| Author: | Isaak P. Abramov and A. Ingemar Skoog |
| Pages: | |
| Reviewed by: | Nigel Eke |
The call came for book reviewers. I saw 'Russian Spacesuits' and promptly left it for someone else to review :-). A few weeks later Richard was still calling for reviewers and this book was still 'on offer'. I passed it by a second time. By the third week I felt sorry for it and decided it needed a review. So here we are.
I have to admit this is not the first title that comes to mind for books that I wish to read. I wondered how anybody could write a whole book on spacesuits, let alone Russian spacesuits. The authors, however, were part of the original team that manufactured spacesuits for the first Russian flights, so if anyone were able to write such a book these are the guys. We could not be in better hands.
The book covers the development of soft-suits, semi-rigid, rescue, EVA, lunar and even suits for Mars. It also touches on the some politics behind decisions required during the suits development. It also gives liberal credit to the teams of people involved in their design and development. There are many pictures, which are all black and white. It would be nice to see a sprinkling of colour if possible. There are also many detailed schematics of life-support systems, which could have been enhanced by some colour coding.
So, I can hear you all asking “Well? Do you recommend it? Should I be clamouring over the rest of the society to get my hands on it?”. Well, a typical politician's answer – yes, and no.
The book seemed to manifest itself in two distinct parts. The first chapters I found somewhat dry. They may well have suffered from the English to Russian translation. They appeared full of acronyms, statistics and manufacturing detail. They did not appear to be described in the same order from chapter to chapter so it felt like we were jumping about from one topic to another and back again.
However, from chapter 12 onwards, it became a much easier read. Amongst other things these latter chapters considered some of the physiological aspects of suit design and covered the suits for Moon and Mars landings.
Appendix 3 gave technical details of each suit design, including a picture and a summary of the suit's characteristics. This was an interesting section to browse, if not read in detail.
The book itself is very up-to-date, at the time of writing this review, having been published in 2003. It is also worth mentioning that the some of the more recent suits were developed with the help of manufacturers outside of Russia. I found the descriptions of these partnerships interesting.
In summary, unless you have a deep interest in spacesuits or have been involved in someway in their development, I would recommend this book as best for browsing rather than reading in detail. However, remember this is a personal perspective. I'm sure the society would welcome other reviews.