Up, Up, and Away

Last night the Discovery Channel wrapped up its series "When We Left Earth."  David Mindell, author of Digital Apollo, offers his thoughts on the documentary:

I watched the entire series of the Discovery Channel's "When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions," all six hours as they replayed last week's episode and then played a new one.  As with so many of these films, the footage and the visuals were great (I'm only sorry I couldn't see it in HD).  But the story lines were generally disappointing--nothing new here, and in fact a great deal left out.  Begin with the subtitle, "the NASA missions," implying that the only NASA missions sent humans into space; the series hardly mentioned any remote missions.  Skylab was given pretty short shrift, despite a great deal of interesting work that went on during that project.  The interviews with key players were interesting in some cases, but they often seemed to be justifying themselves--of course Shuttle astronauts are going to think the shuttle was successful, but what about any other perspectives?  What about some of the interesting glitches, human conflicts, mistakes, and all the other interesting imperfections that make spaceflight a compelling human endeavor?  I was hoping for a little more on the "return to flight" after the Columbia accident; the film brushes over the fact that NASA made many of the same mistakes in recovering from the accident that they had made in leading up to it (not to mention similar ones that had been made on Challenger), and that the first Discovery flight after Columbia showed that the foam-shedding problem had been only incompletely solved.  I suppose there is a place in the world for younger generations to get the basic stories of American human spaceflight, but too often this genre is characterized by repetition more than analysis or originality.  This, I suppose, is partly what leads to the current status of human spaceflight in the US today: some people are for it and will not be convinced otherwise, and others are opposed or uninterested and will not change their minds.

I have higher hopes for the series "Moon Machines" which airs on Discovery July 6-10, made by the same people who made last year's film "In the Shadow of the Moon." David Sington and Chris Riley are smart, creative film makers.  I've seen the third episode, "The Navigation Computer," which is partly based on my book "Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight," and it came out very well.  The episode, and I bet the entire "Moon Machines" series brings to light some of the numerous other stories that went into the Apollo missions.