Raymond Chen, a programmer for Microsoft, went to the Seattle International Film Festival. As mentioned in his blog, he walked into "In the Shadow of the Moon" almost by accident and came out raving about it. From his description, it sound like a film we would enjoy.

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/...01/3019282.aspx

If I may quote:

"This was absolutely wonderful, a documentary consisting of stunning never-before-seen NASA footage from the Apollo missions and interviews with most of the surviving astronauts who have been to the moon. (Of the astronauts, all of whom are extremely well-spoken and quite funny, Michael Collins steals the show.) If this movie goes into general release, I strongly encourage every space buff to run, don't walk, to see it. The footage of the Saturn V launch brought tears to me eyes. I give it a 5 out of 5.

There's a spectacular shot taken from the inside of a spent stage: You watch the next stage ignite and the spacecraft fade off into the distance, then as the spent stage loses attitude, the earth comes into view before the film finally runs out. During the Q&A after the movie, one person asked the director, 'How did the film of that sequence survive re-entry?' The answer: The film was ejected from the spent stage and fell to earth. High-altitude planes were in pursuit with giant nets trailing out behind them. That was one insane game of 'catch'.

The special surprise guest at the screening was Bill Anders, the crewmember from Apollo 8 who took the famous Earthrise photo. He quipped that Frank Borman actually took the first Earthrise photo, but Borman had the disadvantage of using the camera loaded with black-and-white film; Anders had color film in his camera.

Bonus story #1 from Gene Cernan: 'My father was alive when the Wright brothers made their first flight; he could hardly believe that I walked on the moon. My son was five years old; he thought it was no big deal.'

Bonus story #2 from Charles Duke: 'After I returned, the flight doctor told me that at launch my heart rate was 144.' A beat. 'John's was 70.' Cut to interview with John Young: 'I'm old. My heart can't go any faster.'"

Priceless stuff, JR; thanks! BTW, (if you haven't already) and if you can find it, be sure to read Collins' Carrying the Fire...arguably the best astronaut book ever!

Agreed -- "Carrying the Fire" is written solely by Collins (no ghostwriters here), and showcased the man's great sense of humor and intelligent (dare I say intellectual?) viewpoint from within the most fascinating endeavor ever set upon by Man.

I was also quite impressed with Collins' decision to follow Charles Lindbergh's format from "The Spirit of St. Louis." Everything Collins recounted about his life, his training, his pre- and post-flight experiences was written in past tense. His accounts of the flights of Gemini 10 and Apollo 11 are written in present tense. This brings a great sense of immediacy to the actual flights.

Collins is not only one of the wittiest, most intelligent and most perspicacious of the early astronauts, he is undoubtedly the best writer of the lot.

-the other Doug

This movie is set to show commercially with the help of Ron Howard...

http://sev.prnewswire.com/entertainment/20...29062007-1.html

Having lived through that time, I intend to convince some of my younger friends, and others who are not really space oriented, to come see this with me..... except they will have to put up with my tears and crying when I see a Saturn rise.....

I was priviledged to watch the Apollo 17 launch.... an event I will never forget.

Craig

Lucky you. Film footage is all some of us will ever get.

As a kid growing up in Los Angeles, I could hear the rocket motor tests miles away in the desert--some ending with a bang. Unfortunately, I never got to Florida to see a launch. I would really have liked to see a Saturn V blast off.

The trailer has been posted Oh wow! Take a look at this.

Am I right in thinking that because of his time in lunar orbit during Apollo 10, Gene Cernan has spent the most time at (in orbit and on the surface) the Moon than any other Apollo astronaut?

Definitely an oDoug question, Voyager; we'll see if he chimes in.

Thanks for the trailer, Dan; gave me chills! Sure am glad that someone as talented as Ron Howard is on our side, as it were...

Looks really good. I'm going to have to pull out all my iuo's and find some premier tickets to this somewhere, I'll even drive to (ugh) Hollywood if need be. I'll let you all know what I come up with -- they usually come in fours.

Uh, Dan, not to beg, but since I do live in downtown LA & if circumstances permit, can ya do me a solid?

I had you in mind. But as the old saying goes, "Let's not count our rovers before they've completed EDL and successfully egressed."

A venerable platitude indeed, and oft repeated! Thanks, man.

Yes, indeed, Cernan holds the record for a human being spending time in cislunar and lunar space. I don't have the figure handy, but Apollo 17 was the only J mission that spent the extra two days in lunar orbit after ascent/docking (thought it was planned for both 16 and 17), so Cernan does hold the record.

Cernan, along with Stafford and Young, also hold the record for the fastest speed ever achieved by humans (relative to the surface of the Earth), and Young, along with Duke and Mattingly, hold the record for the highest latitude ever flown over (due to their course, they ended up flying directly over a point some 61 degrees or so north latitude post-TLI).

-the other Doug

It opened today (Fri Sep 28) here in Melbourne FL. It is a must see for any spaceflight fan... and should really be seen by everyone else just to inform them (or remind them) of what is possible by inspired, determined people. As someone who turned 16 a few days before Apollo 11's launch, and have followed spaceflight since a kid (Mercury, the Rangers, Surveyors, Lunar orbiters, Mariners), I just had an incredible sense today of almost teary-eyed nostalgia through most of it. Seeing how the Apollo astronauts have aged (as well as myself), I kept thinking how could we (as a country) have just squandered all this and let it all go.

Yes, there is the Shuttle and ISS... but it just seems like way too much time has passed since 1972. I worry that I will not see another manned moon landing in my lifetime... though I am hopeful. But then, toward the end of the movie, I felt a contentment that at least I got to live during this period of man's history and experience it as it happened. (I know it was a Friday afternoon showing... but in a 180 seat theater, I was the only one there, although the other 15 movies playing at the same time seemed fairly well attended. Sad... as I thought there'd be folks like me who'd take a half day just to see it... since its only showing for a few days. I may go back this weekend.)

