Project Apollo
The last manned lunar flight ended in December of 1972. Most people today know little about the lunar missions. Fortunately, NASA documented the missions in excruciating detail. Today, there is all kinds of information available, at the click of a mouse.
Today, you can find things like voice transcripts, scans of photos, scans of mission documentation like training manuals, and more.
The best sources are usually from private individuals with a lot of help from NASA and the astronauts that flew the missions. For example, the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal covers the lunar landing portions of all of the Apollo missions that actually landed on the moon, namely Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17. It is a view of the communications transcripts, with all kinds of useful commentary sprinkled in. For example, many areas of the transcript include post mission comments from the astronauts on what some of their communications meant. They also include links to photographs taken at those particular times in the mission. This allows you to gain some context into what the pictures mean as well. Finally, there are even links to audio and video recordings of some of the portions of the mission to get an overall better sense of what is going on. It is by the far one of the best resources available, and I highly recommend it. I know I’ve spent many hours going through it.
Accompanying the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal is the Apollo Flight Journal. This is a very similar web site, but it chronicles the portions of the missions that were not involved in the actual lunar landing. It is not as complete yet as the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, but it is nonetheless a fascinating read. It covers Apollo 8, 15, and 16 so far.
Finally, I would have to recommend the Project Apollo Archive. It contains a wealth of images and videos of all parts of the Apollo program including pictures from during the missions themselves to hundreds of behind the scenes images from training and testing during the program.
UPDATE: The Apollo Flight Journal was expanded very recently to include Apollo 12. It can be found here.
Posted: June 5th, 2005 under The Space Program.
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