The voyage of Apollo 12, documented in these original reports, had high goals in mind—making a start on real lunar science.
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"...show[s] what an extraordinary achievement it was." -- New Scientist, February 12th 2005.
From the Inside Flap
It's 35 years since the Intrepid voyage to the Ocean of Storms. Ask the average person to name the crew and you'll be lucky if they can name even one of them. Ironically this collective amnesia is likely to be transitory, in a couple of hundred years from now the names of Conrad, Gordon and Bean will probably find their true place in the annals of human history.It is my sincere hope and fervent belief that by the 23rd century we will be a true space-faring civilization, one which remembers its forebears with the honor and repect they earned.
Meanwhile, back here in the turgid backwaters of the early 21t century some of us do what we can to keep the flame of hope alive. The average person may look into the following pages and see only statistics and charts but if you look hard enough you can see that they contain the hard-earned kernels of our collective future. Lest this data languish into obscurity we have replicated it here for future students to ponder.
Captured here are the details of leaky spacesuits, rockets struck by lightning, spacesuit cooling systems which stop working because the spacecraft's door got stuck closed and cameras which were disabled by dust. Then there was the hydrogen tank which failed at the last minute and was fixed by pulling its counterpart from Apollo 13, or the outrageous pinpoint landing by Pete Conrad through a pall of lunar dust, so bad he couldn't see the surface from 40 feet up. If you want to know why that TV camera failed or just how badly decomposed the robotic Surveyor had become after three years on the moon, it's all here.
Let's also not forget the fact that Apollo 12 was the first to use the hybrid trajectory with its so-called non-free-return. Such trajectory for Apollo 13, without correction, would have been fatal.
Then as if to really test the mettle of its hardy crew, the Command Module Yankee Clipper threw one last curve-ball when the drogue parachute deployed almost 20 seconds late - just imagine how that 20 seconds must have felt to the crew and controllers - before the Command Module hit the water at a punishing 15g's.
The photographic record of Apollo 12 is, to put it politely, sketchy. The TV camera failed during EVA, the 16mm movie camera got so much dust on it that much of the footage from the LM window is blurred and unwatchable before it finally jammed during lunar lift-off. When it was working, for much of the time, nothing was happening in the picture. The chest-mounted Hasselblad became clogged to the point where the crew couldn't get it on and off their chest-mounts and as a final coup de grace the 16mm pounced from its mount during splashdown and attempted to spontaneously disassemble the lunar module pilot's head! Despite all of this there are many excellent still pictures and the moving picture record that does exist has its great moments. To try and do justice to this most eccentric mission I have attempted to accumulate some of the highlights on the accompanying DVD-Video disc. Some artistic liberties were taken, such as during the landing sequence the data reports the range to the proposed landing site, which was in fact 500 feet from the actual landing site, so during the last few seconds the figures are "fudged" somewhat. I figured people would rather see a big fat "0" at touchdown so it is only an approximation. The rendezvous and docking footage was also an interesting challenge to combine since the TV only kicks in half way through and then for some unfathomable reason drops-out momentarily, while Dick Gordon actually had the presence of mind to change the cartridge and the frame rate in the middle of the rendezvous. As if this wasn't hard enough, just finding the audio was unexpectedly difficult. Regardless, I hope you enjoy it and join me in tipping your hats to Pete, Al and Dick. Go Navy!
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another winner,
By
This review is from: Apollo 12: The NASA Mission Reports Vol 2: Apogee Books Space Series 50 (Paperback)
Robert Godwin and Apogee Books have, over the past six years, compiled a variety NASA documents, press kits, crew interviews and the like, which recount the early days of the space race, focusing on the Apollo missions. This time, they have released a second volume of information dedicated in the second lunar landing, Apollo 12, which includes a DVD of the lunar EVA and an excellent companion NASA publication. Apollo 12 was the only the second manned lunar landing. This mission was commanded by Charles "Pete" Conrad who was accompanied to the surface by Alan Bean with Dick Gordon as the Command Module pilot.
Regardless of whether or not you were alive to see the moon landings live on TV, you definitely can relive the excitement of that wondrous time by watching this two-sided DVD. The DVD covers all phases of the mission as well as training footage onboard the KC-135 affectionately known as the "Vomit Comet." The DVD has many hours of footage, with sound, related to launch, lunar landing, lunar EVA, recovery, splashdown, rendezvous, onboard TV, assembled panoramas, and 16 mm camera footage. The quality of the footage is not that great, but it is a good as it was when in was first broadcast in 1969. The book that accompanies the DVD is a reprint of the Apollo 12 Mission Report prepared by the Mission Evaluation Team from the Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston. This report is essentially the scientific and engineering evaluation of the flight, so there is very little about the scientific findings and exploration. This lengthy report is 190 pages long and covers all aspects of the mission, from liftoff, lunar landing, the moonwalk, the experiments, and the return to Earth. In these pages, there are figures that show a comparison between a predicted value and an actual flight value (how much was used vs. how much was estimated). It also contains two fairly long sections, which describes both the Command and Service Module and the Lunar Module. The report also contains, many black and white photographs, line drawing and several technical graphs. While some readers may the report's writing a bit dry in some places, they are actually getting a view of how NASA operates and why their exploration programs for the most part are quite successful. Some general information that might be useful. 1) This report is a scanned-in documents from a previously released NASA document. 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.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Least remembered most triumpant lunar landing mission,
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This review is from: Apollo 12: The NASA Mission Reports Vol 2: Apogee Books Space Series 50 (Paperback)
This Apogee Book/DVD combination is another great choice for the Apollo collector, especially at nearly 10 bucks off the list price. The DVD alone is worth the price! I agree with the other reviewer, Apogee should produce similar DVDs to go with all Apollo Mission Reports.
