Customer Reviews

Go For Launch!: An Illustrated History of Cape Canaveral (Apogee Books Space Series)

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I- like many of you have collected the photo books and histories of Cape Canaveral(or Cape Kennedy). When I first saw this title- I thought "not the same old photos again"

Boy- was I wrong!

This book is great. Joel Powell and Art LeBrun have created an excellent guide to the history of Kennedy Space center. From Bumper V-2 to Delta IV and Atlas V. It shows the early missiles like Bull Goose and even this years Pluto Express launch. There are 17 pages of photos from "incidents and accidents" alone.

Photos of lore - like Gordo Cooper holding up his atlas rocket(page195) and Snark infested waters.The recovery of Gemini-5's Titan rocket from the Atlantic(pg.145)and the strange tale of John Glenn's Atlas rocket(pg.174 and 194)photo tours today of the first launch sites and the latest sites.
I heartily recommend this one!
This is what Apogee does best!

The history of space activities at Cape Canaveral, Florida, America's spaceport, is as interesting as it is varied. "Go for Launch!" seeks to tell this story--already available in both scholarly and popular as well as in illustrated and textual forms--with an emphasis on photographs. At a fundamental level the "Cape," as it is universally known by those in the space community, may be as much a state of mind as it is a physical place. With high technology enterprises resting side by side with a wetlands refuge it is an eerie place, what Ann Morrow Lindbergh ironically referred to as the abode of both the "heron and the astronaut."

"Go for Launch! An Illustrated History of Cape Canaveral" is a fine attempt to capture the fifty year history of this place as the central space launch site in the United States. There are three central components to the Cape's space access efforts. The one that is best known is the Kennedy Space Center, the NASA installation that serves as the site for the preparation and launch of the nation's human spaceflight effort. The military also has a huge presence at the Cape, with Air Force and Navy facilities engaging in all manner of test and evaluation in the Eastern Test Range into the Atlantic Ocean. In recent years, finally, there has been a major effort to establish commercial space operations in the area and a growing number of non-governmental launches have been flown from the Cape. The first of all of this activity took place with the Bumper program in 1950, and the launch of Bumper 8 on July 24, 1950, established a precedent that has endured more than fifty years.

"Go for Launch!" is divided into three major parts. The first, nearly half of the book, deals with the period from 1950 through the Sputnik crisis of 1957. It relates in words and photographs the history of the military effort to establish a launch capability at the Cape and to undertake research and development on a variety of missiles and research rockets. These ranged from the ballistic missiles so well-known in history--the Atlas, Titan, Minuteman, Polaris, Trident, and Poseidon--as well as cruise missiles such as the Matador, Snark, Bomarc, and Navaho. They also included scientific rocket launches, and the construction and operation of the facilities that supported them. The authors do a good job of locating and printing in this work unique and interesting photos of these activities, many of them not well-known to the public. Indeed, many of the pages are essentially photographs with captions.

A second section relates the story of the orbital space launch era from the flight of the first U.S. orbital spacecraft, Explorer 1, launched from the Cape atop a Juno rocket on January 31, 1958, through the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986, 73 seconds into its flight. Again, the authors found interesting imagery to illustrate the work. The third section deals with the more recent era, focusing on the return to flight after the Challenger accident and the development and flight of the various types of expendable launch vehicles launched from the Cape.

While the imagery is quite adequate overall, the reader should be aware that the vast majority of it is printed in black and white with only a small color section added to the book. Accordingly, while this is an illustrated history, if one approaches it seeking the splashy design of a "coffee table" book disappointment is assured. A better work of that type is David West Reynolds' "Kennedy Space Center: Gateway to Space" (Firefly Books, 2006), even though it does not treat in any detail the military aspects of the story and has several glaring errors of fact. What "Go for Launch!" does well is collect in one place a large number of interesting and helpful photographs of more interest to the specialist, perhaps, than the casual reader. Additionally, if one seeks a complex historical analysis of the history of space launch facilities at the Cape this is not the best book. Instead, a superb analysis may be found in "A History of the Kennedy Space Center" by Kenneth Lipartito and Orville R. Butler (University Press of Florida, 2007). "Go for Launch!" fills a key niche in the effort to understand the history of the Cape. It does not stand alone as the only work on the subject that interested readers will want to consult.

