Jeffrey Kluger

Outstanding nonfiction about the Apollo 13 mission. Lovell & Kluger manage to hold the technobabble to a bare minimum, though the verbatim calldowns through the different mission control consoles gets a bit wearing.

While the bulk of the book details the mission itself, its multitude of disastrous systems failures, and the incredible Earthside and spaceborne efforts to get the crew home safely, there is also background about Lovell's career, as well as a chilling review of the post-mission investigation into the root cause of the command module explosion that doomed the lunar landing.

There's also a fair amount of attention paid to Marilyn Lovell, both during the hair-raising mission itself and to the general substructure of astronaut wives and the support system they created among themselves.

Much of this material will be familiar to readers who have followed the beginnings of America's manned space program, whether readers lived through that period with the first glimmerings of the Mercury program in 1958 through the last, sad Apollo mission in 1972, or whether their only exposure to it has come second-hand through memoirs and documentaries. Yet nothing seems quite so fraught, quite so heartbreaking, or quite so edge-of-the-seat suspenseful, as those six days in 1970 when America, and the world, were brutally reminded that man-in-space was not routine, and that the technology that got us out there could also fail us with disastrous results.… (altro)

Apollo 8 was the first crewed spacecraft to reach the Moon. It was also the first crewed spacecraft to ever leave Earth's orbit. It was a truly amazing feat of intelligence and effort.

This is a very well thought out book; well-researched and well-written. The physical copy of the book has beautiful pictures from the preparations for the mission and the mission itself. And the audiobook has a great narrator.

This author also co-wrote "Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13", which I highly recommend.… (altro)