Apollo 17: The NASA Mission Reports (Apogee Books Space Series)

Rating:
Summary: A bit of a Disappointment
Review: If I could, I'd give this book four and a half stars, since it is really not up to the standards of the previous editions. I gave it five stars, however, because others might not agree with my opinion on why it is not as good as the previous Mission Reports.

With the publication of this book, Robert Godwin and Apogee Books have provided at least one volume of reproduced NASA material covering all of the manned Apollo missions. As is obvious from the title, this latest offering, examines Apollo 17, the final mission to the moon. Apollo 17 was the last of the three long duration (3 days) missions and again featured the lunar rover, which greatly extended the area that the two astronauts could explore. In addition, this mission included the only non-pilot, scientist astronaut, a geologist in this case, to explore the moon. The mission was commanded by veteran astronaut, Gene Cernan who was making his third trip into space, geologist and rookie Harrison "Jack" Schmidt accompanied Cernan to the lunar surface as the Lunar Module pilot and Ron Evans was the Command Module pilot.

Like many of the other volumes in this NASA Mission Report series, the book opens with the usual NASA mission press kit. It is easy to tell that the author and his staff spent some time searching for some very clean originals, since compared to their earlier efforts, such as Apollo 8, the scanned in drawings are almost perfect. Since this mission was the last lunar landing mission, it seems that NASA produced a much larger and more detailed press kit compared to its earlier Apollo mission press kits. In addition to the customary background information, the press kit focuses on the scientific aspects of the mission including some nice information on the often overlooked orbital photography observations and in flight experiments. The next section contains the Prelaunch Mission Operation Report, which presents a basic overview of the planned activities of the mission, including the EVA timelines. It is interesting to note that the format of these timelines is still used today to plan EVAs for the space station assembly. The next section presents the Post-Launch Mission Operation Report that provides a summary of the accomplished mission objectives and describes any Mission problems and deviations from these planned activities.

The final section, the crew debrief section, covers about 40% of the book, and is 95 pages long. This section contains the crew's comments and feelings about various phases of the mission from liftoff, to landing and even post flight activities. This crew debriefing is fairly technical and uses a lot of undefined NASA acronyms, which makes the reading a bit difficult, even for this NASA contractor employee. Very few pages in this section are devoted to the EVAs (8 pages) and orbital observations (4 pages) and all three astronauts go into great detail describing all aspects of their respective duties. I found it quite odd, that with all the emphasis on the lunar exploration being conducted by an onsite geologist, that there would be such a small discussion about the EVAs and the geological investigations. Reviewing the crew debriefing shows that Cernan and to some degree Evans dominated the conversations, while Schmidt only talked about specific areas like training. All in all; however, an interesting section.

As typical of all the books in the Mission Reports series, the book contains a CD that includes additional material. It is here that I felt the book let the reader (or viewer is this case) down. Unlike the other books in the series, the CD does not contain any of the still photographs. Instead it only contains complete video camera footage from the three EVAs and twenty-two panoramic views. I would have preferred the still photos in lieu the video transmissions.

Some general information that might be useful.

1) These reports are just scanned-in documents from previously released NASA press kits, etc., In order to preserve the spirit of the original reports, all typographical and grammatical errors have NOT been fixed.

2) Proceeds from the book goes to "The Watch" an asteroid impact research project of the Space Frontier Foundation. In other words, Apogee Books is making very little off the sale of US government produced books and documents.

3) Many people have asked why the post mission reports are not included. Since NASA has published several books with hundred of pages each (The NASA SP series), it would be difficult to included this voluminous amount of data.

Rating:
Summary: A bit of a Disappointment
Review: If I could, I'd give this book four and a half stars, since it is really not up to the standards of the previous editions. I gave it five stars, however, because others might not agree with my opinion on why it is not as good as the previous Mission Reports.

With the publication of this book, Robert Godwin and Apogee Books have provided at least one volume of reproduced NASA material covering all of the manned Apollo missions. As is obvious from the title, this latest offering, examines Apollo 17, the final mission to the moon. Apollo 17 was the last of the three long duration (3 days) missions and again featured the lunar rover, which greatly extended the area that the two astronauts could explore. In addition, this mission included the only non-pilot, scientist astronaut, a geologist in this case, to explore the moon. The mission was commanded by veteran astronaut, Gene Cernan who was making his third trip into space, geologist and rookie Harrison "Jack" Schmidt accompanied Cernan to the lunar surface as the Lunar Module pilot and Ron Evans was the Command Module pilot.

Like many of the other volumes in this NASA Mission Report series, the book opens with the usual NASA mission press kit. It is easy to tell that the author and his staff spent some time searching for some very clean originals, since compared to their earlier efforts, such as Apollo 8, the scanned in drawings are almost perfect. Since this mission was the last lunar landing mission, it seems that NASA produced a much larger and more detailed press kit compared to its earlier Apollo mission press kits. In addition to the customary background information, the press kit focuses on the scientific aspects of the mission including some nice information on the often overlooked orbital photography observations and in flight experiments. The next section contains the Prelaunch Mission Operation Report, which presents a basic overview of the planned activities of the mission, including the EVA timelines. It is interesting to note that the format of these timelines is still used today to plan EVAs for the space station assembly. The next section presents the Post-Launch Mission Operation Report that provides a summary of the accomplished mission objectives and describes any Mission problems and deviations from these planned activities.

The final section, the crew debrief section, covers about 40% of the book, and is 95 pages long. This section contains the crew's comments and feelings about various phases of the mission from liftoff, to landing and even post flight activities. This crew debriefing is fairly technical and uses a lot of undefined NASA acronyms, which makes the reading a bit difficult, even for this NASA contractor employee. Very few pages in this section are devoted to the EVAs (8 pages) and orbital observations (4 pages) and all three astronauts go into great detail describing all aspects of their respective duties. I found it quite odd, that with all the emphasis on the lunar exploration being conducted by an onsite geologist, that there would be such a small discussion about the EVAs and the geological investigations. Reviewing the crew debriefing shows that Cernan and to some degree Evans dominated the conversations, while Schmidt only talked about specific areas like training. All in all; however, an interesting section.

As typical of all the books in the Mission Reports series, the book contains a CD that includes additional material. It is here that I felt the book let the reader (or viewer is this case) down. Unlike the other books in the series, the CD does not contain any of the still photographs. Instead it only contains complete video camera footage from the three EVAs and twenty-two panoramic views. I would have preferred the still photos in lieu the video transmissions.

Some general information that might be useful.

1) These reports are just scanned-in documents from previously released NASA press kits, etc., In order to preserve the spirit of the original reports, all typographical and grammatical errors have NOT been fixed.

2) Proceeds from the book goes to "The Watch" an asteroid impact research project of the Space Frontier Foundation. In other words, Apogee Books is making very little off the sale of US government produced books and documents.

3) Many people have asked why the post mission reports are not included. Since NASA has published several books with hundred of pages each (The NASA SP series), it would be difficult to included this voluminous amount of data.

Rating:
Summary: The legacy continues
Review: This is the best Apollo mission report yet! In this volume you find the documents that concluded Mans greatest adventure. The CD gives more panoramas, and more photos than ever done by Godwin before!
At the end of Apollo, there were more reports about what was found and what was done on the Moon- so I know that there will be at least a couple more books with ALL the mission reports!
This volume has the information dealing with the plans for the mission as envisioned, and the preliminary results of what Apollo-17 yielded from the Moon. Ah.. if we had only gone back to the moon again and again!!!
I can't wait to see the next Apollo-17, volume II.