United States Manned Space Program Manuals Collection [Donald Thompson]

Scope and Contents

This collection consists of 22 cubic feet of manned space manuals from the Gemini, Apollo and Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) programs. The collection consists of reports, manuals and working papers, including mission reports, flight crew logs, and technical and crew debriefings.

Biographical / Historical

Donald B. Thompson was employed in the Downey, California, Project Integration Office of North American Rockwell from 1962 until his retirement in 1994. As Thompson's office monitored the testing and mission activities of most boilerplate, prototype and flown spacecraft, they maintained a large collection of NASA and company documents relating to all North American contracts with NASA, especially the Apollo, Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) programs. Thompson later removed these documents from the Downey plant to preserve them for posterity as they were scheduled for destruction. The documents were later returned to North American Rockwell, where they were gone through to remove company-sensitive material and then forwarded to Johnson Space Center for further review before being donated to the National Air and Space Museum.