NASA Mission Reports (Starring John Young)

Apogee Books publishes the NASA Mission Reports, a series of books that collect various original mission documents from Apollo and other NASA programs. With all the NASA material available for free on the web, why would you buy these books? Well aside from the fact that I would never think to use the words "why buy books" in the same sentence, the answer is, books are still the best thing we have for casual browsing. But it was only very cheap sale table serendipity that led me to that conclusion the other day. Now I'm afraid my completeness obsession might start to kick in... MUST... NOT... CLICK.... AMAZON... TOOLBAR.... BUTTON....

Wow, that was close. I still have just the two books shown, and I can now easily read hundreds of pages of mission debrief interviews with John Young, from his Moon landing flight on Apollo 16 in April 1972, and his flight as commander of the first orbital mission of the space shuttle Columbia (STS-1) in April 1981 (they were the only two books in the series on the sale table, so the double dose of John Young was just by chance, and the Space Shuttle book actually covers the first five missions plus landing tests with the non-orbiting Enterprise, though STS-1 gets the most coverage). There are also mission timelines, press kits, photographs, diagrams, etc. There's a CD included with each book, with hundreds of pictures and movies. Really really cool stuff. Space geek heaven.

John Young had an amazing space career, by the way. He flew in all the NASA manned space programs except Mercury and Skylab - Gemini 3 (the first manned Gemini), Gemini 10, Apollo 10, Apollo 16 (that's right, two Moon missions, one orbital, one landing), as well as shuttle missions STS-1 and STS-9. What a job! Now I have to find the Descartes lunar scenery so I can fly Apollo 16 in Orbiter one of these days.