Customer Reviews

Apollo and America's Moon Landing Program : Major NASA Documents

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

"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).

If the option had existed to rate this product with zero stars, I would have! I have been interested in space exploration since I was a child and am delighted by the mission report series collated by Robert Godwin. This CD rom, however, is the worst piece of merchandise I have ever encountered in this field! Quite why someone would charge [so much], let alone pay that much for it escapes me! World Spaceflight News should hang it's head in shame at issuing such a complacent product containing almost exclusively public domain material. If they had any concience they would refund every penny spent on it by trusting souls like myself! I don't mind paying for quality, but I do mind paying for complacent products like this- I cannot afford it!