does anyone have good recommendations on:
the engineering history of the Gemini and Apollo programs?
Ideally something that's got the depth but interestingness-of-writing that The Making of the Atomic Bomb has.
reality is the battlefield
- she/they (pl)
- breadthcharge.net/
the first line goes in Cohost embeds
🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮
I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.
mastodon
email: contact at breadthcharge dot net
I live on the northeast coast of the US.
'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.
conceptual midwife.
https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut
If you can see the "show contact info" dropdown below, I follow you. If you want me to, ask and I'll think about it.
You must log in to comment.
in reply to @NireBryce's post:
It's an older book, and I read it over two decades ago, but I remember Apollo: The Race to the Moon being a good read that's probably comparable to The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
I've heard decent things about Digital Apollo and The Apollo Guidance Computer, but those are focused on just the computing aspects, and I haven't read them myself yet, so I don't know if they manage to stay interesting.
There are the free NASA history special publications about Apollo that are worth reading too, but they do tend to be a bit on the dryer side.
Moonport: A History of Apollo Launch Facilities and Operations, Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft, and Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles are probably the ones of most interest from an engineering history perspective.
NASA Gemini special publications that may be of interest are On the Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini which is very readable, and Project Gemini: Technology and Operations: A Chronology which is a fairly dry and high level timeline but has some neat technical tidbits.
Unfortunately, I'm blanking on non-NASA publications specifically about the engineering history of Project Gemini.
I forget what it was but there's a management document on either apollo or gemini that I remember too, but can't find
Was it possibly Managing NASA in the Apollo Era?
The list of SPs has a section on Management Histories if it's not that one.
oh it may be, I think it had engineering in it's name. but I'll keep wandering
I pitched this question to my space discord and a couple people recommended A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin, but none of them that read that had also read The Making of the Atomic Bomb
tell them they must. it's got an Audible book too. (33 hours)
it's essentially 8-12 different biographies knitted together into a history of the first half of 20th century physics at the highest levels through the lens of people who ended up working at or with the Manhattan Project.
and treats The Bomb with a somber respect even most history authors do not.
it's also about how to get that many completely different eccentrics to live together and coöperate at that scale
I went to go buy this book when you posted this, then realized I bought it the nth time ago you posted about it 😅
Found someone who has read The Making of the Atomic Bomb and also has pitches:
“ As someone who has The Making of the Atomic Bomb in their top 5 all time books, a technical Apollo book I enjoyed was Digital Apollo
https://web.mit.edu/digitalapollo/
and a related memoir Sunburst and Luminary
https://www.sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html”