****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
To me, amongst books, the gold standard for explaining difficult scientific and technological projects and concepts to non-technical readers is Richard Rhodes's "The Making Of The Atomic Bomb". I've long felt that a similar book was needed to explain for us non-techies the other greatest technological achievement of the 20th century--the Apollo moon project. I think this book fills that void. The tone of this book is different from that of Rhodes's. Rhodes's was conceived as an historical epic, beautifully written and researched, while this book, though just as deeply researched, is less formal, sort of as if someone sat down to talk to you to tell, "Well, son, here's how it happened."My own tech level is about that of Popular Mechanics, and my scientific knowledge is on the level of Popular Science, except in Geology, in which I took a number of college level courses. So I'm no expert on these things, though I came to the book with a knowledge of some terms and concepts. This book is much deeper than that, but the writer works you into the concepts and the jargon slowly enough that you begin to get them page by page. By the end, the only subject I was still having a little difficulty with was the navigation and such things as X, Y and Z axes and Refsmmat. I did get them, but only having to go back and re-read some passages several times. But then I bombed badly in trigonometry in high school, so maybe it's a personal mental block.What I found this book especially useful for is in learning and understanding all of NASA's very arcane jargon. I have a number of Spacecraft Films' Apollo DVD sets, which present video and audio of the Apollo missions in a raw footage format, with no narration or notes to help you get what is being said, all numbers and abbreviations and acronyms, by the crew and controllers during the film and audio sequences. But after reading this book, I found myself able to understand most of it. For example, when you listen to the on-board tape recording of the crew during the re-entry phase of the Apollo 8 mission, and you hear them say, "There's the .05 G indicator" and everything starts getting exciting, after reading this book you know why. This understanding adds a whole lot to the enjoyment of watching the videos.I'll echo one complaint of a previous reviewer. That concerns the use of the metric system rather than the standard measurements used by NASA during the missions. Instead of distances given in miles, we get kilometers; instead of feet per second, we get meters. For weights we get kilograms instead of pounds. This takes away a lot of understanding from many readers. The writer explains this in his introduction, saying something like, "when we write the history of Rome, we no longer use such obsolete measurements as cubits and spans", but the difference is that measurements like pounds and miles are not obsolete. They are still used by hundreds of millions of people, in the very country that acutally landed on the moon and from which country there would seem to be the most interest in a book like this. To me, this wasn't a petty gripe. It took away a lot from this book. When you try to impress us, for instance, with the size and power of a Saturn V rocket, it doesn't help when you tell us "The Saturn V was 100 meters tall" when the reader doesn't know how big 100 meters is. To us it could be ten miles or it could be two feet. The measurements could have been given both as metric and standard units without adding too much bulk to the book. This almost made me reduce my ratings from 5 to 4 stars, but I kept it at 5 because the book is helpful in so many other ways, and because the writer seemed to be so genial.I've noticed that a number of very good books on the Apollo and other US space programs have been written, like this one, by Australians, and find this phenomenon to be very interesting. I wondered how much it had to do with the major NASA radio tracking installation at Carnavon. But I think I got a clue while recently watching an Apollo 12 onboard video beamed to Earth during the powering up & checkout of the LEM after docking. Houston tells the crew that they are "Live on TV in Australia right now". So many of the key parts of these missions happened in the middle of the night here in the US with everyone asleep, but that meant they were being shown in prime viewing hours in Australia. It may be, because of this, that more people were watching Apollo in Australia than in the US. So maybe more Australians than Americans are interested in Apollo now, and that justifies the use of metric instead of standard measurements. But I still would have liked the standard.
