Kennedy's assassination and one year before Khrushchev's removal, US officials were making tentative efforts to establish a joint US–USSR space programme. The ways in which Launius treats these possibilities allows him to argue that the funding and implementation of the Apollo programme were anomalous, not something that could be repeated in any other political time.

Both the US and the USSR could boast of their expert scientists and engineers – yet only one nation succeeded in putting people on the Moon. Launius attributes this to political and managerial factors, rather than scientific ones; in the US, NASA expanded its capacity and brought in strict programme management under military managers for a single, complex space programme. By contrast, in the USSR, there were multiple smaller space programmes that all competed with each other and with different Soviet projects. This meant that less money and fewer resources were available to Korolev, Glushko and Mishin than to their American counterparts, and that they had to spend precious time and energy on fighting for these funds and resources. Launius describes all this clearly and concisely, and although it is not a new explanation it is a valuable one to have.

Launius continues by giving a brief account of every Apollo mission. This is valuable, especially for people who may only be familiar with some of the more notable missions such as Apollo 11 and Apollo 13, both because of the breadth of Launius's coverage and because of his justifications for the importance of some of the earlier and less well-known missions; however, the accounts could have benefited from more depth.

Reaching for the Moon summarizes the achievements of the Apollo programme; although Apollo was a triumph of engineering, Launius also argues that the programme was a scientific triumph. This is a departure from accounts that play down the science case for Apollo.

Finally, Launius takes stock of the Apollo programme and any future returns to the Moon – something that is timely, as the fiftieth anniversary of the Moon landing passes, and the US prepares to put people on the Moon again. His conclusion is much less sanguine than that of many other space enthusiasts: because, he argues, the conditions for the Apollo programme were so unique, they cannot be replicated, and we are unlikely to have people on the Moon again. It may shock and sadden some readers, but it is a well-supported conclusion and one that will make audiences think.

Although this book is slim and could benefit from more detail, it is a powerful, reflective account of the space race and its legacy.