Category: Nonfiction
Reviewed by: Douglas Graham Adler
Title: Surveyor: Lunar Exploration Program: The NASA Mission Reports
Editor: Robert Godwin
Format: Paperback
Pages:178
Publisher: Apogee Books
Date: May 2026
Retail price: $27.95 from the publisher
ISBN-13: 978-1894959650
Apogee Books, the venerable publisher of innumerable technical works on all aspects of spaceflight, has reissued its volume on Surveyor for the program’s 60th anniversary. Although forgotten by many, NASA’s Surveyor program was, nonetheless, a critical step in its efforts to land humans on the Moon. In operation from 1966 to 1968, NASA launched seven robotic Surveyor missions; five were successful. These missions were concurrent with the end of the Gemini program and the start of the Apollo program.
The Surveyor program had many goals, but the main one was to develop spacecraft that could reach the Moon and, along the way, help NASA to test and refine the hardware and techniques that would be needed to allow humans to one day land and walk on the Moon. Some of these procedures included executing midcourse correction burns, performing a soft landing, analyzing the lunar surface, and scouting for potential Apollo landing sites.
By far, the most well-known Surveyor mission was Surveyor 3, which landed in the Ocean of Storms (Oceanus Procellarum) on April 20, 1967. Surveyor 3 was the target of the Apollo 12 mission, and in November of 1969, astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean walked to Surveyor 3 after landing their lunar module Intrepid on the Moon. Conrad and Bean retrieved several parts of the probe and returned them to Earth for scientific study. Another mission, Surveyor 6, went so far as to reignite some of its engines after landing and perform a short flight of approximately 8-10 feet before soft landing on the surface again, marking the first time a spacecraft lifted off from a body other than Earth.
The book is a wonder, containing a veritable treasure trove of documents on every conceivable facet of the Surveyor program. The volume is composed of NASA technical documents that give an overview of the program and allows the reader to perform a deep dive on the Surveyor spacecraft, read details about each mission, and uncover the results of the extensive analysis of the returned Surveyor 3 parts brought back by Conrad and Bean. True to form, the book comes with a CD-ROM (yes, a CD-ROM!) that includes many documents in PDF format to further inundate the motivated reader with a plethora of technical details and analyses as well as a large number of Surveyor images of the lunar surface.
As someone who owns and has enjoyed many Apogee titles, I was particularly excited to read the volume on the Surveyor program. To me, the program, in some ways as much as Gemini, was a vital step in NASA’s efforts to reach the Moon. Overall, this contribution from Apogee Books provides readers with the dense technical material that fans of the series have come to expect. The CD-ROM, both with regard to content and its somewhat retro format, is a fun bonus that readers will enjoy as well.
© 2026 Douglas Graham Adler
