Frank Borman (Gemini 7, Apollo 8), Countdown: An Autobiography, with Robert J. Serling (Silver Arrow, 1988)
A long book (over 400 pages) with a lot of detail, in three parts: early life and Air Force career; astronaut years; and his time running Eastern Airlines, in which part it switches gears and becomes a business memoir, an entirely different kind of book. As a businessman, Borman alternates between chummy high-level negotations and low-level policy innovations to (he says) save time and money; as a pilot and astronaut, he's engineering-oriented without being as technical in language as other engineers among the corps. He tells of getting angry at bad management decisions and shoddy work at NASA, especially from after his time, when he feels the agency went downhill; but he's adamantly defensive of the astronauts of his day, of whom he considers only one to be deficient (he doesn't say who it is). Fairly clear writing, avoiding the technical clogging of Schirra or Young, but earnest, telling some funny stories without the sprightliness of Collins (whose book he openly admires). It's during Borman's Eastern years that his wife has her nervous breakdown after years of stress in her supporting role; he devotes a chapter to that which blames NASA doctors for not providing mental health services more than himself for being so absorbed by his dangerous work.
Jim Lovell (Gemini 7, Gemini 12, Apollo 8, Apollo 13), Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, with Jeffrey Kluger (Houghton Mifflin, 1994)
I'm not sure whether to count this as a memoir. It's written in the third person, and consists mostly of an account in almost novelistic detail of the flight of Apollo 13. Like the movie based on it, the book is only in part from Lovell's viewpoint, devoting almost as much attention to Mission Control and the backroom crisis team, so it's really less a memoir than a mission history that's co-authored by one of the astronauts. However, Lovell's role is emphasized by the presence of a number of flashbacks (and one final flash-forward) to other stages of his career - although not including either of his Gemini flights, it does tell in full the story of his getting lost while flying off an aircraft carrier that's recounted in an interview inset in the movie. The first flash, though, is to the Apollo 1 fire, giving the most detailed account I've seen of how this was experienced by the people immediately outside the spacecraft, although Lovell wasn't there.
Tom Stafford (Gemini 6, Gemini 9, Apollo 10, ASTP), We Have Capture: Tom Stafford and the Space Race, with Michael Cassutt (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002)
A low-key memoir, recounting one of the busiest of moon-era astronaut careers. Stafford, who served as chief astronaut for a spell between his third and fourth flights, is plain-spoken without any emphasis on dramatics, and is particularly lucid on his spaceflights. These are among the highlights of the book, as is the vast amount of cultural exchange and acclimation attending on the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission for which Stafford was US commander. Consequently he also intersperses the whole book with nuggets on the progress of the Soviet space program and the career of Alexei Leonov, the Soviet commander (though not as extensively as in Scott's book). Noting which astronauts Stafford knew personally before they became colleagues (as a test-pilot instructor, he'd taught a few), and explaining why he did not want Apollo 10 to attempt a Moon landing (others' memoirs claim he did want it), are also particularly interesting. Though Stafford is as plain-spoken on astronaut office politics as everything else, after his retirement, as he becomes a NASA consultant, the book becomes openly political and a little impatient with anybody who's insufficiently enthusiastic for space or not up to Stafford's exacting standards for administration.
John W. Young (Gemini 3, Gemini 10, Apollo 10, Apollo 16, STS-1, STS-9), Forever Young: A Life of Adventure in Air and Space, with James R. Hansen (UP of Florida, 2012)
Here's a real engineering account of the space program. Young is down there among the messy and niggling details, frequently saying "of course" about some mysterious abbreviation- and technical term-filled statement that the lay reader can't possibly understand. There's so much engineering here that the flights hardly stand out from the rest of Young's life story. Despite that, it's a readable memoir, both the readability and the obsession with details being characteristic of Hansen, the co-author, in his biography of Neil Armstrong, First Man (Simon & Schuster, 2005). And yes, Young reluctantly discusses the corned beef sandwich on Gemini 3, which he considers NASA made a big fuss of over nothing. With a few notable exceptions - there's a frank evaluation of the Apollo 11 crew, with whom he worked closely - there's little about personalities or astronaut politics here, until Young gets to the shuttle era. Young was the only astronaut of his seniority to stay with NASA for so long, by which time he'd ascended to the job of assigning crews to missions, and he piloted the first shuttle test flight himself. In Young's view, the shuttle was always an experimental and not an operational vehicle, and that section of the book is a blunt account of him making a nuisance of himself by firing safety memos off in all directions. In that context, Young shocks the reader by revealing that the astronaut corps was never told of the recurrent booster seal leak problem until it erupted into the Challenger disaster. Maybe if he'd known about it, Young says, he could have raised an effective fuss. He tried afterwards, as a result of which he was kicked upstairs into a less sensitive job.
(No memoirs from: Neil Armstrong (Gemini 8, Apollo 11), Pete Conrad (Gemini 5, Gemini 11, Apollo 12, Skylab), James McDivitt (Gemini 4, Apollo 9), Ed White (Gemini 4), or Elliott See (died before flight))
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