Exploring the Moon: The Apollo Expeditions (Springer Praxis Books / Space Exploration) (Paperback)

If you are interested in the Moon, or simply in why humanity goes into space, read this book.

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Over a quarter of a century after the event we are beginning to see reappraisals of Armstrong & Co's achievements: on the Internet with the extraordinary "Apollo Lunar Surface Journal"; on the screen with the highly successful and technically acclaimed "Apollo 13" with Tom Hanks, who widened the story with HBO's "From The Earth To The Moon" TV series; and now, increasingly, in print. David Harland's book is an unusual mixture in this genre, but an astonishingly successful one.

Harland - obviously capable of writing a novel if he wants to - manages to blend storytelling, dialogue and the thread of the travelogue with careful and accurate description of the science within which the Apollo program operated, and the science it subsequently gave rise to. Though he concentrates on the ambitious final three expeditions, he relates the story of all the missions which landed, telling the reader of the frustrations as well as the elation which visited the crews during their brief visits to the Moon. After each mission, he discusses what was learned and how it fit into the theories of the time. Harland rounds off his tale by introducing more recent robotic exploration to help the reader share our widening knowledge of the Moon and how it relates to the early history and current evolution of our home planet.

The Apollo crews were taught how to read the story in the lunar rocks by looking at their "context"; where and how the rocks lie. Likewise, Harland takes context to his heart and, by staying with the chronology of events, places the manned flights of Apollo into the context of lunar exploration before and since. As he conveys the pioneering, can-do spirit of this extraterrestrial adventure, Harland wields his master stroke in liberal dollops throughout the book by his unusual presentation of the Apollo photographic collection. At many points during their busy expeditions the Apollo crews took sequences of pictures in a circle from where they stood. These "panoramas" of square photographs could be joined together to form wide vistas which, except in analysis rooms as poor paste-ups, were rarely seen by the public. Exploiting widely avalable photo-retouching software, Harland has painstakingly made up many dozens of these pans which, as well as giving the reader the context of the crew's activities, display the splendour of the ancient landscape over which these ment walked, drove and worked.

The book is a technical tome, but should not be dismissed as such as it is a very unusual one. To borrow the words of a gentleman who was lucky enough to spend three days calling the spectacular vista of the lunar Apennine mountains his home and who provides an afterword to the text, it is a tale of exploration at its greatest.

There are many plus points. The book concentrates on the more scientific but less well known later missions. It has good sections on the mission data and a wonderful bibliography. The pictures, reproduced in black and white, are generally very good, well chosen and illustrative of the text. It would have been easy to overlook many images. But there is always the feeling that the book is not quite finished to the highest, polished standard. Harland can write but perhaps he lacked the confidence to make the book all about the exploration of the lunar surface. He could have expanded the robotic exploration. He could have cut back on some of the rather lengthy discussions of the moonwalks.

For the casual reader, I would recommend some of the more general accounts that are available. For the reader seeking more detailed information about the moonwalks, there is much here of interest. However, be aware that there are other books that are better.