His account, which ran to 115,000 words,[1] was published between August 1969 and January 1970 in three long installments—A Fire on the Moon,[2] The Psychology of Astronauts,[3] and A Dream of the Future's Face.

"[5] On February 26, 1970, after the magazine series had concluded, Mailer wrote to Apollo 11 commander, Neil Armstrong, "I've worked as assiduously as any writer I know to portray the space program in its largest, not its smallest, dimension".

Alvin Kernan, in his 1982 academic study The Imaginary Library, included a chapter on Of a Fire on the Moon, noting it represented the declining relevance of the Romantic conception of literature.

This production retitled the work, MoonFire, and was presented in an aluminium box with a lid shaped like the crater-pocked surface of the Moon; the object was mounted on four legs resembling the Apollo Lunar Module's struts.

The package included a numbered print of the famous portrait of Buzz Aldrin standing on the Moon, framed in plexiglass and signed by the astronaut himself—and enclosed a lunar meteorite.