Name: Manned Lunar Landing And Return
Brand: Apogee Books (US)
SKU: 9781926837420
Price: 24.99 GBP
Availability: InStock

Manned Lunar Landing And Return

By (author): Robert Godwin

Published by Apogee Books (US)

Temporarily Out-of-Stock Available to Pre-order

£24.99

Published: 01-May-2019
ISBN: 9781926837420

Paperback
132 Pages

Subjects:
Astronomy
space & time

Quantity

Even fifty years later there are still important stories waiting to be told about how humans first walked on another world; such as the one in this book. Take a trip back to the 1950s when the Chance Vought Company, builders of some of America's top fighter aircraft, were quietly figuring out how to get men to the moon using something they called Project MALLAR. It is the story of a team of engineers who built some of the most sophisticated space simulators in the world, where almost all of the Mercury and Gemini astronauts learned the art of spaceflight. This same team produced the first serious plan to use modular spacecraft and a technique called Lunar Orbit Rendezvous to make it possible to get to the moon. This book also reveals how for several years rocket genius Wernher von Braun overlooked his own ideas, before having them reintroduced back to him because of Project MALLAR, and how Vought's fighter aircraft weaved in and out of the Apollo story and then contributed to almost every major airliner in the sky today. Included are rare illustrations, some from recently declassified reports, of the earliest designs for the rockets and spacecraft that led to the greatest technological achievement in human history. In Manned Lunar Landing And Return, Robert Godwin takes the reader back to the time long before President Kennedy made his famous proclamation to reach for the moon and reveals one critical thread in the trail of genius which ended in the Sea of Traquility.

Robert Godwin is the author and editor of dozens of books about space flight and science fiction. He produced the first ever virtual reality panoramas of the Apollo lunar surface photography and the first multi-camera move of the Apollo 11 Moonwalk. He was the Space Curator at the Canadian Air Space Museum in Toronto and he co-produced the movie 2001: The Science of Futures Past.

"Reads like a novel. Replete with new discoveries. This book is seminal." -- BIS Spaceflight May 2019

Author Rob Godwin's surprising discoveries during his research for Manned Lunar Landings are covered in this article from MIT. Read the full article, below.

This is another of the semi-academic books published by Apogee. It follows the story of the evolution of the Lunar Orbital Rendezvous (LOR) technique that enabled Apollo 11 to land on the Moon in July 1969. The author, a serial writer of spaceflight related books, takes the story from the early ideas and techniques proposed by pioneers like Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, Goddard and von Braun through the post-war theoretical work of the British Interplanetary Society with publications by Harry Ross and Ralph Smith. But the real unsung heroes of this story of MALLAR dating back to the 1950s are the engineers of the Chance Vought Company from Texas. Better known as an aerospace company producing such famous fighters as the F-8 Crusader, by 1959 under the guidance of a Conrad Lau they were pursuing the idea of the lunar orbital rendezvous technique as the best way to accomplish a manned lunar landing and return mission. This is an excellent condensed book, only 130 odd pages long, which sheds light on the little known influence of Chance Vought on the Apollo missions, and is well worth the read... -- John Becklake, RAeS Aerospace Magazine, December 2020