The Apollo History Foundation

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Board of Directors
Walt Cunningham
John P. Healy
John R. (Jack) Garman
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Editors
Ron Burkey
Fabrizio Bernardini

Archivist
Marilyn Chang

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What is the Apollo History Foundation?

The Apollo History Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the legacy of the Apollo Program by preserving the documentation of the program and making it permanently available for online public viewing.  Three basically different methods for accumulating this documentation are pursued:
    1. Apollo Program documentation already available online but spread across many diverse websites is aggregated into a single convenient library.
    2. Apollo Program documentation locked up as physical documents in museums or public archives is digitized.
    3. Apollo Program documentation kept as physical souvenirs by collectors or original Apollo Program personnel is digitized.

Does the Foundation Have a Special Emphasis?

Any documentation from the Apollo Program is of interest and will be accepted for inclusion in the project, as well as any documentation from the Mercury or Gemini Programs.  However, because of the vast amount of such documentation available and because resources are always finite, special emphasis is placed on technical documentation, and specifically on documentation that would assist in the following:
  • Reconstructing working Apollo spacecraft.
  • Computer simulation of Apollo spacecraft.
  • Flying Apollo missions using reconstructed or simulated spacecraft.
Additionally, the Foundation may provide open-source software for the purpose of providing computer simulations of Apollo spacecraft or portions of Apollo spacecraft.

Our Library


Click here to enter our online library


The Foundation does not have the resources to physically warehouse the enormous quantity of documentation associated with the Apollo Project.  Physical warehousing is properly done by museums or other repositories such as the National Archives.

Instead, the Foundation digitizes physical Apollo documents and then the physical copies are returned to their owners.  In some cases, arrangements can be made to digitize documentation at owner sites so that owners can retain physical possession of their documents at all times; this is generally done only when the amount of documentation is very large or it is of very great importance.  Submissions of digital copies made by document owners are also accepted.  (Please refer to our document-preparation guidelines.) 

If owners so wish, we can provide advice or contacts for transferring their documents to museums or to the National Archives.

A Special Plea!
If you are the owner of any Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo Program documentation, and are considering disposing of it—by selling it, sending it to a museum, or simply by throwing it away—please consider providing a digital copy to the Foundation first.  You should realize in particular that documents archived in museums cannot usually be reproduced or internally inspected by the general public, so once a document is in a museum its contents effectively become secret.

Whenever legally possible, the documentation we have collected is available freely online.  In many cases, the online library contains a reduced-quality form of higher-resolution digital documents that can be made available to historical researchers; contact us directly if you are a researcher with such a need.  Where possible, the Foundation also retains provenance information that may be useful to researchers but that is not appropriately displayed online.

Related Online Resources



Last updated 2009-05-11 by Ron Burkey