And the second-best moon landing ...

So as I recall, without making the effort to look it up, the
Apollo 11 astronauts were awarded a Special Hugo in 1970 for the Best
Moon Landing Ever.

What was the second-best, then? And I know there wasn't an
actual vote on that, even granting that it would have been awarded to
Apollo 13, but what fictional moon landings got closest to the way
things actually happened?

To my eye, the things that really stand out as getting it Close
or Dead-On Right would be:

- moon landing as a national (rather than corporate or academic
or Royal Geographic Society) project
- flight done using chemical rather than nuclear or handwavium
engines
- rendezvous maneuvers used to make the flight requirements more
attainable
- small crew going to or touching down on the moon
- short duration of the flight
- frequent communications with earth during the flight
- computers (digital or analog) serving important roles in the
navigation and telemetry of the flight
- extensive training and simulation as important elements to the
flight preparation
- participants aware of the symbolic aspects of the flight (as,
for example, the taking of a piece of the Spirit Of
Saint Louis, or Aldrin's taking communion showed)
- an absence of silly ``tension extruders'' like threats of
mutiny or space sickness or aliens, favoring instead
just the adventure and discovery (although there is room
for some of them; after all, the actual flight seeing an
unexpected alarm that happens to be of the type they ran
across in the last week of training? *Such* a movie
moment, there)


I would be stunned if there were any stories that had all of
these elements. Even just a handful of them would be impressive. And
I may not have picked out all the elements that made Apollo really
different from fictional moon landings, although there are quite a few
stories which had elements of these, some of them even not written by
Arthur C Clarke.

And of course the earlier the story the more impressive the
feat is.

--
Joseph Nebus
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