Where else could one read about Gentle Bess , the pig McDonnell used to test the Mercury spacecraft landing impact. It s possible by reading this volume to trace the development and later rejection of the paraglider allowing for a ground landing. Also of interest are early proposals and designs for a lunar lander to be used with the Gemini spacecraft. This set is quite comprehensive and difficult to obtain. Of these four books, Volume 4 is typically the most sought after because it includes the Apollo 204 fire and all of the manned flights.
All volumes contain excellent illustrations and interesting details of the flights.
For example, these are a particularly good resource for those trying to track the use of Apollo boilerplate spacecraft used in tests. Newkirk, Ertel and Brooks compiled this 458-page book that treats the four Skylab flights as well as development. To this date, no chronology per se has been published for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project or for the Space Shuttle in this series. They contain a great deal of information, are indexed, but typically include no illustrations. These are useful in examining the chronological context in which events occurred or decisions were made.