Customer Reviews

Apollo 10: The NASA Mission Reports

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The APOLLO MISSION REPORTS published by Apogee Books, are an excellent source for Space History buffs. Each book includes press kits from the flight, pre and post mission summaries, and a fabulous bonus CDROM which has the official NASA mission report movies lasting about 17-29 minutes. The CD also has some GREAT color and black and white photographs.

I recommend them as a great resource!

They can be purchased at any bookstore or amazon.com

Like the Apollo 8 volume, this, too, is a revised edition, with my favorite part (the crew debriefing), plus other materials added to the accompanying CD.

Apollo 10 can aptly be called the full dress rehearsal for the moon landing. All that was skipped was the landing (and following activities) itself. The crew was one of the most experienced and distinguished in NASA history: Tom Stafford went on to command Apollo-Soyuz, John Young went on to command Apollo 16, the first shuttle mission, and to head up the astronaut office, and Gene Cernan went on to become the last man on the moon, on Apollo 17. And so far as I know, this mission and Apollo 11 are the only ones in NASA history to have all-experienced crews.

As usual, the text includes the pre-mission press and internal reports, and the post-mission summaries and crew debriefings. The accompanying CD contains hundreds of photos from the mission as well as the official NASA videos.

Another valuable volume for the space enthusiast.

I only hope that these NASA reprts will be available on Apollo 14, and all other Apollo missions as well! Tells all the drama, adventure,and tension; going over 240,000 miles out into space; only to be within 50,000 feet from being 1st humans on moon! And when redocking with mothership, orbiting Moon, lunar module begins to act erratic, almost losing control! real suspense and exciting!

During the first months of 1969 it appeared that NASA would be able to achieve to John F Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of decade. Apollo 10 was NASA's second mission to the moon and was planned as a dress rehearsal for the first manned lunar landing with the only difference being the landing. The mission very successful and paved the way for the first moon landing. This mission was manned by one of the most experienced crews to date and was commanded by Thomas Stafford, who was accompanied by Gene Cernan as the Lunar Module Pilot, while astronaut legend John Young was the Command Module Pilot.

The book opens with the typical NASA mission press kit. Unlike later Apollo mission press kits, this is quite long and very detailed, containing descriptions on everything from orbit and reentry profiles to the crew biographies. The next section contains both the pre- and post-flight operation reports which provide an enormous amount of information on the operation of the Saturn V, the Command Module, the Lunar Module and the rendezvous and docking methods.

The debrief section, which is about a third of the book, contains the crew comments and feelings about various parts of the mission and for the most part avoids the technical language that many of the NASA documents include, but it does contain many undefined acronyms. This section contains crew comments from the lift-off to the landings and discusses many of the technical aspects of the mission, such a telemetry, photography, communications, etc. Since the Apollo 10 mission was a dress rehearsal for the first landing mission, many of the questions and subsequent answer are related to rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit. I always like this section of these reports, because it provides an insight to the crew's feelings on the operation of the space vehicle and the mission in general.

The CD Rom that accompanies the book is divided into two sections. The first section contains two NASA produced movies called "To Sort Out the Unknowns" which focuses on the rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit and "Green Light for A Lunar Landing" highlights portions of the Apollo 10 mission interspersed with Apollo 11 training footage The final section contains hundreds of the mission photos taken by the crew.

Some general information that might be useful.

1) This report contains scanned-in documents from previously released NASA documents. 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 science reports are not included. Since NASA has published several books with hundred of pages each, the NASA Special Publications Series, it would be difficult to include this voluminous amount of data.

4) Make sure you buy the second edition, because it contains more documentation in the text and more features on the enclosed CD.