How Apollo Flew to the Moon (Springer Praxis Books)

I almost passed this book over because of the cover design. The colors and title suggested a watered down treatment of the Apollo program, perhaps aimed at middle school students. But I found it is actually PACKED with information on the systems, procedures and timelines of the program. I've never found a more thorough treatment of Apollo technology and I found it very satisfying reading. It's also very well organized and well written so it isn't difficult to understand.

How Apollo Flew to the Moon is a masterpiece in writing and one of the best books I have read (and I have read most books published) on Apollo and the early NASA missions.
Mr Woods takes a very complex (and to some could be quite boring) topic and breaks it down into easy to understand step by step sections and in doing so draws the reader into what the Apollo astronauts had to do and how the mission proceeded from liftoff right through to splashdown.
This book is the new extended edition which also covers the actual moon landings and EVAs. There are more detailed books related to this aspect of it but what Mr Woods does cover fits in well with the rest of the book and is a great addition to the previous edition.
The only complain I have regarding this book is that Mr Woods has converted everything over to the metric system and this can sometimes be a little confusing to readers, especially when he's quoting actual dialog and the figures given are in feet and miles etc. Mr Woods' explanation immediately converts these to metric. Sometimes there is no imperial/American unit references and everything is in metric. Since Mr Woods would have had to do the conversions for this book in the first place, would it have been that hard to put the imperial/American units in parenthesis next to the metric units (or vice versa)? This would have made a masterpiece book even better.
As such, apart from the very minor gripe above, this is a must read for any Apollo or early NASA enthusiast. Truly excellent.

I have a casual interest in space. I'm not a professional but am fascinating by processes and decisions, how things work. This book covered the type of details related to pivotal decisions in the Apollo Program which get glossed over by more accessible books. For example, how the Apollo Program reached a decision to use 1) a really big rocket, 2) a earth orbit rendezvous or 3) a lunar orbit rendezvous is presented. That type of detail, the people involved and the thought behind each of the proposals was discussed and provide important and fascinating context to the following chapters.

The book has a fantastic (and now dog-eared) abbreviation appendix and while I was more fascinated by the early Apollo missions instead of the final scientific missions, Mr. Woods does a fantastic job of relating the scientific importance of the latter Apollo missions.

Mr. Woods also does a fantastic job of adding incremental detail to equipment usage such as the guidance computer. Instead of spending an entire single chapter on what the computer does and then referring to it in another chapter dedicated to periods of flight, he introduces the guidance computer early as a more general overview. Then, at moments when it is being used he walks through the detail of how it is used at that moment. Again, the way he does this is perfect. It is contextually relevant to the stage of flight he is describing and his method helped me understand details in equipment operation which I'm certain I would have glossed over had he approached it any other way.

The book is chronological but he uses various Apollo programs and the events that occurred during those flights in a way doesn't feel like he's skipping moments. While the flights were different, large macro-type events in each timebase were somewhat similar and Mr. Woods uses examples in ways which make each timebase stand out.

I honestly loved this book.

My only issue with the book is the scant photographs and somewhat smallish schematics. To augment his descriptions and some of the books photos, I purchased the Saturn Rocket Haynes Guide and spent time on the internet looking for additional detail. The images in Mr. Woods book were fantastic, to be sure, but I wanted more. I realize a book of this size has limited space and as a result I'm certain there are photos the author and others reluctantly had to discard so this does not detract in any way from his work. The Haynes Guide provided some additional important details about the saturn rockets which helped visualize their immense scale and the internet provide the ability to look at larger schematics of items such as the guidance computers.

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.

I bought this book because it was highly rated in Amy Shira Teitel's "Vintage Space" YouTube video. I was not disappointed!
(Do a Google search for "Amy Shira Teitel - 5 Books All Space Fans Should Read - YouTube"; it's book number two.)
This book has the best detailed accounts of what the astronauts (all but one were former test pilots) had to do to get to the moon and back, how all the spacecraft systems were built and operated, and how some of those went awry.
One tidbit was an astronaut's response to someone who wondered if we should have sent an artist to the moon to better relate the experience to us back here on Earth. The astronaut said they would have died. After reading this book, you'll agree!

I learned so much from this book. The material is exhaustive. The research that went into it is staggering. There's enough here for years of study. It makes a great companion piece with the equally amazing "Exploring the Moon" by David Harland.

This book is a very detailed discussion of the Apollo space flights, the hardware almost inch by inch and the flight procedures almost minute by minute. The discussion of the initial launch sequence, and how the various stages and engines of the Saturn III and Saturn V worked, goes for more than 150 pages of its nearly 600 pages. The details of orbital mechanics, including exactly what a Hoffman transfer orbit is and how it worked, are explained in great detail with almost no "math".

The details of how the Apollo hardware, the service module, the command module and the lunar module, was built and operated are in this book. Details on the Apollo spacecraft's guidance computer software, including specific programs and how the programs were invoked by the astronauts [*] - which resonated with me as I saw the forerunner of how the Space Shuttle's far more complex systems were influenced operational style that I'd be exposed to in the early '80's. Every bit of jargon one heard on the Apollo mission audio is explained from TLI to POGO to why exactly Buzz Aldrin was getting program alarms from the lunar modules' overworked guidance computer as they descended (he had the rendezvous radar turned on in case of an abort).

And yes, details on how the Apollo astronauts defecated for the scatalogically fascinated. A 45 minute evolution evidently.

If you are a real detail geek and you are fascinated by the engineering details of how contemporary space craft worked, this book will not leave any detail unexplored for you.

I'm posting this quick review as an FYI regarding comments posted by one of the reviewers (Jonathan) who noted that in his edition there was a smell to the pages ("The book literally stinks. I don't know what kind of paper and ink combination they used, but the book smells AWFUL") and that "Most of the black and white photos are reproduced very darkly. Some of them are so dark that it's difficult to tell what we are supposed to be seeing in the photo". Jonathan didn't mention which edition he had received. I can sympathize, as I have gotten books with these issues. Nevertheless, I really wanted this book so I crossed my fingers and ordered it from Amazon.

I just received my copy, which is the 2011 edition. There is no discernible smell and the b&w photos, in fact all the photos and illustrations, are sharp and very clear. Even the color photos are excellent. Of course I can't guarantee that your 2011 edition will be as nice, but at least we know there is one copy that is.

I have read several Project Apollo histories over the past several years, and count "How Apollo Flew to the Moon" among the very best. Author David Woods, and Englishman, has a great talent for the written word and gives unique perspectives on the many development/testing projects in addition to the actual lunar missions. For all interested in learning more on the now 50-year old mission to land on the moon and safely return, count this book among the very best that have been written.

Wow! Actual details about how the Apollo hardware worked. It gives the reader a glimpse into the staggering amount of planning that took place before the missions, even down to using the attitude thrusters to settle the remaining fuel into the bottoms of the tanks before restarting the Stage III motor. I finally understand what those 400,000 people were doing behind the scenes.