Apollo Memories
CG Publishing, 2020, 144 pp., Paperback. $26.95. www.cgpublishing.com
Apollo Memories is the personal memoir of Dr. W. David Carrier, one of the scientists who prepared the Apollo astronauts to do science on another world. Carrier was responsible for the development and performance of lunar soil experiments in support of the Apollo program at the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. His activities included astronaut training, design of lunar surface experiments, and laboratory testing of returned lunar soil. It was Carrier who told Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin how deep they were going to sink into the lunar surface. He was a member of the science support team in Mission Control and a member of the Lunar Sample Preliminary Examination Team in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory during each of the Apollo missions. In this book, using his own words and some of the most famous photographs ever taken, Carrier takes the reader back to the heady days of the first manned lunar explorations and puts the science into context. Although 40,000 people worked on the Apollo program, only a select few were given the opportunity to directly work with the astronauts to prepare them for humankind’s greatest adventure. Carrier earned that opportunity. The book includes images in color and some anaglyphs, explained by the man who asked them to be taken, and comes with red/blue glasses.