Not Because It’s Easy

George Schellenger is an award wining journalist and television producers with two passions: spaceflight and sharks. He combines the two in his new book Not Because It’s Easy, published in May. “I can tell you of rocket ships, both large and small. Of night launches to space and of engine test in the middle of office complexes, of flying machines without wings in the desert.” With these words, Schellenger kicks off the introduction to this book, dedicated to the memory of Neil Armstrong, and predicated on Schellenger’s own impatience to get back to the Moon.

Although the work itself is fiction, it shows clear signs of the author’s expertise, summarized by his publisher as follows:

George C. Schellenger covered the winning Ansari X PRIZE Flights in 2004 for AOL helping to create an online sensation before the days of YouTube. He also developed coverage of Discovery’s Return to Flight in 2005 for AOL Time Warner. He went on to work on the original X PRIZE Cup in 2005 and he worked for the X PRIZE Foundation to help create the Northrup Gruman Lunar Lander Challenge at the X PRIZE Cup in 2006. He produced the first Air & Space show at the Kennedy Space Center in 2007. He is an expert shark driver who recently joined a team to take Sir Richard Branson to see Tiger Sharks in the Bahamas. He believes the lessons of Project Apollo are still relevant today.

Having gotten as close as he could to returning to the Moon in real life, Schellenger decided to go the rest of the way through his protagonist Knox Long, who is determined to rekindle the Apollo Project.

Below, a trailer for Not Because It’s Easy, replete with all the Apollo imagery the most devoted of Orphans could desire:

Not Because It’s Easy – All great adventures begin with a single step… from George Schellenger on Vimeo.