Henry S. F. Cooper (1933–2016)

A fairly straightforward, play-by-play account of the Apollo 13 disaster and recovery with a focus on the technical problems and solutions. However, for someone apparently experienced in reporting on space exploration, NASA, and the Apollo missions in particular, Cooper is oddly unfamiliar with certain basic technical terminology and jargon, as evidenced in the way he presents them to the reader as though he were relaying terms he had never heard before. And some of his explanations are flat-out wrong, as when he calls a vector “a point in space,” or seemingly garbled, as in the following exchange:

“Aaron now told Kranz he would like to get Swigert to test Main Bus A by plugging one of the reëntry batteries into it and taking a Voltage reading. … A couple of minutes later, Swigert passed word back that he was getting a reading of two amps on the bus, and Kerwin said that sounded good to him.” Amps, of course, are a measure of current, not voltage.

Hopefully the more specialized domain knowledge of space flight was handled more accurately!… (mere)

Where I got the book: Audiobook from Audible. This was a deal of the day and I fell for it—SUCKERRRRR.

Apollo 13 is like one of my favorite movies ever. Which is probably why I read The Martian. Tiny humans pitted against the Vastness of Space—can the stakes get any higher? And the cool thing about Apollo 13 is that it was TRUE and it was way back in the dark ages of 1970 when I was ten years old and had no idea any of this was happening. I jumped on this double quick, hoping, I think, for an Apollo 13: The Movie experience.

Well, not quite. I mean it was, but purely from the technical point of view. None of the personal stuff, the anxiously waiting families, the moment in training when it transpires NASA never thought astronauts might need to pee (a hilarious scene). This version of the Apollo 13 story, written close to the event in 1972, is a detailed and thorough account of the technical problems NASA and the astronauts had to overcome to get the mission home to Earth. To add to the geekiness, J. Paul Guimont narrates in a robotic voice that sounds alarmingly like text-to-speech, colorless and dispassionate.

And yet my overall impression was one of enjoyment—I guess this book docked with my inner nerd. (Inner? I think it’s pretty near the surface). Next time I watch the movie I’ll know all about Fido, Guido and Retro, and how the Trench differs from the rest of the room. I’ll understand the danger of gimbal lock, and snigger at the idea of the command module being full of bags containing human waste. In short, this was knowledge as entertainment. Just add Tom Hanks.… (mere)

On its way to the moon on the evening of April 13, 1970, spacecraft Apollo 13 lost one of its two oxygen tanks in the service module due to electric fusing and an explosion, which could be seen from the face of the Earth. Aboard, the three astronauts didn’t notice signals at first, as did their fellow ground control colleagues in Houston. The famous words “Houston, we’ve had a problem here” or the DIY carbon oxygen removal kit aren’t the focus of this story written two years after this ‘failed successful mission’ by Henry Cooper, that had interviewed many actors and read transcripts of conversations of these troubling days in manned space exploration. The book’s divided in four parts: Out (about the problems initiation and their chain reaction), Around (the moon, decision making and living in the Lunar Module), Back (about the navigational and temperature problems on the way back to planet Earth) and Home about the re-entry and landing. Cooper isn’t reserved in his critics of NASA’s inner workings, bureaucracy and faith in technology. Intervention, simulation of unrealistic scenarios, tricking the systems, and taking risks were necessary in order to bring the three astronauts back home. While reading you can feel the tension and effects of exhausted personnel. Thirteen is the shocking, remarkable story of collaboration, complex man-made systems and the real dangers of every single minute in a spaceflight. It’s the kind of books you can’t put away, until you’ve reached the end. This 1972 classic was re-issued in 1994 and again as e-book in 2013 through Open Road Media.… (mere)

I would recommend a background in either computer science and/or geology if you decide to tackle this book. The author is a good writer, but he takes for granted that the reader has a decent amount of knowledge in either of these two topics. Due to my ignorance in both these areas I feel like I got very little out of this book. I found the differing theories of Venus' geological evolution difficult to follow. Illustrations and pictures would have gone a long way to explain some of the concepts. The author is not a bad writer, he couldn't write for The New Yorker if he was, but the topics in this book require some background knowledge and may not be ideal for the lay reader.… (mere)