Special Circumstances

Lost Moon by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger

Pure lunacy. The story of getting a crippled spacecraft headed for the moon back to earth safely.

Reading about the Apollo 13 disaster in this book strangely had the opposite effect to what I was expecting. The story is not about heroism or miracles but rather about training, design and expertise which surprisingly turns out to be much more interesting.

This is a must-read for anyone interested in space travel since few other books describe it in such fascinating detail. Even though Jim Lovell is one of the authors, the presentation is in the third person since there are many viewpoints from which the story had to be told. So it is less of a memoir and more of an honest journal of the events (although there is a great story about Lovell in his early days trying to dead-reckon his way at night without instrumentation onto the deck of a carrier). In fact, the astronauts were (understandably) petulant during most of the trip home often losing their patience with the ground crew. Also interesting is the fact that amateur astronomers would try and pin-point the location of the Apollo spacecraft by trying to locate condensed urine streams.

Of course, most people since the release of the movie about Apollo 13 will not consider reading the book. The movie does help in visualising many details about the spacecraft, but the details in the book were not reflected in the movie. Also, there were many places where the movie where the facts were distorted, I assume, for dramatic effect. Ken Mattingly, the astronaut who was not allowed to fly due to a predicted attack of the measles is given a much larger role in the movie at the expense of the real people (John Aaron and Arnie Aldrich) who solved the problem of powering up the command module.

%T Lost Moon
%T :The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13
%A Jim Lovell 
%A Jeffrey Kluger
%I Houghton Mifflin and Company
%D 1994
%G ISBN: 0395670292
%P 378
%K science, spaceflight

Review written: 1999/07/20