There are a bunch of new ones out as part of the fiftieth anniversary. Here’s a list (including some old classics as well).
9 thoughts on “Moon Books”
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There are a bunch of new ones out as part of the fiftieth anniversary. Here’s a list (including some old classics as well).
Comments are closed.
I wonder why Apollo The Race to the Moon by Murray and Cox is not being reissued? Even as an ebook. It’s one of the very best Apollo books in my opinion.
Jim Davis, you are so right… and used copies of this book begin to sell at $41 and much much more!
Hmmm, maybe I should do a list of 50 Moon Books Not About Apollo
I liked “We Reach The Moon” by Wilford.
Same here. It was contemporary with the Apollo program, and written by a superb science journalist who had unlimited access.
I have a tattered copy of that from back in the day. I still think the best recounting of the early space age (going all the way back to VfR) remains the final edition of Willy Ley’s “Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space.” Ley died about a month befor Apollo 11.
I had that one, as well. It taught me more about rocketry from an historical perspective than any other. But a couple of years later, my grandmother got me a copy of Sutton’s Rocket Propulsion Elements, which began my trek toward a career in rocket engineering.
I read Willy Ley’s Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel countless times, and used it as reference on fuel combinations.
Many years ago I lost my copy of Rocket Propulsion Elements in a Wendy’s in Pennsylvania, as best I can tell. Their fry cook is probably working for NASA now. So a month or so ago I bought a new copy, and it’s been updated! RD-180’s, Merlins, and other goodies are in it!
And speaking of lunar missions, I’m in a Selenian Boondocks thread on the SpaceX Starship.
I calculated that it if fully fueled in LEO, it still can’t deliver any useful payload on a direct lunar mission, and go through the math on that. Basically, the direct mode’s delta V requirements maxes out its available mass ratio.
So Chris Stelter mentioned that Elon says it might have to be refueled in an elliptical orbit, and I figured that was the easy solution to the problem. I picked GTO as a great elliptical orbit that could be easily converted to a TLI with a perigee burn, and started running numbers. It turns out that the Falcon 9 v1.0 can deliver more payload to GTO than the Starship can. The first one arrives on GTO virtually empty, with about 3,700 kg of fuel remaining. Subsequent ones have to do a small deorbit burn (I went with 51 m/sec), so they only deliver 1,710 kg of fuel. That means filling up the first one will take 640 subsequent Starship flights.
Anyway, someone might want to check my numbers over there.
Got that one too. I’ve read both of those books countless times. Both are tattered but both remain on my bookshelf near the Sutton “Rocket Propulsion Elements” book.