I read a pre-release copy and loved it! Apollo Murders is an alternate history of Apollo 18, written by an incredible polymathic astronaut — so it has the engineering detail of The Martian set in the Apollo era, minus the mistakes. It is much more compelling than the alternative Apollo history seen in Apple TV’s For All Mankind.
As an Apollo space artifact collector, I was also delighted to see 16 of these historic treasures reborn in an action thriller, written by my favorite astronaut no less!
For example, one of the characters in the book, Vladimir Chelomei at the OKB-52 design bureau, promoted Almaz as a response to the US Air Force’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) project. MOL had been widely publicized in the US press in the early 1960s, which provided Chelomei plenty of material to use to lobby for a Soviet military space station. I have the Almaz sighting visor for spying on the U.S. It was real, and it really did fire a machine gun in space taking out a target satellite.
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