Cover Image: The Apollo Missions

The Apollo Missions

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Member Reviews

As expected from this author an erudite, extensive and accurate look back at one of the 20th Centuries biggest technological wonders.

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Certainly an unusual non fiction book!

This was a fanscinating read and took me a little longer than anticipated. It's fairly short but packed!
David Baker, an expert in planetary science, gives a nice overview of the Apollo (and subsequent) Missions with a lot of detailed technical information.
It goes beyong a collection of facts by conveying the vision of interplanetary travel and highlighting the success of space discovery. The narrative is linear and organized by the events that lead up to the foundation of NASA, the start and execution of the historic landmark missions, extremely detailed background on rocket thruster developments, etc. The execution of the book is well done.
The only thing that bothered me, is the amount of details. For me as a non-engeneer the weights, distances and all the other minute nice-to-know facts were bothersome and slowed down my reading.

However, the topic of the Apollo Mission is covered in depth from the American point of view. The race to the moon had more than one participant. It would've been nice to have a better view on the soviet progress in that race. Here the book fails to cover both countries achievements in equal detail, probably due to the lack of information. (?)

By the end of the books are schedules and tables listing food menus, flight durations etc. This was a really interesting addition and fun to read! The chapter about the space suit was great too. All in all, this is a great read for space enthusiasts who crave a more in depth view on the Apollo Missions!

I would like to thank the publisher, Arcturus Publishing, for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

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Wow! Just my thing this book. A short but extremely interesting read. Packed full of technical data, illustrations and descriptions. This is definitely for anyone who is interested in space travel and would suit a beginner or someone with some knowledge already. Brilliant.

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This book is fairly short but packs a punch. It covers the Apollo flights up 11 and gives some light detail of the subsequent missions.

Baker packs in a lot of technical details such as when a certain engine fired, for how long and at what point in the mission the engine fired. Although this could come across as fairly dry he livens it up throwing in quips such as, if the engine didnt stop at the exact designated second the mission would have to be aborted or the astronauts would be lost in space etc. This adds the human dimension to proceedings and you can literally feel the thrill and drama as the Apollo 11 mission takes shape and takes flight. That a million people crowded the Kennedy Space Centre and that the American death rate fell dramatically in the months preceding the landings were facts that I did not know.

In some ways I wish this book could have been longer and covered the later missions in as much detail as the first Apollo flights.

I feel there is a lot of ground that could have been covered, there are lots of interesting little snippets of info, for instance one of the spaceraft had to have its thousands of soldered connections to the exact length, if each was just 1/32 of an inch too long the spacecraft would have been too heavy a payload for its rocket. Crazy stuff.

This is well worth a read and serves as a good primer to the Apollo missions.

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