Project Apollo: The Moon Landings, 1968–1972 (America in Space Series, 4)

Project Apollo is the third in a series of books by Eugen Reichl, the first two books covering the Mercury and Gemini missions. It is a nice fairly small hardback book coming in at just under 150 pages and it details the complete events of the Apollo project, not just the moon landings which most people associate with Apollo.Each Apollo flight is given its own chapter, which is essentially a summary of the main points of the mission. Then there is a single page summary to close the chapter giving facts and figures like launch date, crew, weight, recovery vehicle etc.The book starts with the inevitable Apollo 1 tragedy, goes through the unmanned Saturn launches and the manned missions all on chronologic order. Each chapter also has numerous pictures associated with it, most in full color. About two thirds of the way through the book, just after the chapter on Apollo 11 there are a series of very nice full color cut-outs detailing the command module, service module, lunar module etc. Unfortunately the author has left the original German in for some of the descriptions e.g. the main instrument panel in the command module is tagged CM-Hauptintrumentenpaneel.Whilst overall the author has done a very good of summarizing each of the Apollo missions and the book is a fairly good read, there are just too many mistakes and inaccuracies in the book for me to really recommend it. Examples are, when talking about the Apollo 12 mission the author states not once but twice that Conrad destroyed the TV camera by pointing it at the sun when in fact it was Alan Bean. He states that Alan Bean saved the Apollo 12 launch when the Saturn V was struck by lightning but in fact it was John Aaron in Mission Control who remembered the telemetry failure pattern from an earlier test and instructed CAPCOM to radio "Try SCE to aux". For the Apollo 13 summary the author states "Lovell and Haise had it somewhat better as they were able to put on their lunar spacesuits" when talking about dealing with the extreme cold due to the systems having been shut down. This doesn't even make sense as all three crewmembers had spacesuits for launch. The "lunar spacesuit" as the author states is the exact same as the launch spacesuit bar a few extras like the PLSS, EV Gloves, lunar overshoes etc. Also none of the crewmembers donned their spacesuits as it would have made things worse for them.Unfortunately the book is just littered with little inaccuracies like the examples above to the extent that although overall it is a decent book, I just cannot recommend it to anyone.

I have purchased and read all of Eugen Reichl's America in Space series, from Mercury through Gemini and Apollo, and found them an outstanding source on the space program. While only 130-140 pages in length, they are dense with information and details on each program's development and every mission. Nicely hard bound, each volume is beautifully illustrated on high-quality glossy paper. The print is a bit small for older readers, but a decent pair of glasses and a good light will be rewarded with well-written content with just enough technical detail to properly educate a non-expert. I highly recommend this series for anyone wanting to begin their journey into America's space program.

The book is well written but the print is too small for easy reading. Usually this is done to conserve paper (cost) but they offset this by using thick glossy paper. It is unclear to me why the publisher didn't use ordinary type size and ordinary paper, which would have made the book only a little thicker. The published thickness of the printed matter is only 1/2 inch and 144 pages. The photos are good but have been larger.

Takes me back to heady days of the Apollo program. For those who did not have a chance to live that era, this will at least help in getting to know how the program worked back then and how hard it really was to land an man on the moon.

My third book read in the series, and each one is more entrancing than the next. This author knows how to deliver the goods.

This is a good general listing of the missions leading up to and including all of the Apollo mission. There are a few small editing errors.

Fantastic review of the Apollo program. I grew up with Sputnik, Vanguard, etc. Great read!

See my comments on Saturn V of this series.

I was a child of the 1950s, and so I grew up with the 'space race' and the US manned space program. I was even fortunate enough, for a Brit, to witness the Apollo 12 lift off.There is a surprisingly small body of works detailing the three programs of the 1960s, and so when I saw these four books by Eugen Reichl on Amazon I snapped up all four.I was soon to discover that the books are not all that I expected them to be, and there are some really glaring errors that ought to have been picked up at the proof-reading stage. I'm sure that it doesn't help that they are apparently translated from the original German.If a reader doesn’t have the basic knowledge of Mercury, Gemini & Apollo that I was fortunate enough to have, then I'm afraid that these books will confuse him.Illustrations are incorrectly captioned, so we see one photo of an Atlas Mercury on the launch-pad that is captioned as a Saturn 1 Apollo, for example. (And there are many others.)And the data in the mission summary panels relating to Apollos 7 & 8 has somehow been completely mixed up.So the books cannot be recommended as accurate for the purposes of research.That is not to say that I was not wiser about the programs than I was before I started reading them. I understood for the first time the real reason why the spacecraft cabins had 100% oxygen atmospheres, which led to the tragedy of the Apollo 1 fire in January 1967. (It was so they could have very low pressurisation, and thus could be constructed in a much lighter fashion.)