Cooper's telling of the Apollo THIRTEEN mission was originally published in New Yorker Magazine, where he was a staff writer, and is now an e-book.

For all the science and human achievement which went into the launch, recovery from near-disaster and return of this space mission, the reader is immediately struck by the contrast between equipment and testing standards of 1970 and of this time. We first notice this when observers of the travelling rocket, at Houston, see a white blip appear on their monitoring TV screen but dismiss it - the screen "had been flickering and blipping badly". They had seen half of the mission's liquid oxygen spilling out into space and forming a huge bubble which reflected sunlight, but nobody knew.

The courageous, highly trained Apollo Thirteen astronauts were totally dependent on their vessel. Captain Lovell was passing the time during the several-day long journey by filming life inside the capsule so that NASA could put out an educational programme. He had circled the moon on Apollo 8 and this time expected to land. Haise was the lunar module pilot and Swigert, the standby who joined the team when another astronaut was exposed to German measles, was the command module pilot.

Cooper describes the technical construction of the oxygen tanks and other systems which supported life and propulsion. The detail is necessary to understand how a temperature gauge that did not register above eighty-five degrees (I'm guessing Fahrenheit) contributed to the safety shutoff overheating and failing without anyone knowing. Hot wires burned off their coverings and the exposed wires sparked in the oxygen tank, causing what most of us call an explosion but the NASA engineers like to refer to as a 'tank failure'. As a vacuum does not transmit sound waves, the astronauts felt as much as heard the resulting vibration. They and Command immediately started to discover what the problem was, though their instrumentation could not tell them directly so they had to work through all the possibilities. The ship soon began to drop power and the astronauts were clearly in danger.

Again, we hear that the astronauts "had to riffle through twenty pounds of instruction sheets" before they found what they were looking for in a procedure manual. Today a gadget the size of a credit card would produce this information ideally sorted. NASA base was using some of the most powerful computers in the world.

Henry SF Cooper Jr. has condensed the nerve-wracking days and immense amount of teamwork into THIRTEEN. The book is heavy with initials like FIDO, LM, RETRO, GUIDO, TELMU, for teams and equipment, and combined with the constant engineering data it can feel like heavy reading at times for the average person. However at 110 pages it is not too long and the human story is always paramount. Those who have watched the Ron Howard film starring Tom Hanks and wanted to know more can immerse themselves in the technicalities, while those who want to know how it felt for these astronauts to overcome panic and keep working, and what state they were in when they returned, will focus on the men themselves. THIRTEEN will certainly be appreciated by engineers and designers, and by readers with a strong interest in the space programme.