Customer Reviews

Apollo 17: The NASA Mission Reports Volume Two (Apogee Books Space Series)

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I'm glad that Apogee has produced these mission reports. They make a good handy reference on each of the missions, and although this information is available on the net, it's nice to be able to pick up a book and skim through it for data.

I understand that the CDs in the books are intended to be extras, but I wish their quality had been a little higher. It's nice to have the interview with Cernan, and he says some interesting things. The video quality is poor, however.

Similarly, I got the book because I wanted the still images taken during the mission. If you run these on a PC, you essentially get a strip of images and you can scroll through them left-to-right (that function did not work on my iMac). What this demonstrates is that the astronauts took a lot of crummy photos and a few good ones, just like any photographer. (Anybody claiming the moon landings were faked because the pictures are so good should look at how many lousy photographs the astronauts took.) The problem is that all of the images are low res and small. They are not even suitable for use on a website. Their value is really limited--you will give them a single quick look and then ignore them. I was hoping that these would have all been good resolution images suitable to use for other purposes. Once you've looked at the disk, you might as well throw it away, because it has no residual value.

All in all, the CDs in the books don't add much. It's a shame, because if this CD had included all the hi-res images from Apollo 17, it would have been great, an outstanding resource. A little extra effort would have improved the value of the product greatly.

1972 Nighttime launch of Apollo 17 SUMMARY: Apollo 17 space vehicle lifting off from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, December 7, 1972.