Apollo 12: The Nasa Mission Reports, Volume 2

Apollo 12: The NASA Mission Reports, Volume 2 is the 2000 Apogee Books volume that gathers NASA primary-source documentation on the second crewed lunar landing (Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, Richard Gordon, November 1969). The volume is part of Robert Godwin's long-running NASA Mission Reports series, which has now covered every major U. S. crewed spaceflight from Mercury through ISS.

Godwin's editorial method is to gather the original NASA technical documents (pre-mission planning, in-flight transcripts, post-mission technical debriefs, scientific reports) and publish them with minimal editorial intrusion. The result is a primary-source compilation that is dense in a way no narrative history can be. For Apollo 12 specifically, the volume includes the previously hard-to-access Lightning Strike Incident technical report, the Lunar Module landing-zone selection rationale, and the full Surveyor 3 sample-return analysis.

Recommended for serious students of the U. S. crewed space program, for engineering historians, and for readers of books like Apollo 12: The NASA Mission Reports in the primary-source space documentation tradition. Five stars and an essential reference for any serious Apollo bookshelf.