The only nitpick on the one I received of Apollo 12 - Volume II, was due to some adhesive residue that smeared on the outer surface of the DVD from where it is attached to the back inside cover of the book. However, a mild disc cleaning before first use, and I was able to play the video without problem. One of the more unusual segments on the DVD is the KC-135's 1/6th gravity dress rehearsals with both Pete Conrad and Al Bean in their moon walking pressure suits. Some of that footage was actually quite comical when an astronaut fell over on his back - like a turtle - and appeared to be stuck. These are the kinds of things that make landing on the Moon and walking around seem so incredible, that some conspiracy theorists say it never ever happened. Well, if it was a hoax those poor astronauts sure had to go through a helleva training regime for nothing more than show. I for one believe the Apollo missions were REAL and so were all of the moon walkers. In the astronauts' KC-135 escapades, you can appreciate more of what they went through up there as there are a variety of activities and details revealed inside an airplane simulation of 1/6-G that would otherwise be very difficult to make out during any of the TV broadcasts of Apollo EVAs. Pete Conrad even makes passing reference to the "1/6th G airplane simulation" during his first actual EVA on the Moon. This and much enthused voice communications between Pete and AL can be clearly heard thanks to audio sound track on the DVD. As others have said, Apollo 12 was sorely lacking on TV coverage (albeit, color for this flight as opposed to B&W on Apollo 11) as well as rather spotty 16mm color film recordings of the mission. There is no coverage of any kind of Conrad and Bean's 2nd EVA, unfortunately, because it was the EVA with their most extensive exploration (on foot) away from the LM. As had been carefully planned, Apollo 12 landed next to, and very close to the rim of a fairly sizeable crater, where an unmanned probe, Surveyor-III landed a couple years prior. Unfortunately, this large crater, and the old Surveyor probe could not be seen through LMP's window. This was the vantage point where the best film quality could be taken both during and after the landing, but after landing, the LM was facing away from the crater so it could not be viewed from the window. To make matters worse, the portable TV camera failed shortly in to the first EVA, before anything could be seen from it, other than where the astronauts came down the LM ladder. There is a famous (still) photograph of one of the astronauts standing next to derrilic probe where it landed inside Surveyor crater, with the LM high up on the side of the rim clearly visible in the background, only about 600 feet away. It is really a shame the astronauts' secret plan to get a similar photo with both in the same picture was foiled by an elusive camera timer attachment device temporarily misplaced in the moon rock collection bag. Apollo 12 seems to be one of the early missions that most people do not remember. 12 came after 11, and before 13, but those missions EVERYBODY remembers; the latter essentially a failure turned rescue mission overly dramatized by the media with nothing to further our knowledge of Lunar geology. The first landing of Apollo 11 played to a worldwide TV audience of hundreds of millions on Earth, but the B&W TV coverage was generally quite horrible in picture quality. Apollo 14 took the place of the aborted mission of 13 exploring the Fra Mauro highlands, but somehow missed the prize of locating the nearby rim of Cone Crater, and thereby missing yet another fantastic lunar feature to have recorded on film. Then, there were the Lunar Rover enhanced, vastly extended lunar explorations of Apollo 15, 16 and 17 from July 1971 through December 1972, but sadly, there were to be no more mission after the spectacular success (and contributions to our scientific knowledge) of Apollo 17. Apollo Saturn spacecrafts were already bought and paid for, to have flown at least three additional missions, but taxpayers lost interest and the political will responded in kind. What a pity. There are Apogee Mission Reports (some such as 11 and 12 in multiple volumes with DVDs) that are of long since past historical events, but all make for fascinating reading of what was accomplished and technologically possible more than 30 years ago. I yearn for what may be yet to come, whether it be new explorations of the Moon, or the first manned mission to Mars. I only hope to live long enough to be a part of it.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ocean of Storms,
By
This review is from: Apollo 12: The NASA Mission Reports Vol 2: Apogee Books Space Series 50 (Paperback)
Apogee Books continues to add to the wealth of information that they have produced with their Apollo Series. Enough cannot be said as to the value of the reference material that they have packaged. For those of us that have interests in the flights besides Apollo 11, these books, and the Apollo 12 Volume 2 in particular, gives us access to information that if not previously unabtainable, required much effort and resources to obtain. I was particularly impressed with the real time landing footage merged with the audio transmissions - probably the first time it has been seen since it originally occured. I highly recommend this book and the series in general.
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