Customer Reviews

Russian Spacecraft Pocket Space Guide (Pocket Space Guides)

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

 

 

Apogee has done it again with this marvelous pocket guide to the Russian space program. From the Soviet-era moonships (with great cutaway artwork) to the mighty boosters and the trailblazing space stations, it's all here in one authoritative, well-illustrated volume. What a neat book!
-- Andrew Chaikin, author of "A Man on the Moon"

It's interesting but the presentation is blah. It goes on like an interminable lecture and there are few worthwhile graphics, just some small black & white photos and no clear drawings or cutaways. If you know nothing about Russian space this will tell you something but I suspect there are much better titles available.

This is a useful little book. It is a good potted history of Soviet and Russian space endeavour. It is very easy to read which makes it an ideal starter for anyone new to the history of spaceflight. It gives some good insights into the byzantine world of Russian space exploration without becoming dense. The photographs are are amazing and include some very rare and informative images. My one gripe is that the technical drawings and cutaways are really too small to gain anything other than a general idea. Nonetheless as a reference, it is a good book to have.

Editor Robert Godwin has done a fantastic job in telling the story of Russian space technoligies. You would think that in this 50th year since sputnik was launched that such a book would be HUGE and cost a great deal- but Godwin has put it all together so well with photos and diagrams- many that even I haven't seen before, that people of all ages and interests will get alot out of this pocketbook.

This book is a great start to familiarize oneself with the Soviet/Russian space program, a program embedded in secrecy and with little information available in English. It's info-packed with drawings/illustrations and photographs. Again, one has to congratulate the author Robert Godwin, which has again shown the quality of his work.

It is a good Russian-spacecraft pocket picture book. There are some new discoveries for me. I understood why the Vostok rocket fairing has a hole and Voshod rocket fairing has a bump. There also contain the detailed descriptions on Russian manned lunar-mission N-1 rocket and spacecraft. It was very interesting to compare the N-1 and US Saturn V rocket. The design concepts of the N-1 are usages of a lot of comparatively small-sized rocket engines and sphere-shaped LOX and Kerosene pressure tank structures which don't accept direct aerodynamic loads during launch. On the other hand, US Saturn V uses a limited number of large rocket engines and has integral tank structures which withstand the aerodynamic loads. If this book contained the data sheets for typical Russian spacecraft such as Vostok, Voshod and Soyuz, it would be the best reference. Obviously, it is a nice Russian-spacecraft pocket-size picture album.

I tried this one on a whim. There's a whole series of these books, and I chose this one because of my interest in the mysteries of the Soviet space program.

The writing is...how shall I put it...bold? Perhaps the author is trying to make up for the small size of the book (and very small print) by making the ideas and claims really stand out memorably. It isn't quite going as far as a "Soviet Space Program for dummies" but it's close.

Good pictures. I'm especially impressed with the focus on the N1 super-booster, which would have sent cosmonauts to the moon, if they could only get the doggone thing to fly. (It kept blowing up during unmanned tests.) The pictures of N1 show it to be a huge, Saturn V-sized cone with a huge number of small engines at the base (there are 30 nozzles for stage 1 alone!).

If this inexpensive book is indicative of the entire series, I'll be picking up some more.