Space became the ultimate frontier and the battleground of the superpowers during the fifties. The fight was hard, but, happily, it was not won or lost by piling up heaps of dead bodies and dispatching hordes of mutilated veterans home from the fields of conflict, but by imaginative brainpower, engineering ingenuity and perseverance, and, of course, organizing all the fiscal and industrial resources available. Not everything happened at Cape Canaveral, but much of the drama happened there and therefrom. Here we are presented with wiews of it all, from the breadboard "bunker" and painter's scaffolding Gantry of the first Bumper-Wac launches in 1950, to the burgeoning Missile Rows and Skid Strip stretching along the shores of the Snark-infested Waters, and further to the giant constructions needed to launch giants like Titan-III and Saturn-I and V, which was the instrument of slamming the door of the Space Race to the Moon shut on the nose of the Russians. Many important battles of the Cold War were fought and won at "the Cape", but sure enough, during that conflict the tools of Space Exploration and Space Utilization were forged. Nowadays many of these installations serve new and exiting launchers with commercially important or scientifically intriguing missions. Joel W Powell is an inspiring guide to the once, now and future Cape. My reaction to his book was: "Did that, too, happened there?" Well, it did.

I'm not normally interested in "picture books." I much prefer thick, heavy, scholarly tomes filled with densely packed text, possibly with a few pictures interspersed or included in a photo insert section. I thus pondered for quite a while before I decided to give "Go For Launch: An Illustrated History of Cape Canaveral" a try. The "Illustrated History" bit led me to believe it was the type of "picture book" that I normally avoid.

Well, I'm really glad I took a chance on it. Yes, it does consist mainly of photographs--hundreds of photographs. I didn't count them, but I did a rough calculation based on some random pages, and I think the total tally is well over 1,000. And what photographs they are! Here's what the cover blurb says: "Detailed maps and historical aerial photographs reveal the famous launch complexes and basic infrastructure of this storied base, while missile and rocket tests are featured in never-before-seen images with descriptive captions. The bustling daily activity of thousands of employees at the Cape is captured in pictures, providing an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at America's rocket launches." Every word of that blurb is true. The pictures are superb, well-printed and exceptionally rare--no matter how many books you have on the subject, I can guarantee you've never seen the vast majority of these pictures before. And the captions...well, the captions are what takes "Go For Launch" out of the realm of "picture books" and up to a much higher level. They are relevant, detailed, informative and accurate, and many of them are quite lengthy--a paragraph or so. They describe in depth EXACTLY what is going on in the photos. I know how difficult it can be to figure out what's happening in old, poorly documented photos, based on aviation and spaceflight articles that I have written, and my hat is off to author Joel W. Powell and photo archivist Art LeBrun for doing an absolutely superb job. Plus, most pages have boxed-in sidebars providing additional tidbits about the rockets, facilities or events depicted.

So what is the "frustration" that I refer to in the title of this review? Simply this--most of the photos are quite small, on the order of two or three inches on a side. I found myself straining to see details that weren't there. Of course, printing the photos at full-page size (of which there are some) would have made "Go For Launch" six inches thick. This minor concession to the realities of publishing, however, in no way detracts from the magnitude and quality of the amazing work that Mssrs. Powell and LeBrun have created, or from my enthusiastic endorsement of it as a book that belongs on EVERY space enthusiast's bookshelf. Take it from a space geek who thought he wouldn't like it much--this is REALLY a great book!

This is a great book and I should know. I was at the Cape on the Atlas, Titan and Apollo programs when we had a real space program. Joel has worked very hard to give us old rickety rocketeers a glimpse back to the days during the fifties, sixties and seventies, when we hid in the trenches watching an Atlas or Titan go off, or the mighty Saturn head for the moon. The photo's are real real along with the stories. This book should be standard reading for the youngsters coming up to show them how it was done.

An excellent book on the history of the Cape. But remember, the Apollo missions launched from the Kennedy Space Center, so don't look for them in this volume.