TV Documentary Review: 'When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions'
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| © 2009 Discovery Networks. |
July 20, 2019 marks the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11's successful mission to fulfill the late President John F. Kennedy's famous commitment of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" before 1970. Half a century after astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the surface of Earth's nearest celestial neighbor, two generations have grown up with no direct experience of Projects Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo and have lived only peripherally aware of the now-defunct Space Shuttle and the still-active International Space Station.
And even for millions of people in the U.S. and other parts of the world, the Age of Apollo has been eclipsed by Earthbound social, cultural, and historical events that have overshadowed what is perhaps the greatest adventure that humans have taken part in – the manned exploration of space. In many Americans' minds, the images of the three-day-long rock festival at Woodstock are more vivid in the collective memory than the six Apollo missions that followed that first landing on the Moon's Sea of Tranquility.
Fortunately, NASA film crews and many others - archivists, agency historians, TV networks, and the astronauts themselves - shot thousands of hours of footage while creating a record of America's space program. Starting in the late 1950s as part of the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union (the first nation to successfully launch a satellite into orbit) and progressing into the more cooperative period ushered in by the fall of Communism in 1991, NASA sent American astronauts into space (mostly low Earth orbit), chronicling their triumphs and failures – some of which were particularly deadly and tragic.
In 2008, the year in which NASA observed the 40th Anniversary of Apollo 8 - NASA's first manned orbital mission to the Moon - cable TV's Discovery Channel aired When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions, a six-part documentary series that mixed present-day interviews with many of the NASA officials, flight controllers, surviving astronauts (including the usually reticent Neil Armstrong, a man who rarely gave interviews), and some of the journalists who covered the space program from the days of the Mercury Program all the way to the early 21st Century.
Written by Ed Fields and directed by Mary Crisp, Richard Dale, Nick Green, and Julian Jones, the original miniseries was made in cooperation with NASA not just to commemorate the Apollo 8 mission's 40th Anniversary but also to observe the 50th Anniversary of the American space agency's formation. Narrated by Apollo 13 and Forrest Gump's Gary Sinise, it premiered on Discovery on June 8, 2008; the other five episodes aired on the cable channel over the next month, sometimes in one-episode-per-night showings, and sometimes with two 43-minute-long (not counting commercials) episodes airing back-to-back as a "double-bill."
Narrated by award-winning actor Gary Sinise, WHEN WE LEFT EARTH is the incredible story of humankind's greatest adventure, as it happened, told by the people who were there. From the early quest of the Mercury program to put a man in space, to the historic moon landings, through the Soyuz link-up and the first untethered spacewalk by Bruce McCandless, this is how the space age came of age. The vivid HD series features vintage rushes and all the key onboards filmed by the astronauts themselves. The sequences are captured by cameras onboard the spaceships, enabling the series to tell the stories in a depth never seen before. - Discovery Channel blurb.
The six parts of When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions are:
Episode One: Ordinary Supermen (aired June 8, 2008)
Episode Two: Friends and Rivals (aired June 15, 2008)
Episode Three: Landing the Eagle (aired June 15, 2008)
Episode Four: The Explorers (aired July 6, 2008)
Episode Five: The Shuttle (aired July13, 2008)
Episode Six: Home in Space (aired July 13, 2008)
My Take
I watched this six-part series when it originally aired almost 11 years ago on Discovery, a cable channel that I once liked because it aired documentaries such as Wings and Wings of the Red Star before its parent, Discovery Network, decided to spin off its tech and military-themed shows to other venues, including its Military Channel, that often were not offered in Comcast's Basic lineup. Shot and presented in high definition (but also in standard definition, as 2008 was the last year before the U.S. made the Big Leap to digital TV and ditched analog television as the standard format for broadcast TV).
At the time, I wasn't watching Discovery (formerly known as The Discovery Channel) because (as anyone who knows me well can attest) I'm not a fan of "reality shows," which many networks and cable channels were embracing because they are relatively inexpensive to make but are profitable due to high ratings. But my late mom was a subscriber to TV Guide and I found out that When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions was going to be on, so I made it a point to watch.
The series, which was produced by Tyler Butterworth, Richard Dale, Daniel Hall, Bill Howard, Tim Goodchild, and Annabelle Marshall and made in full cooperation with NASA, encompasses half-a-century's worth of events, starting with President Dwight D. Eisenhower's transformation of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) into the more formal National Aeronautics and Space Administration and ending with the Columbia space disaster of 2003 and the construction of the International Space Station.
The producers and writer Ed Fields interviewed many individuals who were involved in some way to the American space program during NASA's first 49 years. Among them are ex-President G.H.W. Bush and former astronauts John Glenn, Jim Lovell, Eugene Cernan, Neil Armstrong, John Young, Barbara Morgan, Eileen Collins, and Storey Musgrave.
Other interviewees include former flight director Gene Krantz, astronaut wives or widows Susan Borman, Valerie Anders, and Evelyn Husband, the late Gus Grissom's brother Lowell, retired space correspondent Jay Barbree, and senior NASA official Christopher Kraft, who oversaw many of the Apollo missions from 1967 to 1972/
Created mostly for the benefit of the present generation that has no living memory of the "Space Race" between the former Soviet Union and the U.S., the heady days of Apollo, or even the Challenger explosion of January 1986, When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions is a good overview of America's first half-century in space. It focuses more on the human experience rather than the purely technical aspects, and it lets some of its most prominent participants tell their stories in their own words.
Since late 2008, the series has been available on four-disc DVD and Blu-ray sets produced by Image Entertainment. I have the DVD set in a steel box package, and I occasionally trot it out to remind myself that yeah, we once went to the Moon and returned safely to Earth.
We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon...We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too. - President John F. Kennedy, Rice University, Houston, Texas, September 12, 1962
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