W. David Woods

An excellent and unusual technical history of Apollo.

The framework of this book is a composite Moon mission from launch to recovery. It assumes a level of familiarity with rocketry, so that few basic techniques are restated. That then allows this book to go far deeper. So staging, liquid fuelled rockets or Newtonian orbits aren't explained, but Hohmann transfer orbits are. Gyroscopes aren't explained, but it simply states "Apollo used a stable inertial platform" and then goes into an in-depth discussion of gyro lock, how Apollo had to avoid it and the mysteries of Captain REFSMAT. If the project director of Gemini had read this in the mid-1960s, they'd have found a wealth of new information, specific to Apollo, with very little restatement of standard material.

Production is less showy than some and it has the feel of a university-level textbook for the sparse but effective illustrations, but a very good one.… (more)

If you are a space buff this is the book for you. Like an episode of "How it's Made," this book confines itself to providing a technical, but not overly complicated explanation of how Apollo got to the moon and back. Distilling the thousands of moving parts that comprised the Apollo program into a very well written one volume description, the author takes such concepts as gravity, orbital dynamics, weightlessness, and computer theory, and explains them as they applied to Apollo in a way even the non-scientifically inclined can get their brains around.

Really enjoyable!… (more)