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Rating: 
Summary: Great as Usual
Review: Over the past five years, Robert Godwin and Apogee Books have compiled a variety of various NASA documents, press kits, crew interviews and the like, which recount the early days of the space race and with specific emphasis on the Apollo missions. As is obvious from the title, this book does not focus on any Apollo mission, but the final Gemini mission, Gemini 12. With the launch of this mission, one of the most successful manned space flight projects came to an end. The mission focused on rendezvous and docking; however, the most important aspect of this mission was the testing and evaluation of the Extravehicular Activities (EVA). Veteran astronaut James Lovell who was making his second trip into space commanded this mission, while rookie astronaut Buzz Aldrin conducted the EVAs. By all accounts, this mission was extremely successful and proved that man could function in space outside of the spacecraft.Like many of the other volumes in this NASA Mission Report series, the book opens with the usual NASA press releases and mission press kit. It is easy to tell that the author and his staff have spent some time searching for some very clean originals, since compared to their earlier efforts the scanned in drawings are almost perfect. In addition, to the customary background information, the press kit focuses on the scientific and operational aspects of the mission including a nice summary of all the Gemini missions. The next section contains the Gemini 12 Summary Operations Report, which presents a basic overview of the planned activities of the mission, including the EVA timelines. A small six page report summaries the Gemini program accomplishedments. The next section, the crew debrief section, covers over half of the book, and is 140 pages long. This part contains the crew's comments and feelings about various phases of the mission. Unlike a lot of the previously published crew debriefings, this one is fairly technical and uses a lot of undefined NASA acronyms. Most of the pages in this section are devoted to the EVAs and as one would expect, Buzz Aldrin does most of the talking. There are nice sections on the rendezvous and docking as well as general spacecraft performance through out the mission. Here James Lovell is much more involved in the debriefing. The final section of the book includes a seldom seen report about modifying the Gemini capsule and launch vehicle, so that it could be launch towards the moon and eventuully enter lunar orbit. While the report does not present a lot of technical detail, but it does show that was possible to use the Gemini capsule for lunar operations. As usual the book also contains a CD that is loaded with a variety of interesting features. The CD contains over 400 photographic still images that appear to be in high resolution and focuses on the EVAs, Earth Observations, and rendezvous and docking. The CD contains 16mm camera footage, a NASA mission movie, and the mission Air-to Ground transcript. The CD also contains a nice interview with James Lovell. 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.
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