[.ca] Space Shuttle STS 1 - 5: The NASA Mission Reports: ... (ISBN 1896522696)

Space Shuttle Sts 1 - 5:
Editor and compiler Godwin continues with his sequence of collected material from NASA archives, presenting details related to the flights of the first five space shuttles, including their approach and landing tests. Material regarding each flight includes a press kit, a pre-flight operations report, and a postflight operations report. There is a postmission medical report for the first three flights, and for the first flight, there is a long, detailed, and illuminating 94-page technical crew debriefing. Also included are news releases, a short introduction to the history behind the space shuttle, and a short but good chronology of events connected to the flights. The details of each flight include a mission description and objectives, the experiments performed during the flight, details of the missions and the astronauts involved, as well as details of the orbit, food, and human elements of space flight. There are eight pages of color photographs. Illustrations are sometimes small or hard to read. Recommended as a good summary of the beginnings of the nation's long series of shuttle flights and early lessons learned.

Space Shuttle STS Flights 1-5.:
First of all let's take a look at the book without opening it. This time the background of the cover is light green. I like the choise of colour. It really looks good, framing the wonderful STS liftoff-photo as it does. Absolutely satisfying. And one more thing... How could we ever travel in space, if all the beautiful colours existing in our world would be an obstacle? Now let's open the book! Here you can find lots of interesting documents about the first five Shuttle flights from the NASA archives, such as: Press Kits, Pre Flight Mission Operation Reports, Post Flight Mission Operation Reports, Technical Crew Debriefings, Medical Reports, many small bw-pictures that makes me happy and eight pages of wonderful colour photos. I really like to read the Press Kits and the Technical Crew Debriefings. I allways start with them and then I go for the rest of the documents. The included CD-Rom features some highly enjoyable NASA-footage. The Post Flight Press Conference-videos are outstanding. And there is even another book about the Shuttle - NSTS 1988 News Reference Manual Volume 1 & 2. It's all there for you and me and anyone who takes an interest in space... Please carry on like this mr Godwin and I will go all the way to any star in universe as long as I've got your NASA MISSION REPORTS -series as my companion.

Space Shuttle STS Flights 1-5 The NASA Mission Reports:
Having read several of Mr Godwin's other NASA mission reports on the space program, I find this is another welcome book to the collection. The fact that there is a lot of information in this one book is a great asset for a 'armchair astronaut' like myself. The CDROM in this book (like the others, check out Apollo 11 vol 1 & 2) is worth the cost of the book. They are also a great teaching aide. I highly recommend this book to Student, Teacher and Space enthusiast.

Good but disappointing...:
Having read most if not all of Robert Godwin's other fine compendiums on the different manned spaceflights, I was a bit disappointed that this one wasn't up to the same standard. There was considerable coverage of STS-1 (which I would have expected), but the others did not have mission debriefings. And the CD was not as complete nore does it work at all well on a Macintosh because of the windows 8 character file naming issues. In summary, I think it could have been done better... it seemed to be rushed out the door.

A Good Addition to the Series:
This book, released to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the first space shuttle launch, contains a great deal of information about the development test flights of the space shuttle and its first operational (non-test) flight. While some readers may not find this book as interesting as the Apollo Mission Reports that have been already been released by Robert Godwin and Apogee books, it does contain a lot of information about the shuttle, its crews and its payloads. The book also contains a lot of nice figures and photographs, especially on the first flight, as well as a CD that contains 700 color photographs and 2 1/2 hours of crew press conferences. The book opens with the Approach and Landing Tests (ALT), which were conducted approximately 4 1/2 years before the first launch of the space shuttle, and provides some really interesting information about flying piggybacked airplanes. This was and is the method used to transport the space shuttle orbiter after launch. The next section of the book, which takes up about 40% of the book, covers the first flight of the shuttle. The rest of the book covers the three remaining test flights and the first operational shuttle flight, which had a crew of four. Even though I work at the Johnson Space Center and have participated in some form or another in many shuttle launches, I found many parts of the book very interesting and informative. For example, it was interesting to see that George Abbey, the future administrator of the Johnson Space Center, dominated the questioning of the first crew's debriefing. There is also a lot of material on the various abort scenarios, which are absent in the press kits, which are released for the current missions. For me, one of the most interesting parts of the book was the charts that showed the crewmember's mission schedules (time-lines). These same figures/charts are still used today. Some general information that might be useful. 1) These reports are just scanned-in documents from previously released NASA press kits, etc., In order to preserve the spirit of the original reports, all typographical and grammatical errors have NOT been fixed. 2) Proceeds from the book goes to "The Watch" an asteroid impact research project of the Space Frontier Foundation. In other words, Apogee Books is making very little off the sale of US government produced documents.