Not Worth The Read

[Marsfka]

If you are the type of reader who requires a particular level of technical accuracy, then this book is not for you. I knew nothing about 'Rocket Men' until I found it in a bargain bin and swooped on it. I started reading it and very quickly got the twitches - I have been reading about the Apollo programme long enough to know when an author is on top of his subject and it was rapidly becoming clear to me that this author was not. The errors started mounting up and the going got harder and harder for me.

In no particular order:

X-15s "aerotowed" to drop altitude (they were carried to drop altitude under the wing of a B-52), the Titan rocket powered by kerosene and LOX (it wasn't. It used Aerozine 50 - a 50/50 mix of hydrazine and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine -and nitrogen tetroxide as the oxidiser), the Lockheed U2 had a 200-foot wing span (it didn't), the first Soviet N-1 Moon rocket exploding while sitting on the pad (all four test launches blew up in flight), the Apollo Command Module was made of iron reinforced with porcelain (grr!), liquid hydrogen an *oxidiser* (it's a fuel), Neil Armstrong logged "over four thousand hours in his X-15" (in only seven flights...)

Techno-gibberish like the X-15 having "only 600,000 horsepower - one-fourth the velocity needed for orbit". What, in the names of the Lords of Kobol, does that mean? Or the Saturn 5 F-1 first stage engines "producing a thrust that was four times the speed of sound"

The five F-1 turbines consumed ten thousand pounds of fuel every second (that is just plain sloppy - each Saturn 5 first-stage F-1 engine burned nearly three tons of *propellants* (kerosene and liquid oxygen) per second). The book stated that the Saturn's main tanks held liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, but no mention of the RP1 kerosene the fuelled the first stage.

And that was only as far as page 116 - I could not bear to read any more of this slop and had to put the book aside. It is quite clear to me that the author knows nothing about his subject and appears to have done most of his research on the History Channel.

I don't burn books, but I was seriously tempted to use this one as a fire starter. In the finish, I gave it away, but warned the recipient of the bloopers. Thank the Maker for competent Apollo-programme authors like Andrew Chaikin and Murray & Cox.