Zack Scott - Apollo: A Graphic Guide to Mankind’s Greatest Mission

This attractively produced and beautifully designed factbook gives an account of each mission, including unmanned missions, Apollo-Soyuz and Skylab. It also provides a gazetteer of astronaut Moonwalkers, including fascinating information about their education and motivation, a breakdown of the spacecraft, rockets and ground equipment used on the programme, and a collection of statistics, facts and infographics, for instance a splashdown map, info about the solar systems other moons, speed comparisons and a pull-out flight plan. When President Kennedy announced the US Apollo programme in 1961 he was fighting back against the Russian achievement of making Yuri Gagarin the first man in space. The 17 Apollo missions between 1961 and 1972 reasserted the USAs world leadership in the field, with the first moonwalk taking place from Apollo 11 in 1969, when Neil Armstrong was the first to land followed by Buzz Aldrin. The final Moonwalkers, and the last to travel beyond low-earth orbit for 50 years at the present time, took place in 1972 with Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt completing the actual walk. They brought back the largest haul of samples, and their pilot Ronald Evans became the astronaut to have spent the longest amount of time in the moons orbit. Not all moon expeditions were successful, and the Apollo 13 mission was aborted when an oxygen tank exploded. The spacecraft continued onward to the moon and half orbited it in order to gain the momentum to break free of its gravity. On the return journey, the astronauts had to create a working component to filter out excessive CO2 in their cabin. Apollo 14 aimed to redress these problems but itself only just avoided disaster owing to a faulty signal which had to be rebooted.