A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Book cover photo by NASA.  © 2019 HarperCollins “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”  - John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961 It's hard to believe that fifty years have passed since three manned missions (Apollo 10, 11, and 12) made the still-amazing voyage from the Earth to the Moon and fulfilled President John F. Kennedy's 1961 pledge that American astronauts would go to our closest celestial neighbor and return safely to the big, blue marble we call home before 1970. Of the three Apollos that flew between May and November of 1969, only two (11 and 12) landed on the Moon; Apollo 10 was a dress rehearsal that involved everything in a lunar mission except the landing itself. To commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing (July 20, 1969), many publishers have published new books about various aspects of Project Apollo, including the t...

Book jacket design: Greg Kulick. © 2019 Little, Brown and Company (Hachette Group) On July 20, 2019, the National Air and Space Administration (NASA), historians, and millions of space enthusiasts around the world commemorated the Jubilee of Apollo 11's landing on the Moon. To observe the 50th anniversary of astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's historic moonwalk - and the fulfillment of the late President John F. Kennedy's challenge to land a man on Earth's nearest celestial neighbor and return him to Earth before 1970, a wave of new movies ( First Man ), documentaries ( Apollo 11 ) and books preceded the commemoration of the greatest adventure in human history: the Space Race and the triumph of the Apollo Program. Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11, historian James Donovan's 464-page account of the Apollo Program, its Cold War roots, and America's bid to land men on the Moon before the Soviet Union, is ...

What was the first big historical event (such as when the Berlin Wall came down) that you can remember and how old were you? Because I was born eight months before JFK’s assassination and was a baby at the time, I have no memory of that. My mom and an older half-sister, of course, were of “the age of reason” on November 22, 1963, so they had vivid memories of that tragic event. I have vague memories of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as a dim awareness of the unrest all over the world due to the Vietnam War and social upheaval in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. The first big historical event I recall with clarity (albeit enhanced by my watching documentaries and dramatizations on the topic) was Apollo 8’s flight to the Moon in December of 1968. The biggest historical event I recall as a kid, though, was the Moon landing 50 years ago. I was six and living in Colombia at the time, but like most of the world, the media the...

Apollo 11 Mission Insignia.  "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." - Astronaut (and Mission Commander) Neil A. Armstrong, July 20, 1969 It was 50 years ago today (at 20:17 UTC) that the lunar module Eagle, carrying Mission Commander Neil Armstrong and Lunar Module Pilot (LMP) Buzz Aldrin, landed on the surface of the Moon. Six hours and 39 minutes later, before a worldwide television audience, Armstrong emerged from the Eagle and, uttering the now-famous phrase, "That's one small step for man....," became the first human to set foot on Earth's only natural satellite. At that moment, the Space Race that began on October 4, 1957 with the Soviet Union's successful launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, into orbit, was over. After trailing the Russians in various milestones  - Soviet cosmonauts were the first to fly into space, to perform a spacewalk, and launch a woman into orbit - the landing of Apollo 11 wa...

On March 1, 2019, Neon (the production company that distributed 2017's I, Tonya ) and Universal Pictures released Apollo 11, Todd Douglas Miller's documentary about the first manned lunar landing. Produced by CNN Films and Statement Pictures, the documentary focuses on the eight-day period between July 16 and 24, 1969, with a few "flashback" sequences tracking the careers of astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins via montages of black-and-white and color still photos provided by the astronauts and their families. Miller, who also edited and produced Apollo 11, eschews the conventions of most documentary films by not using a mix of "present day" interviews, voiceover narration, or dramatic recreation of events. Instead, Miller and his team use a technique called "direct cinema," relying exclusively on archival material from the National Air and Space Administration (NASA), which consists of a mix of 16mm, 35mm, and newly r...