Apollo 9: The NASA Mission Reports (Apogee Books Space Series)

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Summary: Great material on the 'forgotten' Apollo mission
Review: Apollos 9 and 10, juxtaposed as they were between humanity's first trip to another celestial body and the 'giant leap for mankind,' tend to be overlooked but in many respects were more important to the ultimate success of the landing missions than even Apollo 8. 8 was bold but didn't really advance the knowledge about the systems that would get men to the moon. Apollo 9 stands as a significant engineering achievement, by demonstrating for the first time the major components of a lunar landing mission - extraction of the LEM from the S-IVB stage, CSM/LEM separation and docking, flight of the LEM ascent and descent stages, EVA with the self-contained lunar spacesuit. Apogee's books contain a wealth of information that would be difficult (if not impossible) to find elsewhere, and the inclusion of a CD-ROM with many photos and video makes this a must-have for any Apollo nut.

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Summary: Good but not enough coverage of a critical mission
Review: It would be difficult to overstate the significance of Apollo 9 in the final push to land men on the moon. As editor Godwin points out, this mission easily gets lost in the breathtaking excitement of the surrounding missions that actually went to the moon. But Apollo 9 may be the single most ambitious, "pushing-the-envelope" mission ever undertaken by NASA. The almost ludicrously intense flight plan called for a complete checkout of the lunar module in just a few days. Not unreasonably dubbed "the world's first true spacecraft" for its inability to fly anywhere other than space, the LM was and is a unique machine. And Apollo 9 was, in stage parlance, a full technical rehearsal for a lunar landing. It's also easy to forget that this would be only the second time that two manned vehicles are in space at the same time. Gemini 6 and 7 were the first, but at least in that case there had been considerable experience with the necessary ground support for the Gemini capsules, not to mention that all one of the Gemini craft had to do was provide a target while the other did all the work.

Apollo 9, not surprisingly, had one of the strongest crews of any mission: Commander Jim McDivitt, who on Gemini 4 became the first rookie ever to command a multi-man space flight, went on to succeed the illustrious George Low as Apollo Spacecraft Program Manager. Command Module Pilot Dave Scott stayed in the astronaut corps and became commander of the first J-class mission, the scientifically ambitious Apollo 15. Rusty Schweickart, unfortunately, was grounded after this mission for his demonstrated propensity for space sickness, which almost caused the mission to fail.

Instead, he recovered enough to go on with the flight plan, and Apollo 9 was a stunning and extraordinary success, making a lunar landing possible on President Kennedy's ambitious timeframe. There are those, in fact, who think that it would have been possible to go straight from Apollo 9 to Apollo 11 without the "dress rehearsal" provided by Apollo 10.

That being said, I found this collection to be the most disappointing of the series so far. It contains the usual press kit, pre-mission report, and post-mission report, but the first two overlap greatly, and the latter is a mere 11 pages long. There is no transcript of the crew debriefing, which I've found to be the most interesting item in these collections. It seems an appalling absence considering the importance of the crew's evaluation of the capabilities and performance of the lunar module. The CD-ROM, too, simply contains the standard NASA film on the flight along with the usual photographs: no inflight videos, interviews, or supplemental documentation.

Godwin should also know better than to spell the possessive "its" with an apostrophe, as he does several times.

Now, what's here is good, but it just doesn't seem like enough. Apogee Books should consider putting out a second volume (as it did with Apollo 11), with the crew debriefing and other supporting documentation. But perhaps this mission just isn't glamorous enough for them, or perhaps they think it won't sell (which I think is underestimating their loyal audience).

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Summary: A MUST resource for any space history buff ...
Review: The APOLLO MISSION REPORTS published by Apogee Books, are an excellent source for Space History buffs. The book includes a press kit from the flight, pre and post mission summaries, and a fabulous bonus CDROM which has the official NASA mission report movie lasting about 17. The CD also has some GREAT color and black and white photographs. In particular, the APOLLO 9 Mission Report has a wonderful set of interior photographs of the command module. There's some excellent detail for all us model makers out there.

All in all, these books are a must. I recently got the mission reports for Apollo 8,9 and 10 (10 has TWO movies and some stunning moon photography). I just found out that the Apollo 11 Mission report has just been released and is a TWO volume set (with Volume 2 released next week).

I recommend them as a great resource. They can be purchased at any bookstore or amazon.com

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Summary: An exellent view into the workings of Apollo
Review: This book shows the interoir of Apollo, the systems and the people like no other book or WWW site. The CD is very useful and, although the book is mostly black and white there are diograms almost everypage, most of which are clearly readable (some have been compressed to fit the page, in which cases any keys or labals are printed else where). There are about 1400 images taken of earth and of the other spacecraft along whith recent pictures of the inside of the spacecraft taken a few years ago.