NASA's Moon Program Paving the Way for Apollo 11

David Harland here initiates a series of books on NASA’s Moon Program of the 1960s and early 1970s. Presented chronologically, ‘NASA’s Moon Program – The Early Years’ will outline the Mercury and Gemini manned missions, the unmanned lunar probes and the Apollo missions leading up to Apollo 11, covering that mission only as a postscript. ‘The First Men on the Moon – The Story of Apollo 11,’ released in 2006 is devoted solely to that mission. ‘Apollo – The Definitive Sourcebook,’ published in 2006, covered all the missions, including the unmanned tests, in an encyclopedic style which included many facts and figures. ‘Exploring the Moon – The Apollo Expeditions,’ published in 1999, focused on the final three Apollo missions, and covered only their activities on the lunar surface. A fully re-illustrated second edition with color illustrations was released in 2008. The individual mission books in this series will relate to the planning, flight and results, and are written in the same style as ‘The First Men on the Moon – The Story of Apollo 11,’ i.e. using dialog from the in-flight transcripts (including some conversations never broadcast) to bring their stories to life. David Harland will later cover the other five missions that landed on the Moon, concluding by 2012 – the 40th anniversary of the ‘last’ Apollo mission.

Each of the Apollo missions that reached the Moon gets its own book-lenth account covering planning, the flight, and the scientific results. This series will become the definitive account of the Apollo era. It will give the Springer/Praxis list unrivaled coverage of the Apollo era of space exploration. Plans are already in the works for a return to the Moon by 2020 to create a Moonbase.