Moonshots and Snapshots of Project Apollo [antikvár]

Introduction John Bisney This book, which begins in 1967, chronicles the Apollo program and its two follow-ons, Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (AST?). It is the companion volume to Spaceshots and Snapshots of Projects Mercury and Gemini. We again drew from among the more rarely seen manned spaceflight images to take you to the moon and on months-long odysseys above Earth, wrapping up with the first international manned flight in 1975. The most important outside source for this project was our friend, French photojournalist Jacques Tiziou. I first met Jacques while covering Space Shuttle missions, and I eventually mentioned to J. L. that Jacques had been a reporter and photographer during Apollo. The two soon met; J. L. was thrilled to have hit such a gold mine. Jacques still had most of his Apollo photos as beautiful 35mm color slides stored in his basement, unseen for decades. He has generously given us permission to share some of his unpublished photos, which often provide a more artistic look than NASA's somewhat clinical photographs do. That said, government "shooters" could also capture the unusual angle or moment, and all of our contributors could be said to have taken a fair number of "snapshots" during their professional duties. We also tried to provide a more complete understanding of all the events and processes before and after the missions than existing space-photo books have done. J. L sent the photos to me in sequence, presenting the missions in almost storyboard fashion. I then chose those I felt had exceptional visual, engineering, or human-interest appeal. We occasionally switched out a photo to maintain the flight's narrative, or in a few instances, J. L. came up with a higher-quality or more unusual image to substitute. For the Apollo program, one group of advisors deserves special mention: the astronauts themselves. Thanks to J. L.'s reputation and to our mutual involvement in the space-history community, we have been honored to become friends with a number of the pioneering men whose exploits we illustrate. Their input has been invaluable and has helped to ensure the accuracy of this work. I would especially like to thank Walt Cunningham, Alan Bean, and Ed Gibson for their generous help. A word about distances—we used statute (land-based) miles for distances