And it was not a disappointment. Admittedly, it IS rocket science but I like to think that hours of poring over various books and magazines in the years after the missions has made me able to criticise at least some of the technical content of any new ones. I cannot fault this - this pictures are captioned correctly and specifically rather than being either generic or just plain wrong. The structure of the book is logical and well thought-out - the technical content is defined by what needs to be said rather than by what pictures were available. An absolutely definitive layman's guide to both the spacecraft and the men who flew them. If you have any inkling of nostalgia for those heady days of adventure mixed with engineering genius then get this book.
The main thought in my head is how all those years ago, the fact that it all worked on time and almost flawlessly was just a given - I obviously didn't have the rigour to think about all those interlocking parts. The whole Saturn/Apollo stack, from the massive first and second stages to the relatively small conical section of the escape tower, was held together with various bolts which had to separate at exactly the right time. The parachutes had to deploy at the correct times - all the movable parts had to move when ordered to either by the astronauts or the computers which controlled most of the operation. That not one man was lost in space is breathtaking. Truly awesome in the correct sense of the word. And now your modern life is almost certainly very different from what it would have been like had this project not taken place. It is probably also true that the world was saved from destruction by the moon landings as it gave the superpowers something less destructive to flex their muscles with.
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