[X] My Assistant

[dvandorn]

As I'm sure many of you are aware, The Science Channel completed their annual Space Week a couple of weeks ago. As usual, a few new pieces of programming were included, one of which had been "previewed" on Discovery's more mainstream History Channel.

We've already had some discussion of the first one to premiere (on History), "When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions." The other two are "Rockets Into Space" (which actually, I believe, is an older series that Science had not run in its entirety before) and "Moon Machines," the centerpiece of the premieres during Space Week.

Oddly, the older piece, "Rockets Into Space," was most satisfying to me, being a straight documentary on the manned space program from its infancy in Nazi Germany and on Goddard's farm, to the present day. Some very good footage is included, and most of the commentary is accurate. The one really annoying tendency of the commentary is to take the crew designations and infer incorrect assumptions -- specifically, speaking of how the Lunar Module Pilots "piloted" their vehicles to landings and back up to rendezvous with the CSMs. It might be amusing to hear it stated that Buzz Aldrin piloted the LM Eagle to the first lunar landing (entirely incorrect -- as Buzz himself has said, if he had tried to grab the control stick, he would have had his hand slapped) to the impossibility of stating that Jack Schmitt piloted his LM, Challenger, to its landing at Taurus-Littrow. (Reminding me of the most amusing Schmitt anecdote I know, that when Schmitt was training with Dick Gordon as backup LMP for Apollo 15, the SimSup decided to fail the CDR's controls, forcing the CDR and LMP to switch roles and have the LMP actually land the LM. Instead, Gordon grabbed Schmitt bodily, moved him to the left side of the cabin, and completed the simulated landing from Schmitt's right-side position -- as Schmitt laughed hysterically. As they walked out of the LM simulator, Gordon called out to the SimSup, "Tried to get me to let Jack land, didn't you?' As he strode past SimSup, he said "Didn't work, did it?" And as he walked away, he added over his shoulder, "It never will!" )

There is even a segment on the first women astronauts/cosmonauts. It goes all the way back to the earliest female test pilots, including Hanna Reisch (sp?), the famous German WWII test pilot.

"When We Left Earth" features a lot of really nice footage from training and spacecraft development I had not seen in decades, but not much beyond what I had already seen. And the commentary was less sharp than in "Rockets Into Space." There was a lot of nice footage, but the overall impression was less than satisfying.

And then we come to "Moon Machines," in which a separate episode was devoted to the different modules and development areas involved in Apollo. The episodes covered the Saturn V, CSM, the LM, the Guidance and Navigation hardware and software used for translunar flight, the Lunar Rover and the Apollo space suits. A very uneven effort, I think. Far more footage of spacecraft and equipment development/test than in any of the other series, yes. And interviews with a lot of the engineers involved in the development efforts. But highly unsatisfying in many ways.

For example, the episode on the space suits gave a very detailed history of the relationship between Hamilton-Standard and ILC, who ended up being the prime contractors for the PLSS backpack and for the rest of the suit (usually called the PGA, for Pressure Garment Assembly), respectively. And yet, there is no mention whatsoever of the fact that the ILC suit was running far enough behind that the Apollo 1 crew was wearing a slightly modified version of the David Clark Company's Gemini suit when the Fire occurred (and would have worn those modified Gemini suits into orbit).

And while "Moon Machines" featured interviews with numerous engineers involved in the various development programs, they tended to be the guys who were middle managers, who ran small organizational units that dealt with development at a subsystem level, or who just did their part on their very small piece of the overall effort. I think the most senior guy they had from North American to discuss the CSM development was George Jeffs, who was more of an integration manager than anything else.

If you've ever read "Apollo" by Murray and Cox, you know the names of the major players on the development side. And for the most part, those names are entirely absent from the list of interviewees in the "Moon Machines" episodes. Now, before anyone calls me on it, I do understand one of the reasons -- the "big" names in that effort are mostly dead, now. It's not possible to interview Max Faget, Joe Shea, Tom Kelly, Stormy Storms, etc., etc., for a documentary made in the latter half of the first decade of the 21st century. But that took a lot away from the documentary, IMHO.

So, while I welcome this kind of renewed interest in the Apollo era, the work is, to me, somewhat unsatisfying.

-the other Doug