MISSION CONTROL, THIS IS APOLLO

Based on interviews with 28 astronauts, this history of the Apollo program masterfully describes the missions and personalizes them with astronauts’ own words. Chaikin starts with a brief overview of its origins and of the Mercury and Gemini missions. He then highlights the significance of each manned Apollo mission in chronological chapters, with full-page sidebars on such topics as food, TV coverage, space sickness and going to the bathroom in space. The handsome design has many photographs, diagrams of the rockets and modules and more than 30 well-reproduced paintings by Apollo 12 astronaut Bean. Often using pastels instead of the moon’s grays, his very tactile style includes footprints from his lunar boots embedded in the most recent paintings, a technique described in an appendix. The large pictures of moonscapes, astronauts in spacesuits and equipment, which have similar styles and palettes, get repetitive but benefit from the long captions in which Bean adds personal details and reflects on his role as an artist. (authors’ note, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 10 & up)