Apollo and America's Moon Landing Program : Major NASA Documents [CD-ROM]

World Spaceflight News (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

World Spaceflight News has covered spaceflight and the Space Shuttle program since 1983. In addition to our flagship publication, we produce printed and electronic Special Reports and NASA videos. Our "American Space Encyclopedia" CD-ROM series provides exclusive coverage of many spaceflight topics.

Product Details

• CD-ROM: 4720 pages
• Publisher: Progressive Management (April 5, 2000)
• ISBN-10: 189347206X
• ISBN-13: 978-1893472068
• Average Customer Review: 1.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,046,960 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars AWFUL presentation of great info., May 15, 2000

By 

K. Feinstein (NYC Area, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Apollo and America's Moon Landing Program : Major NASA Documents (CD-ROM)

There is some excellent content here, it is just slapped together in what is possibly THE epitome of amateurish product design.

This is LITERALLY a cd-rom of PDF files of NASA documents (many of which, if not all, are simply available from NASA's site). It is so poorly put together that the contents page doesn't even read out properly in Acrobat... to find out what info any file contains you are forced to open them individually and find out for yourself.

And get this - the CDROM is a CDR, a disc most likely burned on a little cd-rewritable drive like you might have on any home computer. The "publisher" didn't even bother to label the CD either... it's completely blank on top... but hey, it's still easy to identify... I don't think ANYONE else has the guts to actually sell a CDROM like this, so you will know it by sight in case you leave it out of it's equally amateurish jewel-case.

Great info for Apollo fans, but I couldn't recommend purchasing this disc for any reason unless the publisher re-works it from the ground up.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A good collection of Apollo documents for serious enthusiast, June 4, 2000

By 

Rogera Sauterer (Pell City, AL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Apollo and America's Moon Landing Program : Major NASA Documents (CD-ROM)

World Spaceflight News has provided another CD collection of NASA documents for the serious student of the Apollo Program. The CD includes Adobe PDF files of all the Apollo Press Kits and Mission reports, the Apollo CSM and LM news references (unfortunately NOT the Saturn V and 1B launch vehicle references) as well as complete Apollo 11 voice transcripts and several other documents. Although some of these documents are available on the internet, the large file sizes make downloads impractical without high speed internet access, while others are unavailable as far as I know.

I must disagree with some other reviewers about the reproduction quality.....I have some of the original documents on this CD collection and the originals are nearly as bad as the reproductions....NASA press kits never were of high quality to begin with in those days, though newer ones are much better. Overall, however, the image quality is fair and comparable to photocopies of a typical magazine article. They are both readable and printable.

The major problem with this collection is that it has considerable overlap with the NASA Apollo 11 Anniversary CD-ROM, which costs little more than half of this one but has fewer documents. (incidently, document quality in the NASA CD is the same as in this one, suggesting that poor-quality reproductions are not WSN's fault) Additionally, adding PDF files of the out of print NASA histories, Moonport, Chariots for Apollo, and Where no Man Has Gone Before, would have been valuable and made this collection appeal to a wider audience. Given a choice between the two, most people would prefer the NASA CD over this one, although serious enthusiasts may want both.

One hopes that future versions of this CD or new releases would provide more documents that would have made this collection even better.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars America's Moon Landing Program CD: A Major Disappointment, May 21, 2000

By 

Russ Tobias (Santa Rosa, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Apollo and America's Moon Landing Program : Major NASA Documents (CD-ROM)

"Apollo and America's Moon Landing Program : Major NASA Documents" from World Spaceflight News is an extremely disappointing product. The CD has no printed label and it is apparent that the disc was recorded on an ordinary CD burner. The Acrobat documents are of very low quality. I have been an aerospace historian for more than 30 years and have a personal collection of more than 1,000 documents relating to the space program. It appears that the documents on the CD have been copied from poor-quality micro-fiche (at best) and are totally useless. One cannot read the legend on most of the illustrations. World Spaceflight News has always been associated with quality materials and I ordered this CD, based upon that association. If you want good CD's on the Apollo Program, get the various "NASA Mission Reports" by Robert Godwin (Editor).