Chaikin is terrific on the astronauts. Kranz is staring at me from my bookshelf, but I've not yet opted to read him. Let me add 'Apollo' by Murray and Cox to your list. It's focused on the Apollo engineers and managers, including great discussions of how they re-engineered things after Apollo 1, and of the behind-the-scenes work on Apollo 13, as well as many other elements.
The Kranz book is really great. The LEM had its problems, too :)
Re:Apollo 1
by vermontdevil on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @01:52PM
(#13484593)
Even though it had problems, the engine design was incorporated into Merlin engines under SpaceX later on.
Apollo technology - the gift that keeps on giving.
Re:Apollo 1
by dr_zoidberg on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @09:53AM
(#13481802)
The testimony is "barely searchable", the text seems to have been already OCRed in someway, but it's disconnected at parts (so a full search may fail, whereas a partial might succeed). It'd then be a problem of parsing and joining the parts in a coherent way... which may not be an easier problem than just re-OCRing everything.
Thanks. I can't find his "failure of imagination" response (I searched for "imag"). I think these transcripts may not be complete.
Re:Apollo 1
by dr_zoidberg on Thursday January 26, 2017 @11:07AM
(#13492472)
Mmmm... I remember the scene in From The Earth to The Moon, if it was scripted "historically" then that might give a bit of context as to the previous parts of the testimony, right before the quote?
Edit: I did some more searching, and the best I've found is something that confirms your suspicions[0]: that the records are more extensive, and the PDFs available don't cover all of his testimony.
[0] http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum29/HTML/000779.html
"Apollo 1-Challenger-Columbia Lessons Learned" - https://nsc.nasa.gov/sfcs/systemfailurecasestudyfile/downloa...
I also found transcripts of his testimony, but they aren't searchable - http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/Apollo204/inv.html
(I'll have to OCR the pdfs. I started to read the first one and it's fairly interesting.)
There's two books I always recommend re: Apollo:
1) A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, by Andrew Chaikin.
2) Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond, by Gene Kranz.