Review:Fine historical source about lunar spaceflight (4/5) This synthesis gives an excellent overview of the US efforts to explore the Moon in the 60's. A good basic work to understand the return of mankind to the lunar surface.
Review:Could have been good, but the author ruins it all (2/5) As a short overview of the moon landings this book would have been good for beginning students or as a coffee table book, and I enjoyed reading it in two sittings, reliving what was for me a childhood memory. Throughout the book the one noticeable thing you get from all the astronauts is the feeling that their endeavour was for ALL humankind - not just for the US. It doesn't matter that the flag they planted was a US flag - these guys came from Earth for all of Earth's people. So when the author says, on the very last page, "If We Don't Go, Someone Else Will: Just who might be the United States' primary competitor... but whoever it is, the United States will have lost an opportunity..." he completely ruins the whole book and shows that he's MISSED THE ENTIRE POINT of the lunar explorations. This wasn't a petty nationalist endeavour - even though it started as a race with the Soviets it was not 'the US against the rest of the world'. On the contrary, as the plaque on the Apollo 11 lunar lander says: "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969 A.D. WE came in peace for ALL mankind", and when WE go again, no matter what nation or group sends the people up there, they will be people representing Earth, and we should welcome that. We should not, as Rod Pyle clearly does, see it as a potential threat to the hegemony of the United States. So sad that a few poorly chosen words should ruin what was a nice book. Anyway, sadly I cannot recommend it. Watch 'From the Earth to the Moon' instead. It's a far longer commitment in terms of time spent, but at least the authors don't betray their audience in the petty way Rod Pyle does. As a boy in England, those astronauts landed on the moon for me just as much as they did it for folks in Milwaukee or Dallas. To suggest differently is to dishonour all of us, including the astronauts who made such a daring leap for ALL humankind.
Review:Another Illustrated History of the Apollo Program (3/5) Like clockwork celebratory books like "Destination Moon" appear in print just in time for the holiday shopping season. These books on the space program always take advantage of the stunning imagery of the Apollo missions to the Moon to capture the impressive nature of that undertaking. "Destination Moon" does this exceptionally well, and prints both iconic images burned into the public memory as well as less well-known photographs of the Apollo adventure. Compiler Rod Pyle couples striking visuals with excerpts from the voice communications between the astronauts and Mission Control in Houston. It is important to note that transcripts of those communications are also readily available on-line at NASA Johnson Space Center's history portal: http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/mission_transcripts.htm. For each of the missions, which are listed chronologically, there are usually several different transcripts.
"Destination Moon" is a capable book and one that will be helpful to those unfamiliar with the Apollo program; it provides an accessible introduction to the Apollo Moon landings. It is, unfortunately, quite cursory as a work of history. Individuals who already understand the Apollo story will not learn much new here. If you want to understand the history of the program two other books are much better: Andrew Chaikin's "A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts (Viking, 1994), and Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox's "Apollo: The Race to the Moon" (Simon and Schuster, 1989), both of which have been reprinted several times and are readily available. Even so, the imagery is worth the price of the book.
Review:Excellent book on a neglected part of the space program (4/5) There are many books about the moon landings but only a handful about a different aspect of the manned space program, the effort to put a long-term human presence into orbit. This book is therefore a welcome addition.
It begins with science fiction and speculation: Edward Everett Hale's (author of "The Man Without a Country") "Brick Moon," about a round, masonry space station is the science fiction. The speculation involves the "big three" of early astronautics: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Hermann Oberth, and Robert Goddard. The first two speculated in detail about the possibility, benefits, and technology of space stations, while Goddard did the engineering to help make them possible. Two unfamiliar (to me) names also appear: Baron Guido von Pirquet, who published articles describing space station design in the German Rocketry Society's newsletter, and Hermann Noordung, who published a book with more than a hundred engineering drawings of a proposed space station. And the groundwork would not be complete without a mention of von Braun's fifties-era vision as published in Collier's, with dramatic illustrations.
