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EDITORIAL INFORMATION

On July 20, 1969, Michael Collins's command module circled the moon while his fellow astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took mankind's first "small step" into the mystery of space. The glorious culmination of years of research, planning, and experimentation, the moonwalk marked an unforgettable milestone in one of mankind's most awesome adventures -the U.S. manned space program.

Liftoff tells for the first time the complete and spellbinding story of America's odyssey in space -from early faltering steps in 1960 to the crisis that befell NASA in 1986- in a fascinating account that could only have been written by an intimately involved participant. It is a story in which the human and technical interweave to create a portrait of NASA, its astronauts and space ventures, its designers and engineers of the machines that soared into the unknown.

(Extracted form the dust jacket).

GENERAL TABLE OF CONTENTS

-Author's Note.

-Illustrator's Note. James Dean.

-Contents.

-Acronyms and Key Terms.

-1- Apollo 11.
-2- An Elegant Solution.
-3- The Bridge.
-4- Decade's End.
-5- Life in Orbit.
-6- Wings and Wheels at Last.
-7- Ad Inexplorata.

-Glossary.

-Spaceflight Log.

-Index.

OUR REVIEW

Published in the USA by means of a collaboration between NASA and Grove Press, Liftoff has already become a true classic in the popularization of astronautics. We discover in it an astronaut, Michael Collins, who turns out to be an excellent narrator who not only gives a good account of his experiences during the incomparable mission Apollo-11 but also displays an attractive narrative style perfectly able to entrap the reader. Certainly, this one has not been the only book published by Collins in the last years, yet it is one of the most illustrative ones in his career, besides probably being the one that no true amateur should do without in their library.

Most noteworthy are the beautiful illustrations lavishly included in the book (although none of them are photographs as a matter of fact) all of them having been drawn by James Dean, thus providing the book with a special charm. Therefore, we should not look for great technical explanations, as would be expected from an astronaut who is highly specialized in what he talks about, but rather, let's enjoy a nice story, extremely well written, concise, where we will find all the basic aspects of the American manned program. Collins, in his role as a character who will enter the History books as a member of the most famous crew that inaugurated the Moon trips, has more than fulfilled his only debt to Humanity: that of making his impressions and feelings about his space missions available to anyone wishing to learn about these, something that every astronaut-navigator should some day do as well. There are so very few people who will ever get to enjoy what he and his colleagues accomplished!