Birthday Book Bonanza

 

My recent birthday meant it was an opportunity to add to my space library, by trawling the second hand book market with a bit of disposable income in hand. Ebay being my first and most obvious point of call, I found a few gems for a handful of shekels here and there.

First up was John Richardson and Chesley Bonestell's 1965 book 'Mars'.  As it was published prior to any real mapping or close up examination of the red planet, it is largely speculative in its approach. Quite text heavy, it is however, graced with a series of quite beautiful colour plates by the master of space art, Chesley Bonestell. Bonestell's depictions of the planets are amazingly photorealistic and he was used as art director on the early film 'Destination Moon'. Its a large format book and the illustrations of early plans for a nuclear rocket to Mars are quite exquisite.

To compliment Richardsons romantic and imaginative book, I picked up Apogee Books 'Mars: NASA Mission Reports', which collects together all the press material and reports of the various US probes from the first Mariner mission through to Pathfinder. An accompanying CD also includes stills and movies to add to the printed data. Wheareas the earlier Mars volume only hints at detail, Apogee's book is heavy with technical data.

Back to the sixties now, with 'The How and Why book of Planets and Interplanetary Travel'. This slim series of books were a major staple of my childhood, with 'Dinosaurs' and 'Flight' being favourites. For some reason, I never got the space issue at the time and I bought a copy about 12 years ago due to the connection with Sword and Spacex. However, the copy I found was a 1976 reprint, which substituted all the more interesting parts for apollo coverage. So I was very pleased to find an original 1967 copy, which included the all important section which detailed the Moon Prospector.

A small panel in the book shows the proposed sequence of moon exploration probes, which would begin with the Ranger series with a fly by and crash landing probe, move on to Surveyor (shown in the 1967 version as a very different vehicle to the final one) which would perform a soft landing on the lunar surface and ultimately, the Prospector - which proposed a roving vehicle capable of exploring the surface.

As the race to land on the moon hotted up and costs began to soar, Prospector was shelved in favour of the more cost effective Lunar Orbiter series, which were used to identify a landing site for the Apollo missions.

The 67 issue also includes some great futuristic craft, such as the glider equipped moon rocket and 'mexican hat' space station, which appeared as an AMT kit in the Star Trek series as Station K-7.

Finally, from Amazon, a curiosity. A large, lavish tome to coincide with an exhibition at the Antwerp Museum of Photography in 2019.

'Moon' is primarily an art book, I bought the dutch text version for a third of the price of the english one and it worked out as quite a bargain. Rather than being an examination of photographs of the moon itself, it is rather an celebration of the moon in cultural references.

There are some lengthy essays included, which I am unable to read directly, but the big draw for me is the imagery. It ranges from the early imaginative work of George Melie and his visions on film of a trip to the moon with comic effect, into the early Nasa plans to reach the moon and the work of Von Braun and the vision of Kennedy in selling the idea to the american public.

It fast forwards slightly then to show the families of the US astronauts and the psychological impact of man visiting another world.

By contrast to the red, white and blue tickertaped US missions, it also shows the Soviet approach to space travel and includes more harrowing imagery of airbrushed photographs removing failed cosmonauts from official records in the pre-perestroika Soviet republic. Possibly the most powerful image is the line of Kremlin officials viewing the charred remains of Vladimir Komarov after the ill fated crash of the early Soyuz craft. Komarov reportedly knew full well that the mission would be disastrous, due to failings with the spacecraft, but stepped up to the role to prevent his friend and fellow Cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin making the flight. Due to hasty preparations and almost none-existant flight checks, the Soyuz module began to fail almost before reaching orbit and Komarov was allowed to bravely wish his wife a final farewell from space. As expected the problems mounted and as the module attempted to re-enter the atmosphere, out of control, the landing chute failed to deploy, and Komarov's capsule crashed to earth at over 500 mph. At his request, his remains were displayed in the Kremlin in an open casket.

Moon is a very interesting book, even without the benefit of the text and essays, the images speak for themselves. There are rare shots from the US space programme, early depictions of french lunar atlases, copies of imagery taken by early lunar probes and some wonderful artistic interpretations of events connected to the moon. 

So all in all, a great selection of books to pad out my space library and to keep me busy on the long winter nights of lockdown!