Warning: Wikipedia contains spoilers
In the book Bond is asked privately to come and observe Hugo Drax, who is winning money playing bridge at M's club, and who M suspects is cheating. Bond confirms him as a cheater, and manages to 'cheat the cheater', winning a large amount of money and infuriating Drax.
Drax is also the backer of the (fictional) 'Moonraker' missile being built to defend the UK. Partly because of the cheating episode, M then asks Bond to inflitrate Drax' missile-building organisation on the coast of England. Bond uncovers a dreadful and fiendish plot which he foils with the assistance of a junior female (and, of course, attractive) fellow MI6 agent.
In the 1979 movie, Drax' lair is relocated to outer space, although the plot remains equally fiendish. In the movie, Drax has converted a toxin found in a species of orchid found in the Amazon River basin, which in its natural state causes sterility, into a lethal nerve agent. He plans to destroy all human life (the toxin affects only humans) by launching a series of 50 globes containing the toxin from a space station; the toxin would be dispersed when each globe broke up during reentry into Earth's atmosphere. Before launching the globes, Drax transported several hundred carefully selected young men and women to the space station. They would live there until Earth was safe again for human life; these people would be the seed for a Hitleresque master race.
Bond reaches the villain's orbital lair by means of the space shuttle (which was soon to be launched for real when the movie was released). Widely considered to be one of the most juvenile Bond movies, it is, unexpectedly, the first where Bond's female companion is on a more or less equal footing with him. The "Bond girl", Dr. Holly Goodhead (played by Lois Chiles), is a CIA agent who competently wards off bad guys and pilots the space shuttle.
Moonraker was the last of three Bond movies for which the theme song was performed by Shirley Bassey.
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