Taking Science to the Moon: Lunar Experiments and the Apollo Program (New Series in NASA History)
by Donald A. Beattie

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Book Reviews of Taking Science to the Moon: Lunar Experiments and the Apollo Program (New Series in NASA History)

Book Review: Fine Book on the Apollo Scientific Experiment
Summary: 5 Stars

The book begins with the usual background information of the author's pre-NASA career where he worked for a major US oil company in South America. After hearing about the space program, on a whim he decides to apply for a position and after several unsuccessful attempts, he lands a position at NASA headquarters in Washington D.C helping to plan the missions and experiments that will be used.

After this introductory section, the books covers the conceptual designs for both the Apollo missions and post-Apollo missions that were planned, the inclusion of the United States Geological Survey to plan the missions and analyze the data, and training of the astronauts to perform various scientific tasks. After these sections, a good portion of the book is devoted to the J-series lunar missions (Apollo 15, 16 and 17) and all the training and hardware that was developed to support them. The book even covers the often overlooked Command Module on-orbit photographic survey, which provided some of the most detailed photographic of the Moon's surface.

While each page of this book is loaded with a lot of very interesting and I would say previously unpublished information, I found the parts of the book which examine the working relationships between the NASA centers, the most interesting. I was dumbfounded to find out that several people at the Manned Spacecraft Center felt that they should be designing and developing the experimental packages for the lunar surface operations even though they were engineers and not scientists. Fortunately, the upper NASA management decided that the design of these packages should be left to the scientists.

In final chapter, "The Legacy of Apollo", the author summarizes what was learned from the Apollo mission to the Moon, what it cost and mostly importantly, what it all meant. That is, people working together can solve very difficult problems and reap great rewards, whether they are scientific or philosophic.

Summary of Taking Science to the Moon: Lunar Experiments and the Apollo Program (New Series in NASA History)

How did science get aboard the Apollo rockets, and what did scientists do with the space allotted to them? Taking Science to the Moon describes, from the perspective of NASA headquarters, the struggles that took place to include science payloads and lunar exploration as part of the Apollo program. Donald A. Beattie -- who served at NASA from 1963 to 1973 in several management positions and finally as program manager, Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments -- here supplies a detailed, insider's view of the events leading up to the acceptance of science activities on all the Apollo missions.

General Books

• History > Americas > United States
• Professional & Technical > Engineering > Aerospace
• Science > Astronomy > Aeronautics & Astronautics
• Experiments, Instruments & Measurement > Scientific Instruments
• History & Philosophy > History of Science
• Technology > History of Technology
• General