The book moves on from there to what has really happened. The first of these chapters focuses on Skylab in some detail but also covers the eventually cancelled Manned Orbiting Laboratory military effort. The Russians deservedly get two chapters, one on Mir's predecessors, the Salyut series, and one on Mir itself. The International Space Station also gets two chapters, one on all the permutations it has gone through and one on how it turned out once it truly became "International." A short final chapter addresses colonies in space, focusing on Gerard K. O'Neill's visionary concepts.
These chapters are very detailed and sumptuously illustrated, providing details on each mission and what they were intended to accomplish, as well as the design of each space station (with the myriad Soviet Salyuts, this is a significant amount of information). The Russian chapters are particularly good, briefly covering the engineering details as well as the politics behind them (as two rival factions in the Soviet space establishment strive to impose their vision on a Soviet manned presence in space). The ISS chapters are somewhat depressing, pointing up how much money was spent before anything was built and how much the actual cost has exceeded the estimates. However, the illustrations are particularly good for the ISS, showing it in great detail as it is planned to be built as well as the many discarded permutations.
All in all, this is an excellent book for those interested in the subject.
Baseball fans have the Sporting News Register for getting their stats fix, and farmer-types can turn to the time-honored Almanac. So it's only fair that space-exploration junkies should have Robert Godwin's definitive NASA Mission Reports, providing page after page of official data and diagrams, not to mention CD-ROMs packed with movies, pictures, and searchable NASA documents.
While most of Godwin's NASA books focus on a particular mission (e.g., Apollo 13 and Gemini 6), the Mars book chronologically surveys every single mission that's been mounted to the red planet, from the 1964 launch of Mariner 4 to the more current Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor encounters. And it's this breadth that makes the book a standout even in this excellent series. Not only can you marvel at the 16K flight computer on 1975's Centaur and the much more impressive hardware on the MGS, but you can even see the quality of NASA's press materials evolve. (When's the last time you saw a diagram with a typewritten legend?)
With NASA press kits for all the probes and a choice assortment of the more interesting mission reports, Godwin has assembled an authoritative, blow-by-blow resource for serious space buffs. And good news on the "Windows" CD-ROM that's included: Since the files are primarily mpegs, jpegs, and html, readers can access the CD and its hour and a half of vintage video from just about any platform. --Paul Hughes
Review:On to Mars - Take the trip with Apogee Books! (4/5) Apogee Books once again strikes gold! This Mars book is one of the best written, because it deals specifically with the spacecraft and missions that went to the Red Planet. Original press kits and fact sheets for the first few Mariner missions (a rare find!) have the orbital calculations for the trans-Earth and trans-Mars trajectories - how many times have you seen estimated times for travel, but wondered "How did they get that?"
The data for the Viking missions are also interesting - they list the 3 main experiments that was going to solidify the "Life on Mars" argument. The data was inconclusive, and I can't quite remember if the press kits covered the results - however, the fact that the experimental procedures and equipment were listed is amazing.
Apogee Books have a high "geek" factor built in and this book does no less than the rest of the series. If you're one of those who needs to know how it works or the 'rest of the story' then Mars: The Nasa Mission Reports, Vol. 1 & 2 are for your library.
Review:A great reference (5/5) This book pulls together a ton of publicly available information on the unmanned Mars probes from the United States, tracking the changes in our understanding of the Red Planed. The bonus CD has, among other things, a cool short film starring Carl Sagan, showing the experiments on the Viking landers that were to show whether there is life on Mars.
Review:Search for Mars (4/5) This book is a nice handy reference of robotic exploration of Mars (Mariner IV to Mars Polar Lander). The information is detailed enough to give you an understanding of the mission objectives and the spacecraft design. The level of detail varies for each mission, but in most cases gives the reader a starting point. Before this book was available I spent many hours trying to compile this information myself and was never fully able to obtain a complete collection. So I would recommend this book because of it's completeness (at least to Mars Polar Lander) and for the insight it does provide into each mission. May there be many more volumes to come.
