Blast off to the moon - review
UCLAN publishing are new, but they already have won an award and run the biggest YA festival in the NW ever, they've published some superb books, they allow students to be part of a publishing house and are destined to be seen and read and remembered akin to the day man landed on the moon, coincidental my 3rd birthday and my earliest ever memory.
This book is a real collaboration, they have been ever so lucky to have worked with the British Interplanetary Society which is the World's longest established body connected to Space exploration started in 1933!
We find out so much, not just about the events we feel we know, but more so about what it all meant behind those scenes, simple but very interesting everyday history and insight into just how groundbreaking and technical and also so tense this all was.
Weird little things too, all 3 astronauts were born in the same year and weighed exactly the same weight! 11st 11lbs!
Two of them were 5 ft 11 and the other 5 ft 10.
The stunning way this book is produced in a throwback style of the time and how transcripts would have looked is a great tool.
It gives enough insight into the events and feelings of those taking part, it also allows us to think about the scale and scope of this huge experiment, bear in mind it took 8 years to make this event happen, but that was after 30 odd years of NASA and let us not forget Sputnik and Vostock from the Russians... They perhaps did more earlier, but really it was the ability of NASA and the bravery of ordinary men to take us to where no man had ever been able to go before.
The science is phenomenal, we simply cannot comprehend the temperatures, the gravity issues the need for exact ability to co-ordinate docking and landing and many other feats accomplished by these brave men. They spent nearly 3 years training for something that they may well have never come back from, that says such a lot. In today's terms they only earned £200,000 a year which really isn't a lot, a week playing football for Barcelona maybe? Hmmmm
The clever thing about this book is you can read it all, or bits of it in isolation, I'd recommend time on Youtube too. There are still some who doubt this ever happened, really? You cannot con over 500 Million TV watchers and hide a conspiracy of a magnitude of this scale for 50 years, it just cannot be done. Not whilst so much was documented live and by so many people, think about all the families and friends and the cost of setting up NASA, why or how would that make sense to be anything other than one or possibly the greatest events in mankind's history. For just 2 and a half hours on the moon would you really make it up? Then replicate it 6 more times!
We find out all about diet, toilets and much more, it's fascinating stuff, wet burps and all. One day I really hope some of us can go to the moon and look down and smile, it's a shame it's seen as a race and costs so much!
Helen Sharman wrote a wonderful forward to this book and it comes out next week on 3rd June then there is a full tour to promote it, luckily I'm selling it that week and can take orders if you drop me an email to tonythebook@live.co.uk and we can sort your copy out and post for £8 inc delivery...
I'd recommend a whizz to www.bis-space.com too!
This book is a real collaboration, they have been ever so lucky to have worked with the British Interplanetary Society which is the World's longest established body connected to Space exploration started in 1933!
We find out so much, not just about the events we feel we know, but more so about what it all meant behind those scenes, simple but very interesting everyday history and insight into just how groundbreaking and technical and also so tense this all was.
Weird little things too, all 3 astronauts were born in the same year and weighed exactly the same weight! 11st 11lbs!
Two of them were 5 ft 11 and the other 5 ft 10.
The stunning way this book is produced in a throwback style of the time and how transcripts would have looked is a great tool.
It gives enough insight into the events and feelings of those taking part, it also allows us to think about the scale and scope of this huge experiment, bear in mind it took 8 years to make this event happen, but that was after 30 odd years of NASA and let us not forget Sputnik and Vostock from the Russians... They perhaps did more earlier, but really it was the ability of NASA and the bravery of ordinary men to take us to where no man had ever been able to go before.
The science is phenomenal, we simply cannot comprehend the temperatures, the gravity issues the need for exact ability to co-ordinate docking and landing and many other feats accomplished by these brave men. They spent nearly 3 years training for something that they may well have never come back from, that says such a lot. In today's terms they only earned £200,000 a year which really isn't a lot, a week playing football for Barcelona maybe? Hmmmm
The clever thing about this book is you can read it all, or bits of it in isolation, I'd recommend time on Youtube too. There are still some who doubt this ever happened, really? You cannot con over 500 Million TV watchers and hide a conspiracy of a magnitude of this scale for 50 years, it just cannot be done. Not whilst so much was documented live and by so many people, think about all the families and friends and the cost of setting up NASA, why or how would that make sense to be anything other than one or possibly the greatest events in mankind's history. For just 2 and a half hours on the moon would you really make it up? Then replicate it 6 more times!
We find out all about diet, toilets and much more, it's fascinating stuff, wet burps and all. One day I really hope some of us can go to the moon and look down and smile, it's a shame it's seen as a race and costs so much!
Helen Sharman wrote a wonderful forward to this book and it comes out next week on 3rd June then there is a full tour to promote it, luckily I'm selling it that week and can take orders if you drop me an email to tonythebook@live.co.uk and we can sort your copy out and post for £8 inc delivery...
I'd recommend a whizz to www.bis-space.com too!