Apollo 13: The NASA Mission Reports - Softcover

Robert Godwin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1896522556 ISBN 13: 9781896522555

Publisher: Collector's Guide Publishing (CA), 2000

Synopsis

CD-ROM and Book. Homer himself could not have written a more captivating story than the flight of Apollo 13. On 11 April 1970 veteran astronaut Jim Lovell and his crew mates Jack Swigert and Fred Haise rode atop the ill-fated journey to the moon. The aptly named command module Odyssey and the reluctant lunar module lifeboat Aquarius were to take the three men to a date with the lunar highland area known as Fra Mauro but fate and a faulty circuit in one of the vehicle's oxygen tanks would irrevocably alter their plans and turn the flight of Apollo 13 into an epic to rival the original Odyssey. After an explosion in the service module crippled the spacecraft while it was still outward bound, the crew would spend several harrowing days in near frigid temperatures while the technicians at home worked around the clock to devise new and ingenious ways to keep them alive and bring them home safely. In 1970 some considered Apollo 13 a catastrophic failure but it has since been recognised as one of NASA's truly great moments, when the spirit of daring and ingenuity came to life in the team at Mission Control as they successfully brought the crew home. Some of the rare official documentation of the voyage of Apollo 13 is collected and made commercially available for the first time.

About this title

Review:

A dream come true for dedicated space buffs, the NASA Mission Reports series pulls together an almost overwhelming array of official NASA press kits, operation reports, images, CD-ROM movies, and even dinner menus from some of the space agency's most momentous missions, from Gemini 6 to the many Mars launches.

Series editor Robert Godwin explains in his introduction why the failed Apollo 13 mission (later of Tom Hanks-Ron Howard fame) is particularly deserving of such detail-intensive attention: "Putting aside the high drama of the events, the following documents reveal a side of NASA that is often overlooked, the talents of the management and administrators." Those talents are nowhere more evident than in the minutes from the House Science and Astronautics Committee hearing, numerous internal NASA memos, and the previously classified technical debriefing of the astronauts. Even the pre-mission materials prove interesting, explaining with extensive diagrams the many experiments that never reached the lunar surface.

As with the other excellent instalments in the Mission Reports series, the included CD-ROM backs up the already solid content with searchable documents and choice images and movies, including a long interview with Jim Lovell. (And while the CD works more smoothly on Windows, users on other platforms shouldn't have to work too hard accessing its many jpegs and mpegs.) --Paul Hughes

About this edition

• Publisher: Collector's Guide Publishing (CA)
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1896522556
• ISBN 13: 9781896522555
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264
• Editor: Robert Godwin