Marty’s Mission: An Apollo 11 Story

2019 Kansas State Reading Circle Selection for the Catalog in the Intermediate School Division It’s 1969 and Marty’s family lives on the U.S. island of Guam, where his father manages the NASA tracking station. It’s important work and never more so than during the Apollo 11 space mission, where the tracking station relays signals back and forth between the astronauts and Mission Control in Houston, Texas. Along with the rest of the world, Marty listens to every mission update, including the historic landing on the moon and astronaut Neil Armstrong’s first steps. But during Apollo 11’s return to Earth, something goes wrong. There is a problem with the tracking station’s antenna during the final hours of the mission. The problem must be resolved–the antenna is the only way Mission Control can communicate with the astronauts before Apollo 11 splashes down. Marty finds himself playing a key role in helping bring the craft safely back to Earth. Based on actual events, young readers get a front-row seat to this historic event in this new entry in the Tales of Young Americans series.