This year is the 40th anniversary of NASA’s Apollo missions to the Moon. Apollo 17 was the sixth and final moon landing by the United States and launched from the Kennedy Space Centre December 7 1972. Apollo 17 had the first scientist/astronaut to land on the moon – Harrison Schmitt.

Apollo : the epic journey to the moon / by David West Reynolds.
“Space expert Reynolds reconstructs all the key events and personalities connected to the Apollo space missions, from the experiences of the astronauts to the scientists and mission control operators who helped convert this extraordinary dream into reality. His text is accompanied by 400-plus color photographs, artwork showing the lunar explorations, and cutaway illustrations.” (Syndetics summary)

The last man on the moon : astronaut Eugene Cernan and America’s race in space / Eugene Cernan and Don Davis.
“Eugene Cernan is a unique American who came of age as an astronaut during the most exciting and dangerous decade of spaceflight. His career spanned the entire Gemini and Apollo programs, from being the first person to spacewalk all the way around our world to the moment when he left man’s last footprint on the Moon as commander of Apollo 17. Between those two historic events lay more adventures than an ordinary person could imagine as Cernan repeatedly put his life, his family and everything he held dear on the altar of an obsessive desire. Written with New York Times bestselling author Don Davis, this is the astronaut story never before told – about the fear, love and sacrifice demanded of the few men who dared to reach beyond the heavens for the biggest prize of all – the Moon.” (Syndetics summary)

Spacesuit : fashioning Apollo / Nicholas de Monchaux.
“When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: twenty-one layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. This book is the story of those spacesuits. It is a story of the Playtex Corporation’s triumph over the military-industrial complex—a victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation over cybernetics. Playtex’s spacesuit went up against hard armor-like spacesuits designed by military contractors and favored by NASA’s engineers. It was only when those suits failed—when traditional engineering firms could not integrate the body into mission requirements—that Playtex, with its intimate expertise, got the job.” (Global Books in Print)

DVDs:
James May on the moon [videorecording].
“In this BBC documentary, James May commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landings. He meets three of the men who walked on the moon, before experiencing the thrill of weightlessness, and the bone-crushing G forces of a Saturn V rocket launch. Finally, he puts on a space suit and flies to the edge of space in a U2 spy plane, where he looks down at the curvature of the earth and upwards into the black infinity of space.” (Syndetics summary)

From the Earth to the Moon [videorecording] / HBO presents a Clavius Base/Imagine Entertainment production.
“Through dramatization, this series relates the story of the conquest of the moon by the Americans, from the Mercury and Gemini projects to the legendary Apollo missions.” (Syndetics summary)

Websites:
NASA – Apollo 17
Project Apollo drawings and technical diagrams