Customer Reviews

Taking Science to the Moon: Lunar Experiments and the Apollo Program (New Series in NASA History)

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I first saw this book while at my local library and after glancing through it I decided it might be worth a quick look. Once I got home and started reading I quickly discovered that this was no dry Science/History book by some old college professor but a great read that tells a part of the Apollo story that is far to often ignored.
The author was a participant in the development of the NASA experiments and the book is written from the view of an insider, not just someone who has done research on the subject. He discusses field training and the development of the moon simulations here on earth. Read about how they duplicated the lunar sites, including how they made craters, in Northern Arizona so that the astronauts felt as though they had already been there when they got to the moon. He discusses cost and weight problems that were worked out and he shares a great story about astronaut Walt Cunningham's field demonstration of an early space suite design. He shares some of the ideas that were developed for post Apollo projects that were regrettably never realized (including the large MOLAB test vehicle that you can still see today at the Space Museum in Huntsville, Alabama). You learn how moon rocks were stored and examined when brought back to earth and he includes several photos and maps that add to the various storys. All of these subjects are told in a highly readable and sometimes humorous way, so don't get the idea that this is some old NASA text reworked, it's not!
If you enjoyed the 10th episode of HBO's "From The Earth To The Moon" titled "Galileo Was Right" then this book is a must read. This book puts meat on that story about Apollo 17 Astronaut Harrison Schmitt and his selection as the only Science astronaut who went to the moon; in much the same way that other books have told the rest of the story about the "Spider" episode from the HBO series.
I give this book very high marks and I hope the author writes a second book about this subject. By the way, I enjoyed the copy from the library so much, I bought a copy for myself!

While much has been written about the Apollo missions to the Moon, most of these books have focused on either the spacecraft the got us to the Moon (Moon Lander or Stages to Saturn) or the astronauts (autobiographies by Collins, Cernan, Aldrin) and to a lesser degree, Mission control and the flight controllers. Furthermore, thousands upon thousands of scientific and technical papers have been and are still be written from the data collected by the various experiments that were conducted on the lunar surface. The story of how these experiments got to the moon, which ones were chosen and why, the people who developed this experimental packages and the internal NASA struggles to even get these experiments to the Moon has never been documented, at least in much detail. In his book, the author, Donald Beattie who was the program manager for the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments, details all decisions, meetings, NASA in-fighting and the like that got these important, and initially overlooked surface experiments on the flights to the Moon. The author draws upon his extensive library of NASA memos, publications and the like to craft a really fine book.

The book begins with the usual background information of the author's pre-NASA career where he worked for a major US oil company in South America. After hearing about the space program, on a whim he decides to apply for a position and after several unsuccessful attempts, he lands a position at NASA headquarters in Washington D.C helping to plan the missions and experiments that will be used.

After this introductory section, the books covers the conceptual designs for both the Apollo missions and post-Apollo missions that were planned, the inclusion of the United States Geological Survey to plan the missions and analyze the data, and training of the astronauts to perform various scientific tasks. After these sections, a good portion of the book is devoted to the J-series lunar missions (Apollo 15, 16 and 17) and all the training and hardware that was developed to support them. The book even covers the often overlooked Command Module on-orbit photographic survey, which provided some of the most detailed photographic of the Moon's surface.

While each page of this book is loaded with a lot of very interesting and I would say previously unpublished information, I found the parts of the book which examine the working relationships between the NASA centers, the most interesting. I was dumbfounded to find out that several people at the Manned Spacecraft Center felt that they should be designing and developing the experimental packages for the lunar surface operations even though they were engineers and not scientists. Fortunately, the upper NASA management decided that the design of these packages should be left to the scientists.

In final chapter, "The Legacy of Apollo", the author summarizes what was learned from the Apollo mission to the Moon, what it cost and mostly importantly, what it all meant. That is, people working together can solve very difficult problems and reap great rewards, whether they are scientific or philosophic.

The Apollo program was not launched for scientific reasons but plenty of excellent science was carried out during it. This book, written by a NASA insider, gives a good guide to all the planning and development that went into the scientific investigations. In addition, it provides some very interesting material on planned longer duration Apollo and post Apollo missions, including lunar bases. Overall, this book is a great addition to any Apollo enthusiast's library.

"Taking Science to the Moon: Lunar Experiments and the Apollo Program" by Donald A. Beattie is an excellent account of efforts by NASA scientists to do more to include science payloads on Apollo missions in the 1960s despite opposition from mission engineers, who envisioned a direct round-trip shot with as much margin for error as possible. Beattie worked for NASA between 1963 and 1973 in the science effort of Apollo. His position as program manager for the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments means that the commentary offered here is based on first-hand experience.

As Beattie makes clear, the reasons for undertaking the Apollo Moon landing program had little to do with furthering scientific understanding. Its impetus rested almost solely on Cold War rivalries and the desire to demonstrate technological verisimilitude to the peoples of all the nations of the world. Even so, also demonstrated by Beattie, a great deal of good scientific knowledge emerged from the exercise. "Taking Science to the Moon" emphasizes how scientific ideas about the Moon developed with Apollo and how they have changed over the more than thirty-five years since the last mission. It seeks to contextualize the manner in which Americans have incorporated this story, including its rich scientific legacy, into our post-modern milieu.

This is, by far, the best discussion of lunar science during the Apollo program yet published. It ranks with other first person accounts such as Don E. Wilhelms's "To a Rocky Moon: A Geologist's History of Lunar Exploration" (University of Arizona Press, 1993), and Paul D. Spudis's "The Once and Future Moon" (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996). Enjoy.