Splashdown: NASA, The Navy, & Space Flight Recovery Review

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(More customer reviews)First, let me state that I was very disappointed to see a reader render such a terrible review for a terrific book. While I admit that the book is not what I would consider as an academic or scholarly researched reference, it is an impressive work by a individual who played a key role in communicating this history to the world during the Apollo era. I can't fathom giving a 1-star rating to such an excellent work.
Don Blair was aboard the recovery ships and witnessed first-hand the recovery process. He had numerous interactions with key personnel responsible for the recoveries and broadcast 5 splashdowns. His book is really a personal memoir of his experiences, with wonderful personal photos, documents that include ship menus, and numerous other interesting artifacts. There are numerous rare personal photos including Neil Armstrong inside the MQF playing a ukulele following their historic mission. In addition, it is the first time a photo has ever been published of the prime UDT recovery team of Apollo 11 (UDT-11 and UDT-12). He also showcases numerous personnel often overlooked in the more commercial books on the Apollo Program. I would almost liken his book to browsing through a personal scrap book of photos, news clippings, and other memorabilia.
Don's book fills a historical gap too often passed over in a variety of books chronicling the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo missions. I think it is an excellent book and consider it required reading for those conducting a serious study of the history of manned spaceflight. I believe that most historians will agree that Don's book has a permanent place on the Apollo bookshelf.


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This is the first-ever publication detailing the Navy's role in manned spacecraft recovery from 1961 to 1975, from Alan Shepherd's initial suborbital mission to the Apollo-Soyuz flight, which inaugurated the first space collaboration between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.Splashdown: NASA, the Navy, & Space Flight Recovery takes the reader through a detailed explanation of how recovery forces on land, sea, and in the air were deployed across the globe to be trained for any and all emergencies. This book gives concise histories of all prime recovery ships as well as back-up ships in manned and unmanned missions, with every ship's history followed by a retelling of the space missions themselves. The Navy's ships, men, and aircraft stepped in time and time again to play their vital role in the space program and returned to their regular assignments and deployments with little or no fanfare. Now their side of the story is told.

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Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman Review

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(More customer reviews)To anyone but a true student of spaceflight history, this might be regarded as a superb biography of an extraordinary man, and it certainly comes very close. Neal Thompson has a punchy, smooth-running style, which obviously reflects his lengthy career as a professional journalist, but just like a journalist it seems he kept his manuscript to himself and well under wraps, and I believe this has proved a sad downfall for an otherwise excellent book. People who know their spaceflight stuff are thick on the ground, but it is very obvious that no one was consulted in order to simply verify the so-called facts about Shepard's NASA career in this book. There are so many elementary errors inherent in this part of the story that it must call into question the reliability of other areas such as his military service, and he deserves better.
The author's descriptions of early spacecraft are incorrect; so too his explanations of the dynamics of space flight and the space environment. I know helicopter pilot Jim Lewis well enough to say that he would be absolutely furious with Thompson's baseless assumption that Gus Grissom blamed Lewis for nearly letting him drown after the hatch blew on his spacecraft. Quite the contrary - Lewis was elsewhere making a valiant but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to save Liberty Bell 7. Any fundamental study of this dramatic event would reveal that Lewis's helicopter did not in fact retrieve Grissom as stated in the book, and his was not the only helicopter on the scene - there were actually three involved. I also feel that far more effort should have been made to research the Mercury flight of Scott Carpenter, rather than reiterating bitter and biased recollections dominating Chris Kraft's account of this flight in his own book. Carpenter successfully brought home a flawed, badly malfunctioning spacecraft, but where is this story? It seems a much-misrepresented confrontation between two personalities is a better scenario to present than the program-saving heroics and expertise of a gentle, courageous astronaut.
The author says he elicited the help of Alan Shepard's family in writing this book, and while I do not doubt the veracity of this statement, I wonder if they feel betrayed by many of the vapid sex "revelations" he felt obliged to relate, which only serve to make this book a poor man's "Right Stuff." I, for one, did not care to know the intimate details of Alan and Louise Shepard's first night together as man and wife. This was just guesswork, voyeuristic journalism at its most revolting, and has no place in such a serious biography. It would also, I am sure, have proved very distressing to the daughters, and such odious reporting is precisely why Shepard would not divulge his life story before he died, and why family members have never cooperated with journalists or biographers before now - and probably never will again. The author also rebuts the whole Shepard/Glenn conflict matrix he carefully makes throughout the book by saying that Shepard was panicked into seeking Glenn's counsel on a delicate matter. This goes absolutely against the grain of both personalities, as pointed out numerous times in his own book. Research and sources please, Mr. Author, not the presentation of presumptions as facts based simply on third-party and questionable hearsay.
My sincere wish is that the author had just allowed someone with a solid knowledge of spaceflight dynamics and history to read the text before he rushed this book into print, because the presence of numerous errors and typos only serves to diminish the full impact of what might have been a truly good biography.
An Australian called Clive James once penned a great book called "Unreliable Memoirs," and I'm afraid this is an alternate title I would have to apply to this book. Nevertheless, it still merits 4 out of 5 for readability, and for finally bringing us the incredible (albeit author-flawed) story of America's first man in space. We can only hope that a corrective rewrite is in the offing. Then, I'm sure, I can probably add that fifth star to the overall rating.

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