Storms was given the chance to lead North American's expansion into the business of spaceflight by Dutch Kindelberger and Lee Atwood.

While this was a significant achievement, Storms was not satisfied, as he was also aiming for North American to win the contract for the Apollo spacecraft itself, which they did on November 28, 1961.

In 1961, Storms' management team, called "the Storm Troopers", consisted of Harold Raynor, Dr. Robert Laidlaw, John Paup, Charlie Feltz, Bill Snelling, Dale Myers, Norm Ryker Jr., Scott Crossfield, Frank Compton, Lloyd Harriott, Dr. Henry Swift, Earl Blount, and Dr. Toby Freedman, medical director.

He had lifted them out of the humdrum of their ordinary lives and put them to work on one of the greatest adventures in history, and now a bunch of sonsabitches who probably couldn’t find their asses with both hands were yanking him out of the saddle just short of the finish line.

If Harrison Storms hadn’t held everybody’s feet to the fire on the S-2 common bulkhead, there would be no moon landing in this decade; there was no way the Saturn 5 could have lifted the weight of the other design.

And the spacecraft itself was unquestionably a masterwork — a labyrinth of systems more complicated than an aircraft carrier packed into a stainless-steel phone booth — and anybody with hands-on experience knew that it was the finest piece of machinery ever assembled.

While Shea blamed North American's management for the continuing difficulties in the development of Apollo, Storms felt that NASA itself was far from blameless.

Publishers Weekly described it as a "swaggering portrait of NASA's Apollo project [which] might well be called Indiana Jones and the Engineering Mission of Destiny.