Apollo was first written live: reportage, albums published within weeks of the missions, raw transcripts of the exchanges between the crews and Houston. The event in its pure state, with no narrative added. Then Apollo becomes memory: astronauts, engineers and programme leaders publish their testimonies, each with their own angle and their own silences.
Finally comes the time of history: archives opened, distance gained, the great technical, political and human syntheses of the programme follow one another, and every decade rereads Apollo differently.
Few human undertakings have produced a literature so abundant and so layered. That is the interest of the theme: the same mission, told ten years apart, no longer says the same thing.