- Sullivan, Scott P. Virtual Apollo. Burlington,
Canada: Apogee Books, 2002. ISBN 1-896522-94-7.
- Every time I see an Apollo command module in a museum,
I find myself marveling, “How did they cram all that stuff
into that tiny little spacecraft?”. Think about it—the Apollo command
and service modules provided everything three men needed to spend two
weeks in space, navigate autonomously from the Earth to the Moon and
back, dock with other spacecraft, enter and leave lunar orbit, re-enter
the Earth's atmosphere at interplanetary speed, fly to a precision
splash-down, then serve as a boat until the Navy arrived. And if that
wasn't enough, most of the subsystems were doubly or triply redundant,
so even in the event of failure, the ship could still get the crew
back home, which it did on every single flight, even the dicey Apollo 13. And this amazing
flying machine was designed on drawing boards in an era before
computer-aided interactive solid modeling was even a concept.
Virtual Apollo uses computer aided design to help you
appreciate the work of genius which was the Apollo spacecraft. The
author created more than 200 painstakingly researched and highly
detailed solid models of the command and service modules, which were
used to produce the renderings in this book. Ever wondered how
the Block II outward-opening crew hatch worked? See pages 41–43.
How the devil did they make the docking probe removable? Pages 47–49.
Regrettably, the attention to detail which went into production of
the models and images didn't follow through to the captions and text,
which have apparently been spell-checked but never carefully proofread
and contain almost a complete set of nerdish stumbles: its/it's,
lose/loose, principal/principle, etc. Let's hope these are remedied
in a subsequent edition, and especially that the author or somebody
equally talented extends this labour of love to include the lunar
module as well.
July 2004 