Customer Reviews
Beautifully written tour de force - By: Jonathan Glenister, 14 Nov 2008 
It takes real talent to explain something intricate without confusing or losing your readerin the process. David Woods has pitched the delivery of this masterpiece perfectly.
David gives the book a logical flow from start to finish, citing facts from each mission as appropriate to illustrate the issues. The explanations of hardware design & operation hit just the right level of detail to enlighten, but also end up inspiring awe. Until reading this book I had never realised just how superb the design of the Saturn/Apollo machine was.
Furthermore the significance of mission timings & trajectory calculations is explained, demystifying what for me has been a very grey area for the last 4 decades!
I would recommend this book for anyone already interestedin the Apollo missions, but open to finding out more. It's a gem.
Fascinating - By: Peter Kennedy, 14 Nov 2008 There are plenty of great books, films, TV shows & internet resources telling you who the Apollo astronauts were & what they said & did. There is surprisingly little telling you how they did it. Even the astronauts' & controllers' own memoirs seem to shy away from this, as if afraid that technical details are boring.
So how would you navigate to a pinpoint landing on a distant body? Why were the spaceships the size & shape they were, & what were the alternatives? What did all the bits do? How did they deal with things that went wrong? What was the astronauts' rolein all of this? What were all those peoplein Mission Control doing? In the Apollo 13 movie, what on earth does "FIDO" or "Main Bus B Undervolt" mean?
This book explains it all, & somehow manages to do itin a way that is engaging & fairly easy to follow. I found it endlessly fascinating. Really excellent stuff that really fills a major gap, & I suspect future historians will love him for it.
Some bits work better than others; my mind wandered a little when reading about the scanning instrumentsin the SIM bay, but he rightly wants to explain every part of it & he structures itin a way that you can skip some bits but easily know where you are.
It is also great to see the attention he gives to all of the missions, not just the big-name ones, & explains really well how the build-up missions (not just Gemini but also Ranger & Surveyor & so on) contributed. And having once met the late Ron Evans of Apollo 17, I was chuffed to see his exploits describedin some detail, especially as other books (especially Chaikin) tend to portray him as a bit of an amiable simpleton.
The only questions I would have are extremely minor; he seems to downplay Jim Irwin's health problems, which Chris Kraft's book described as practically a full-blown heart attack. He also downplays the design changes caused by Apollo 13, which again Chris Kraft complains were enforced by political rather than engineering reasons. But given his attention to detailin the rest of it he may well be correct.
So warmly recommended.
From pre-launch to splashdown - By: Mr. M. J. Bowyer, 27 May 2008 I have just finished reading this excellent book & I would certainly recommend it to anyone interestedin the Apollo project, or space flightin general.
Without getting bogged downin equations, this book explains how the space craft of the Apollo era worked & where flown. Following the journey from the launch pad to splash down, every stage of this grand adventure are explainedin detail. Each section contains examples from the real missions to show how a staggering series of procedures allowed the first humans to walk on the Moon.
Well worth reading!
Deserves 10 Stars! - By: Dr. A. Sahal, 13 May 2008 This is a book that I've been waiting for all my life! I've read so many books about Project Apollo, many of which naturally focus on the human side of the adventures-this is after all, what the general public wants to know about. But as a reasonably intelligent & educated person I have often been left wondering how they actually did everything they needed to get to the Moon & back safely. This book fills that gap &in a way that the person with an average level of education will fully comprehend & enjoy. Mr Woods's explanations on navigation procedures are so lucid as to make it sound simple & after a few minutes reading I found I could confidently bandy phrases around such as 'state vector' at dinner parties, even though I have to take my shoes & socks off to count up to 23!
After many years of falling into the trap of thinking the Moon landings were a great but, only moderately hard task to achieve, Mr Woods superb book has reinstated my feelings of awe for what humans can achieve if they put their minds to it & polished my absolute admiration for the astronauts who put themselves into the hands of their ground-based colleagues.
I cannot praise Mr Woods efforts enough, however I worry that since the bar has been set so high by the author, every subsequent book I read on Project Apollo will compare unfavourably to 'How Apollo Flew to the Moon'.
Text book for lunar rocket scientists - By: A. D. Crysell, 23 Apr 2008 When we go back to the Moon, just about everything we learnt from apollo will have to be relearnt. If that is the case, then this book is the one that should be the starter for ten. It is one of the best technical books on Apollo I have ever read, & I've read quite a few, keeping the cut & paste jobs of some books to a minimum & actually writing for a readership for once. Allin all, a very good book, beautifully presented, laced with anecdotes & engineering details but never too heavy. For those that doubt anyone ever went there, this at least tells you how - other books will tell you why & give you all the whens. Recommended.
