Andrew Chaikin is an independent space historian best known as the author of A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, widely regarded as the definitive account of the moon missions. Published in 1994, the book became the main basis for Tom Hanks’ 1998 Emmy-winning HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. He has been a visiting instructor at NASA since 2010 and has taught Principles of Success in Spaceflight to spaceflight professionals there and at the DoD’s Missile Defense Agency.
A graduate of Brown University with a degree in geology, Chaikin served on the Viking missions to Mars at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was a researcher at the Smithsonian’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies before becoming a science journalist in 1980. Since 2015 he has been a member of the Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. He is also a member of the NASA Engineering Safety Center’s Human Factors Technical Discipline Team.
A former editor of Sky & Telescope magazine, Chaikin has also been a contributing editor of Popular Science and has written for Newsweek, Air & Space/Smithsonian, World Book Encyclopedia, Scientific American, and other national publications. He is a co-recipient of two NASA Group Achievement Awards for his participation in the Viking and New Horizons missions, and is a recipient of the American Astronautical Society’s Ordway Award for Sustained Excellence in Spaceflight History.