The Final Journey of the Saturn V by Andrew R. Thomas and Paul N. Thomarios

Following the cancellation of Apollo 18, 19, and 20, the equipment built for these missions—including their massive Saturn V boosters—became surplus hardware. One of the rockets was placed in the parking lot of the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, serving as a photo opportunity for bused-in tourists. Left nearly unprotected in Florida’s unforgiving climate, it quickly began to deteriorate. Ostensibly, The Final Journey is the story of how, in the 1990s, that rocket was painstakingly restored to become the centerpiece of a new, multi-million dollar visitor center. This is a story that hasn’t been told before, and it seems like a great opportunity to learn more about the mighty rocket. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t live up to this promising premise.

Though the book is extremely brief—it runs to 128 pages, filling that space thanks only to an extremely large typeface—it includes surprisingly little material about the restoration of the Saturn V. About ten pages or so actually deal with this process. The rest of the book consists of generic, non-technical background information about the space program and the Saturn family of rockets. There’s nothing in these sections that can’t be found in a better, more thorough form elsewhere. And here, the arrangement of the information is frequently jumbled. Successive sections jump forward and backward in time for no apparent narrative reason. To make things worse, there were numerous errors, both with facts and with copy editing. Given that this book was published by a university press, I had higher hopes for at least the quality of its presentation.

All that said, the short sections of material that cover the Saturn V restoration process are very interesting, and they aren’t found elsewhere in the Apollo literature. As the leader of the project to restore the rocket, Thomarios contributes worthwhile information and anecdotes (and many terrific photos of that project) that at least partially salvage the book. It’s just a shame there’s so little of that material here. Cut down dramatically, The Final Journey of the Saturn V might have made for a great magazine article. But as a full-length book, it’s stretched far too thin.