As expected from this author an erudite, extensive and accurate look back at one of the 20th Centuries biggest technological wonders.

Wow! Just my thing this book. A short but extremely interesting read. Packed full of technical data, illustrations and descriptions. This is definitely for anyone who is interested in space travel and would suit a beginner or someone with some knowledge already. Brilliant.

This book is fairly short but packs a punch. It covers the Apollo flights up 11 and gives some light detail of the subsequent missions.

Baker packs in a lot of technical details such as when a certain engine fired, for how long and at what point in the mission the engine fired. Although this could come across as fairly dry he livens it up throwing in quips such as, if the engine didnt stop at the exact designated second the mission would have to be aborted or the astronauts would be lost in space etc. This adds the human dimension to proceedings and you can literally feel the thrill and drama as the Apollo 11 mission takes shape and takes flight. That a million people crowded the Kennedy Space Centre and that the American death rate fell dramatically in the months preceding the landings were facts that I did not know.

In some ways I wish this book could have been longer and covered the later missions in as much detail as the first Apollo flights.

I feel there is a lot of ground that could have been covered, there are lots of interesting little snippets of info, for instance one of the spaceraft had to have its thousands of soldered connections to the exact length, if each was just 1/32 of an inch too long the spacecraft would have been too heavy a payload for its rocket. Crazy stuff.

This is well worth a read and serves as a good primer to the Apollo missions.