Apollo by Catherine Bly Cox (PDF)

Description

This is the classic account of how the United States got to the moon. It is a book for those who were part of Apollo and want to recapture the experience and for those of a new generation who want to know how it was done. Republished in 2004 with a new Foreword by the authors.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I grew up watching the Apollo program, and this book was a marvelous trip over some very familiar ground. I have read many other books on program, but this is still one of my favorites, and I am so glad to have found it again. I read it previously and enjoyed it, but foolishly lent my copy to someone.=== The Good Stuff ===* Murry and Cox wisely limit what they attempt to include in the book. The book is more of a series of vignettes than a comprehensive history of the program, but those vignettes are chosen well. We get to meet a sample of just about every level of NASA, including designers, flight controllers, back-room gurus, men running the facilities, and even the occasional clerical and junior staff.* The authors do a marvelous job of capturing the tension, passion, technical expertise and even the humor that made the program work. I laughed out loud for a couple minutes upon reading the story of one famous prank done to a flight controller. It was only a simulation of a launch, but when the count showed T-0 and he pushed the simulated red button, one of his screens showed a (previously taped) view of a Mercury/Redstone rocket taking off. On a sad note, the tragedy of Apollo 1 and its affect on NASA and its people is well described.* The book is not about the astronauts-and they are actually fairly minor characters. This work is about the thousands of people sitting behind the astronauts, and it tells their stories. There are quite a few details in the book, including technical explanations that are somewhat detailed, but still clear enough for anyone interested enough in space flight to comprehend. There is more technical information in this book than in the movie Apollo 13, and in the Earth to the Moon documentary series.=== The Not-So-Good Stuff===* The authors worked very hard to explain and detail the NASA management hierarchy. It is quite complex, and I must admit I still don’t know the difference in the responsibilities between the Apollo Program Office, the Manned Space Flight Office and the various NASA centers, programs, groups and facilities. I think the distinctions between these teams are really only discernible to members of NASA who lived through it. For my two cents, the time and word count spent on this could have been better used with other information.* Some of the characters are presented in a much more detailed and personable manner than others. As a reader, I feel like I almost know Gene Kranz and Sy Liebergot, but Werner von Braun is just sort of a German guy that built rocket engines in Alabama.=== Summary ===I loved the book, and found it a great look at parts of the Apollo programs. It was not a complete history by any means, but rather a series of more intimate looks at different pieces of the programs. It covered most of the main events, and touched on the roles of just about every group in NASA. The book stands alone, and is a great read for either new Apollo fans, or for space junkies who have read quite a bit of material previously.

⭐This is probably one of the best books ever written about the Apollo moon landing project. It is chock full of details and information that I have not seen in any other book yet.Reading this book makes you feel like one of the “Important Insiders” sitting at a console in Mission Control.The book covers everything from the very beginnings of NASA, the initial shock of the people who had to make it work (“how on earth are we going to do this???”) to the first lunar landing and beyond.It has a lot of detailed information on many of the key people in America’s space program such as Christopher Craft, Gene Kranz, Bob Seamans, Max Faget, Kurt Debus, Rocco Petrone, Caldwell Johnson, Robert Gilruth, George Low, John Houbolt, Sam Phillips, Joe Shea, Jim Webb, George Mueller, Cliff Charlesworth, Bill Tindall, Paul Castenholtz and of course Wernher von Braun and countless more.Not only are the contributions and professional histories of these people documented, their personalities, idiosyncrasies, habits and behind the scenes antics are recorded. Not only do you learn what a person did, you also learn what it would be like to know them personally.Amazing stories such as how one engineer (John Aaron) just happened to see a particular pattern in garbled data years before and was probably the only person on the planet who knew that saying “Flight, tell them to go SCE to AUX” would save the Apollo 12 mission after it had been hit by lightning during launch or how SimSup Dick Koos just happened to choose a simulator program containing the 1201 and 1202 program alarms for the very last simulator run and taught the flight controllers exactly how to handle it (they blew it in simulation, but got it right for real). Without that random chance simulation of an almost unknown error code, the Apollo 11 landing attempt may very well have been aborted.This book is also obviously very well researched. I have yet to find a single technical error in it. Even the cause of the 1201 and 1202 program alarms (during Apollo 11’s landing) is accurately documented (mismatched phase angles in spacecraft and radar power supplies, not “computer errors” as is so widely said).Also, a test stand run of an engine that failed is correctly documented as “divergent combustion instability”, not the “dust cover mistakenly left on a fuel line” baloney that’s told to the general public.If you want a lot of very interesting, accurate and richly detailed information about the development of the Apollo project and the people who made it happen, this book is for you.If you want to feel as though you are sitting alongside Gene Kranz during the Apollo 11 landing or working with Paul Castenholtz at an engine test stand in the desert trying yet another combustion instability fix or standing alongside Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in the LM seeing the lunar surface approaching and feeling the tension of low fuel level lights illuminated, program alarms pausing the computer and less than 30 seconds left to land safely, this book is for you.It’s one of the best I’ve read on Apollo.

⭐If you have ever wondered what it was really like working for NASA and it’s history this is the book for you, if you want to learn about what the all singing all dancing astronauts did then don’t read this book, it has little to no information about the astronauts, this book is strictly dealing with the events behind the scenes, the good the bad and the ugly, from laugh out loud to down right tearing your heart out, this is not about the feel good official NASA history this is the real deal history from the people that actually worked at NASA during the early years up till the ending of the Apollo era, I read this book when it was first in print in a hardback, if you have read James A. Michener ‘Space’ then you know exactly what you are getting into, ‘Space” is a fictionalised version of real events, ‘Apollo’ on the other hand is the real historical version, this is probably the best book you will ever read on the history of NASA.

⭐It may be 50+ years old, but it’s still a fantastic story about a project that probably shouldn’t have worked, but did. The writers interleave the history of rocket development in the late 1950s with the foresight of a few people who thought that flying to the moon was possible. There are stories of lone voices who were reviled, but turned out to have the perfect solution, factional infighting between the various development centres, “the right people in the right place” who pulled the mammoth effort together and made it work it the allotted timescale. You know the outcome, but you are amazed at the journey. I took this book on holiday and was entranced by it; very difficult to put down!

⭐This is the best book on Apollo that I have ever read. It is not focused on the astronauts. It is focused on the engineers, launch technicians, operations teams and flight controllers. If you want to understand how the missions were actually developed and supported then this is the book. Really excellent. A gripping and exciting read.Some of the recent books I’ve read on Kindle have had formatting and spelling mistakes – seem that there was carelessness in developing the Kindle edition. This one is very clean.

⭐A thorough and well researched biopic of possibly the greatest of all of mankinds achievements regardless of personal political views

⭐Superbly written account of the greatest project delivered by mankind

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