Where no man has gone before:; A History of Apollo Lunar Exploration Missions, NASA SP-4214

xiii, 415, [3] pages. 26 cm. Color frontis. Illustrations. Footnotes. Source Notes. Bibliographic Essay. Index. Cover has some wear and soiling. This is one of the NASA History Series. William David Compton was born in De Leon, Texas (1927), and received B.S. and M.S. degrees from North Texas State University and the Ph.D. from the University of Texas. He taught at West Texas State University and Colorado School of Mines before moving to Prescott, Arizona. At Prescott College he inaugurated a program of liberal studies in science and technology. He received an M.Sc. in history of technology from the University of London in 1972. Upon completion of the Skylab history, he worked for an energy consultant firm in Houston and was contracted by to NASA to write this history of Apollo's lunar exploration missions. [Derived from The Authors section of Living and Working in Space.] When the crew of Apollo 11 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969, Americans hailed the successful completion of the most complex technological undertaking of the 20th century: landing humans on the moon and returning them safely to earth. This document records the engineering & scientific accomplishments of the people who made lunar exploration possible. It shows how scientists and engineers worked out their differences and conducted a program that was a major contribution to science as well as a stunning engineering accomplishment. The purpose of this book is only partly to record the engineering and scientific accomplishments of the men and women who made it possible for a human to step away from his home planet for the first time. When scientific requirements began to be imposed on manned space flight operations, hardly any aspect was unaffected. The choice of landing sites, the amount of scientific equipment that could be carried, and the weight of lunar material that could be brought back all depended on the capabilities of the spacecraft and mission operations. These considerations limited the earliest missions and constituted the challenge of the later ones.…