Apollo 16: The NASA Mission Reports, Volume 1 (Apogee Books Space Series)

Rating:
Summary: Another Mission accomplished
Review: Another book in the exciting Nasa mission reports.
While I have no wish to repeat what has been written in other reviews, it seems to me that the publisher manages to cram more and more material into each edition.
I must also comment very favourably on the included CD-ROM.
The lay-out has been consisted throughout the series and the content is very easy to access.
I have been absolutely hooked on this astonishing series and the present volume is no exception.
Mr Goodwin, please keep them coming.

If you are interested in the hard data on space missions then these books including this one are for you. But even if you do not want to know at what time TLI took place, the accompanying CD-ROM still makes it worth the price of admission.

Rating:
Summary: Keeps Getting Better and Better
Review: Over the past three and a half 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 specifically the Apollo missions. As is obvious from the title, this book focuses on the Apollo 16 moon mission. Apollo 16 was the second of three long duration (3 days) missions and again featured the lunar rover, which greatly extended the area that the two astronauts could explore. Veteran astronaut John Young who was making his fourth trip into space commanded this mission, rookie Charlie Duke accompanied Young to the lunar surface as the Lunar Module pilot and Ken Mattingly 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 I guess his staff) 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 aspects of the mission including some nice information on the often overlooked orbital photography observations. The next section contains the Pre-Flight Mission Operations 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 Operations Report and describes the Mission problems and deviations from planned activities.

The final section, the crew debrief section, covers over half of the book, is 160 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 orbital observations and all three go into great detail describing all aspects of their respective duties. For example, John Young explains at great length his removal of his EVA suit and Ken Mattingly descriptions of his orbital photography mission take over five pages. One thing that I found extremely interesting is that John Young and Ken Mattingly dominated the conservations, with Charlie Duke just filling in the holes. This is opposite to the image of these astronauts. Typically, John Young and Ken Mattingly are portrayed as the quite ones, while Charlie Duke is the talker.

As usual the book also contains a CD that is loaded with a variety of interesting features. The CD contains over 2500 photographic still images, unfortunately in a low resolution format, numerous high resolution panoramas and the complete video camera footage from the three EVAs. The CD also contains a nice 25 minute interview with John Young.

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.