- Godwin, Robert ed. Freedom 7: The NASA Mission
Reports. Burlington, Ontario, Canada: Apogee Books,
2000. ISBN 1-896522-80-7.
-
This volume in the superb Apogee NASA Mission Reports
series covers Alan Shepard's May 5th, 1961 suborbital flight in
Freedom 7, the first U.S. manned space flight.
Included are the press kit for the mission, complete transcripts
of the post-flight debriefings and in-flight communications, and
proceedings of a conference held in June 1961 to report
mission results. In addition, the original 1958 request for astronaut
volunteers (before it was decided that only military test pilots
need apply) is reproduced, along with the press conference
introducing the Mercury astronauts, which Tom Wolfe
so vividly (and accurately) described in
The Right Stuff. A bonus
CD-ROM includes the complete in-flight films of the instrument
panel and astronaut, a 30 minute NASA documentary about the flight,
and the complete NASA official history of Project Mercury,
This
New Ocean, as a PDF document. There are few if any errors in
the transcriptions of the documents. The caption for
the photograph of Freedom 7 on the second page
of colour plates makes the common error of describing its heat shield
as “ablative fiberglass”. In fact, as stated on page 145, suborbital
missions used a beryllium heat sink; only orbital capsules
were equipped with the ablative shield.
December 2004 