Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles (Paperback)

What this book really highlights is the sheer scale of the project, and how such a basic idea (build a very large rocket) has so many knock-on effects and soon becomes a truly mammoth project. Time and again the book reiterates that most of the difficulties in the project were a result of the size of the rocket being built, from building the largest rocket engine ever constructed, through finding ways to make longer and better weld joints than had ever been attepted before, up to the logistics of transporting something so gargantuan from the manufacturing plant to the test facilites and finally to the launch site. It is all on a larger scale than ever previously attempted.

(Incidentally, the vast number of new facilites that had to be constructed, new management infrastructures needed and new techniques to be developed just in constructing the launch vehicle gives the lie to the fringe belief that Apollo was all a huge hoax.)

All that said, the book does have a few flaws. Its illustrations are one of them. Whilst the author is to be commended for choosing throughout to use only the illustrations actually produced at the time by NASA, the individual who decided how to present them within the book was perhaps not so interested in the subject matter. Most of the illustrations have been poorly reproduced and reduced to a size that renders their detail almost invisible and their text almost illegible. Additionally, most of them were originally made in colour but are printed here in black and white, making the kind of colour scheme that works so well on the illustration on the back cover (in which the various stages are given separate distinct but subdued colours) fail miserably, thus obscuring a number of important details.

It is also the case that, especially in the sections regarding the rocket engines, the detail is not readily visualised by anyone who does not know very much about rocket engine design beyond the 'mix fuel and oxidiser and blast the exhaust out the end' concept. The F-1 and J-2 engines utilised some very complex methods for cooling the engine parts, usually involving the recirculation of cryogenic fuel around the engine before ignition or the funnelling of incomplete combustion products into the engine exhaust to shield the metal. The descriptive detail is extensive, but is very difficult to relate to the illustrations, which consisted of a picture of the engine itself with major components labelled and a separate schematic of the fluid flow within the engine. The schematic was like a London underground map, in that it showed you the paths but not how they actually relate to the real object. I found it hard to really get a grip on how the engines worked in detail from the explanations and illustrations offered, which is a shame because I am fairly sure that conveying such an understanding was the objective of those sections.

A few more original illustrations may have served to better illuminate the reader as to some of the details described.

Those flaws do make the book hard to follow in places, and slightly unsatisfying in others, but overall the book is a good one, and well worth getting hold of if you want to get a feel for the real complexity of rocket science. The Saturn rockets are often overshadowed by the missions they launch, since their part is over within minutes. However, without the launch vehicle there would be no mission, and this book rightly redresses the balance by focusing on this part of the greatest exploratory program the world has ever seen.

There is some great sections that illuminate just how hard it is to build a rocket that big, and the problems that have to be overcome when trying to do something genuinely new and innovative.

A Few downsides. The book does at times without warning dive into detail that most readers may not grasp - especially the terminology of manufacturing and construction. Not a big problem is you are willing to skim over it.

There is lots of detail on how the effort was managed, which feels dated and to me at least not very interesting.

The information on the Instrumentation unit focuses on the hardware side and has almost no mention of the software process, which I'd have thought would be interesting given the (lack of) maturity of the software trade at the time.

All in all a good read if you just want to know how they did it, and know the basics already.