IN all the thousands of years of human history, only 12 men have ever known what it is like to walk upon the surface of the moon. When Apollo 12 commander Pete Conrad died in a motorbike accident in 1999, only nine of them were left.

Journalist Andrew Smith set out to track them down and speak to them about those heady days between 1969 and 1972 when mankind seemed ready to reach for the stars.

What drove them to let themselves be strapped into a tiny airtight capsule on top of a giant controlled explosion and be flung into the dark infinity of space? What was it like to walk upon the surface of another world, and see the Earth rising over the horizon? What loneliness gripped their souls as their orbiting spacecraft swung round the far side of the moon and they were cut off as never before by the bulk of the moon itself from the rest of squabbling, fighting humanity? And what was it like to return to Earth knowing that the greatest achievement of your life was already over and the rest of your days would be one long, slow anticlimax?

The result is a gripping, profoundly revealing book which captures all the excitement and danger of the Apollo flights and is both a portrait of a lost time when everything seemed possible and a meditation on what it is to be human.

Stunning.

Updated: 09:09 Saturday, April 22, 2006