[.ca] Friendship 7: The NASA Mission Reports: Apogee Books ... (ISBN 1896522602)

fantastic:
The book and CD are fantastic, especially at such a modest price. The CD worked for me without any hassle at all (I have a fairly recent Win98 SE installation, with nothing fancy.) The 60 minutes of mpeg on the CD are worth the price, alone. Reading Glen's mission report was really fascinating -- I've never seen that before. I'd have expected something a lot more formal and stilted, but he's always been a nice straight guy.

What an era!:
As I mentioned in my review of the Apollo 11 book in this series, I bought this for the CD-ROM. The video documentary is excellent. It even features footage of the old tracking stations at Muchea and Woomera in Australia. This was a great moment in the 'space race' and it fascinating to flick through the drawing and plans. The debriefing is also interesting...what were those fireflys? Well worth your investment.

Key reference to a key mission:
From the climax of the manned spaceflight program I go to the beginning, and quite a change it is. The heart of this collection are a series of reports compiled about every aspect of John Glenn's brief but historic flight, covering the whole thing in excrutiating detail-after all, no one had done anything like this before. (Gene Kranz is coauthor of one of them.) It even includes a transcript of all the air-to-ground communications throughout the entire mission, not something that could be done very easily for Apollo. Another key reference book for the true spaceophile.

Excellent in-depth look at first US orbital mission:
If you're a space-junkie, you will definitely want this book. Included are in-depth technical drawings, the complete ground-to-space communciations log of the mission, lots of great color photos, plus a CD-ROM with official NASA video of the Friendship 7 flight. Find out what made John Glenn such an enduring icon of this century. A wonderful glimpse into the early days of the space race.