A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 2009 Discovery Networks. “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."  –  President John F. Kennedy's Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs,  May 25, 1961 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

Before James Horner died at the age of 61 on June 22, 2015 in a single-fatality plane crash in California's Los Padres National Forest, he had composed over 100 film scores, including the Academy Award-winning music for director James Cameron's Titanic (1997), which included that year's Oscar-winning Best Original Song, "My Heart Will Go On." Throughout his 27-year-long career as a composer and orchestrator, Horner earned eight more Best Original Score Oscar nominations, won two Golden Globes, three Satellite Awards from the International Press Agency, and three Saturn Awards from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films. Among the eight Oscar-nominated scores in Horner's filmography is the one for director Ron Howard's 1995 film Apollo 13, a dramatization about the April 1970 lunar mission which nearly ended in tragedy as a result of a catastrophic explosion of an oxygen tank aboard the spacecraft's Command/Service Module (CSM).