Apollo 13: The NASA Mission Reports (Apogee Books Space Series, 9) (Vol 2)

A dream come true for dedicated space buffs, the NASA Mission Reports series pulls together an almost overwhelming array of official NASA press kits, operation reports, images, CD-ROM movies, and even dinner menus from some of the space agency's most momentous missions, from Gemini 6 to the many Mars launches.

Series editor Robert Godwin explains in his introduction why the failed Apollo 13 mission (later of Tom Hanks-Ron Howard fame) is particularly deserving of such detail-intensive attention: "Putting aside the high drama of the events, the following documents reveal a side of NASA that is often overlooked, the talents of the management and administrators." Those talents are nowhere more evident than in the minutes from the House Science and Astronautics Committee hearing, numerous internal NASA memos, and the previously classified technical debriefing of the astronauts. Even the pre-mission materials prove interesting, explaining with extensive diagrams the many experiments that never reached the lunar surface.

As with the other excellent installments in the Mission Reports series, the included CD-ROM backs up the already solid content with searchable documents and choice images and movies, including a long interview with Jim Lovell. (And while the CD works more smoothly on Windows, users on other platforms shouldn't have to work too hard accessing its many jpegs and mpegs.) --Paul Hughes