posted 10-31-2006 12:40 AM               

David Harland proposes a series of books on the theme of NASA's Moon Program of the 1960s and early 1970s. Presented chronologically, "NASA's Moon Program -- The Early Years" will outline the Mercury and Gemini manned missions, the unmanned lunar probes and the Apollo missions leading up to Apollo 11, covering that mission only as a postscript. "The First Men on the Moon -- The Story of Apollo 11" due for release in September 2006 is devoted solely to that mission. "Apollo -- The Definitive Sourcebook" published in 2006 covered all the missions, including the unmanned tests, in an encyclopaedic style which cited facts and figures in a stylised manner. "Exploring the Moon -- The Apollo Expeditions" was published in 1999, focusing on the final three Apollo missions, and covered only their activities on the lunar surface. A fully re-illustrated second edition with colour illustrations will be released in 2008. The individual mission books in this series will relate to the planning, flight and results, and be written in the same style as "The First Men on the Moon -- The Story of Apollo 11"; i.e. using dialogue from the in-flight transcripts (including some conversations never broadcast) to bring their stories to life. With the release of the book on Apollo 11 David Harland will then cover the other five missions that landed on the Moon, concluding by 2012 -- the 40th anniversary of the 'last' Apollo mission.

Each of the Apollo missions that reached the Moon deserves its own book-lenth account covering planning, the flight, and the scientific results. This series will become the definitive account of the Apollo era. It will give the Springer/Praxis list unrivalled coverage of the Apollo era of space exploration as the 40th anniversary approaches in 2009 and the world looks back with a sense of wonderment at the achievement. Plans are already in train for a return to the Moon by 2020 to create a Moonbase.

• Spring-Praxis Publishing, UK
  
• 2007, Approx. 415 p., 202 illus., 32 in colour, Softcover
  
• ISBN-10: 0-387-68131-0
  
• ISBN-13: 978-0-387-68131-3

posted 05-27-2009 08:37 AM               

NASA's Moon Program
Paving the Way for Apollo 11

It is impractical to cover all the strands of this effort in a single volume in equal detail. Nor can any given strand be properly appreciated in isolation. My approach is therefore to write a series of books, each of which applies a magnifying glass to a certain number of strands and glosses over others. This book focuses on what was known about the Moon at the dawn of the space age and details the robotic projects that paved the way for the first Apollo lunar landing, in particular the Surveyors that soft-landed to investigate the physical and chemical nature of the lunar surface and the Lunar Orbiters sent to reconnoitre possible landing sites. I used the mission reports as my primary source of information - there are many thousands of pages available on the NASA Technical Report Server. Millions of dollars were spent developing and flying the vehicles used to take close-up pictures of the Moon and, like the mission reports, until recently they remained in archives. I have assembled some of the contiguous photographic sequences taken by the Lunar Orbiters to illustrate the process by which the site for the first Apollo landing was selected. To my knowledge, they have never previously been made available to the public in this form

Contents

1. Astronomers' Moon
   Classical philosophers
   The Renaissance in astronomy
   Early telescopic impressions of the Moon
   Mapping the Moon
   The surface material

2. Geologists' Moon
   Early ideas about lunar craters
   A different point of view
   Stratigraphic mapping
   Whence the Moon?

3. The space age dawns
   Missiles and space
   Satellite shock
   America tries for the Moon
   Soviet lunar flyby
   NASA embraces lunar science
   More Soviet successes

4. Preparing Ranger
   Firming up the plan
   Management issues
   The spacecraft
   Deep-space tracking

5. The Apollo commitment
   The role of man in space
   Kennedy's challenge
   Rangers for Apollo
   Apollo underway

6. Ranger struggles
   Stranded
   Lunar flyby
   Lobotomy
   Power failure
   TV failure

7. Ranger triumphs
   Success at last
   Repeat performance
   TV spectacular
   Mission accomplished

8. Soviet activity
   The second generation
   Filling in the gap
   On the surface
   In lunar orbit

9. Developing Lunar Orbiter
   Changing horses
   Boeing wins
   Mission objectives
   The spacecraft

10. On the surface
    "My God, it landed!"
    Tumbling out of control

11. The Apollo zone
    Reconnaissance flights
    Apollo site short-list

12. Scratching the Moon
    A bouncy landing
    Outcome unknown

13. Orbiters for science
    Global mapping
    Scientific targets
    Wrapping up

14. Tasting the Moon
    A risky descent
    On the meridian
    Inferences about the maria
    The southern highlands
    Roving plans

15. Apollo development
    Organisation
    Plans and schedules
    Early unmanned testing
    The Gemini legacy
    Setback and recovery

16. Apollo picks up the pace
    Moon rocket
    A spectacular 'all up' test
    The first LM
    A daring plan
    Boring holes in the sky
    Men orbit the Moon!
    The Spider
    Dress rehearsal
    End game

    Index