| Author: | Hamish Lindsay |
| Reviewed by: | Nigel Eke |
Hamish Lindsay was working at Honeysuckle Creek during the Apollo missions. This enables him to give an interesting insight to some of the real background behind the Apollo missions.
The book covers the history of manned spaceflight up to the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975. The main focus is on the Apollo moon missions from 1967 to 1972, but the first three chapters give a history of flight and information on Mercury and Gemini programs.
Although the focus, throughout, is on the American flights, there is also much information on the Russian flights as well.
Hamish's style of writing makes for a very easy read, as if he's telling you the story of spaceflight while sharing a nice malt whisky by the warmth of an open fireplace. Each mission has a summary which gives the main data about the mission, including astronauts, dates, craft names and numbers, duration, apogees, perigees etc. The mission descriptions tell some of the politics behind the astronaut selection and the successes, failures, mishaps and luck that the astronauts, technicians and spacecraft all had.
One of the main things I enjoyed about the book was a liberal sprinkling of conversations between ground control and the astronauts. There are also many quotes from the people involved at the time. All this gives you a feeling of reliving their roles, as if you're right there with them. There are also many behind-the-scenes photographs of the astronauts and mission control and tracking-station operations.
Given Hamish's background there are also many stories about the trials and tribulations handled by the tracking stations. If you're interested in the space missions themselves you may feel this detail unnecessary, but I found it every bit as interesting as the rest of the book.
As you may tell, I heartily recommend this book if you're at all interested in spaceflight. Even if spaceflight isn't high on your lists of interests, I still think most people would find more than one or two facts that makes them think “Hey! I didn't know that. That's interesting”.
Fortunately for me, but unfortunately for the ASNSW, I am reviewing my own copy of this book. As far as I know it isn't currently in the library, but I would certainly recommend its purchase.
I leave this review on a tantalising note. The Skylab 3 crew of Alan Bean, Owen Garriott and Jack Lousma played a couple of practical jokes during their mission – but you'll have to read the book to find out what they were.