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 ...

From the Earth to the Moon finally gets the Blu-ray treatment. © 2019 Imagine Entertainment and HBO Home Entertainment  Yesterday marked the 50th Anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, the third manned flight to the Moon and the first to land on Earth's closest celestial neighbor and only natural satellite. There were the usual commemorative segments on the morning and evening newscasts, and social media was littered with tributes to Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.  Fittingly, Imagine Entertainment and HBO Home Entertainment chose July 16, 2019 as the "drop date" for the long-awaited Blu-ray disc (BD) set of From the Earth to the Moon, a 12-part docudrama about mankind's greatest adventure: Project Apollo.  Produced by Tom Hanks, Ron Howard, and Brian Grazer, From the Earth to the Moon premiered on HBO in the spring of 1998, seven months before the 30th Anniversary of Apollo 8's historic "first...

When President Barack Obama’s administration announced in early 2010 that it was canceling Project Constellation, the next manned-spaceflight program which was supposed to take American astronauts back to the Moon and – eventually – on to Mars, I couldn’t help but think that John F. Kennedy – to whom Obama had often been compared during the 2008 Presidential race – would be extremely disappointed with America’s lack of determination and “can-do” spirit as far as space exploration is concerned. Though Obama is a Democratic President as was the late JFK, he and his advisers are – depending on one’s point of view – pragmatic realists who are dealing with two wars overseas, the Great Recession, the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and a lack of bipartisan support in Washington, or bleeding heart liberals who are willing to tax and spend billions of taxpayer dollars on a wrong-headed mission to create a “socialist” welfare state along the lines of those in Western Europe and Scandina...