Contact Us | Media Information | Global Military Communications | SatTV Week | Telecomstalk  
 

 

 

 

<< Begining

Apollo 11 Owners’ Workshop Manual, Christopher Riley & Phil Dolling, Haynes, 2009, 196pp, £17.99, ISBN 978-1-84425-683-9 [hardback]

7th March 2011

For those who remember the days of balancing a Haynes owners’ manual between the engine block and the carburettor, trying to turn the pages without obliterating the text with too many oily fingerprints, this book might come as a surprise. Apollo 11 Eagle: good runner, one careful owner, variegated paint job…but an owners’ workshop manual?

Well aware of the incongruity involved, the authors decided instead to “tell some of the remarkable engineering stories that led to the vehicles that carried men to the Moon”. “There was never going to be enough room to write a nut-and-bolt guide”, says Chris Riley in his acknowledgements. “There are over five-and-a-half million parts in a Saturn V alone!”

The layout of the resulting book is therefore fairly standard for a book on Apollo. However, it differs from most of the others in its unashamed celebration of the technology, from rocket engines and guidance systems to spacesuits and environmental control. The book is copiously illustrated with colour photographs and line diagrams from the original Apollo briefing documents, which gives the book a contemporary 1960s feel. There is also a list of abbreviations, a timeline, a mission table and details of where the Apollo hardware ended up (some modules are still on the Moon, while others are in museums or in solar orbit). The only unfortunate omission is an index, which a book of this kind should surely include.

Following an introductory chapter, the book features major sections on the Saturn rocket, the Command and Service Module (CSM) and the Lunar Module (LM). There are also chapters on the spacesuits and the guidance, navigation and control system (which the author calls “the lynchpin of Apollo”). The latter is an excellent addition to the book and confirms the author’s understanding of the importance of the technologies that had to be developed to get men to the Moon. Another example of this is the inclusion of a chapter dedicated to communications systems, so often ignored or taken for granted even in more technical books.

Admittedly, the author concentrates on the media aspects of communications, such as TV picture quality, but it is welcome nonetheless. Nor does he miss the chance to write about the so-called “missing A” in Armstrong’s famous utterance, to which he devotes a double spread. It includes a fairly detailed waveform analysis of Armstrong’s speech and concludes that, “even if he did not vocalise it”, there was room for the “a” and Armstrong almost certainly meant to say it.

Although a workshop manual for Apollo can only be viewed as a ‘tongue-in-cheek’ concept, the publishers should be commended for their confidence in the project. The level of technical detail allowed by this format would have been difficult to pitch to any other publisher. The fact that Buzz Aldrin used his felt-tip pen to close a broken circuit breaker (thus allowing the ascent engine to fire!) fits well within the ethos of the DIY car mechanic, and I’m sure there were times on the mission when the astronauts would have welcomed a real Haynes manual for the LM.