That is sad, RedSky. The publicity has really dropped off, so that's probably part of the reason.

Hopefully the DVD release will be much more successful. (I admit this: haven't been in a movie theater in years, I ALWAYS wait for the DVD...)

Well, it's playing at the local "art house" theater here in Mpls this week, and looks as if this is the only week it will be playing. I'm planning on seeing it over my weekend (Tues.-Weds.), though I have a feeling I've seen every piece of footage they have. Maybe not as cleaned up as they've managed, but if there is a single bit of film taken during the Apollo missions that I haven't seen, I'd be quite surprised...

-the other Doug

Always amazed when they mention " stunning never-before-seen NASA footage from the Apollo missions " as this only applies to the general public and not to us who have seen all the Apollo Spacecraft Films DVDs

Lovell did an interview on the Colbert Report. For our non-U.S. folks, the Colbert Report is a show on the Comedy Central channel that is a parody of a news program.

Thanks, Ted! Very good interview; Colbert's always a hoot, but Jim Lovell was great as well!

Stephen Colbert seems to me like the kind of guy who would read UMSF.com. If he knew it existed.

Steve? You there?

Yeah, I got that vibe, too, even though he was staying in character. Come out, come out, wherever you are, Steve!

He (or his researchers) must read Phils great blog at BadAstronomy.com - because a while back Steve popped a 'we never went to the moon' throw-away joke into his show and Phil called him out on it....so Steve's repented

Doug

Well, I saw it yesterday. I was impressed.

For one thing, of the nine men still alive who walked on the Moon, they had commentaries from eight of them. Only Neil Armstrong chose not to participate -- and it's not like we didn't see and hear him, from contemporary recordings and films. Interestingly, perhaps in silent memory of them, there were almost no images of the three moonwalkers who have passed on -- Conrad, Shepard and Irwin -- with Al Bean only even mentioning Pete's name once.

There was a good amount of commentary from a guy who only ever flew as a CMP, too -- but then again, Mike Collins has such a startlingly intelligent wit and delightful way of telling a story, I was *really* happy to see a lot of him in this piece.

The next most prolific contributor was Charlie Duke, and this again met my wholehearted approval. Charlie was always the most enthusiastic of the guys who went to the Moon, and while he has lost some of that frenetic energy with age and the calming influence of his faith, he was more boyishly happy in his reminiscences than I've seen him in years. He even admitted to having been so incredibly relieved when Apollo 11 finally touched down on the Moon that "...I couldn't even say Tranquility. I said 'Twangquility' or something like that." Which is very true.

Charlie had one of the best insights into himself and into Neil Armstrong, as well. He said something along the lines of (paraphrasing from memory, here) "Neil was the best guy to be the first guy on the Moon. He was real -- controlled. He had a lot of control, he thought up that great line. I wouldn't have been a good choice, I wouldn't have had any control, I would've just screamed 'Yahooooo, I'm on the MOON!' or somethin' like that..." In point of fact, Duke was the *only* guy to let out a scream when his LM landed, and he did sort of holler "That first step on the lunar surface is SUPER, Tony!" when he had his own shot at climbing down that ladder and setting his own foot onto the Moon.

I was very pleased to see John Young appear, albeit somewhat briefly. He had some very pithy and insightful things to say, though. Just like John -- never use six words when three will do.

Al Bean was confident and happy. Dave Scott was only on screen a little, but as always he was well-spoken. Cernan, as usual, came off as a cheerleader who hasn't yet realized that high school is over. Schmitt was reserved and somehow sad. Mitchell showed the sense of awe and wonder that the trip brought out in him, never to be put back in the bottle like the proverbial djinni.

There were maybe 20 seconds of footage that I had never seen before, almost all of it from one of the trasnposition and docking maneuvers. There was a very nice piece of film editing, though, that I had never seen before -- someone matched the multi-loop MOCR recordings to the 16mm film being shot in the control room on July 20, 1969, and we got to watch Charlie Duke throughout the descent, hearing the actual words he spoke *and* watching his face as he spoke them. That was a very nice piece of work.

Finally, they end the film running each and every one of the guys' reactions to being questioned about the "moon hoax" thing. From John Young's "Why would you want to take the most impressive thing people have ever done and crap on it like that?" attitude to Charlie Duke's "I could maybe see faking it one time -- but NINE TIMES???? Why in the world would anyone do that?" to Mike Collins' "You ever have two people who know a secret? You can't even keep it then. You just CAN'T <breaking out in laughter> you CANNOT have TENS of THOUSANDS of people in on a secret like that!"

It was an amusing way to end the piece.

-the other Doug

The kooks always say "They laughed at Einstein"
But there are a lot more Bozo's the Clown than there are Einsteins. and they laugh at Bozo's too.

The active we-never-went-to-the-moon crowd consists of scientific illiterates <even with advanced degrees, I presume, in a few cases> who are clueless and unclueable.

Endlessly disproving their bogus claims as fast as they can fabricate them is a loser's game.

The thing to do with these bozos is to LAUGH AT THEM.

I was at the world premiere of this film in Edinburgh, Scotland on 17 August. Having seen virtually every piece of Apollo film, I still found it an exceptional film. The tower-top sequence of Apollo 17 lifting off in the dark is rarely seen and quite amazing. The astronaut interviews are all original and very refreshing. I can thoroughly recommend it.

Kenny

Yep -- and while looking at some other things on YouTube, I came across a trailer for yet another interview-the-Moonwalkers film, "The Wonder of it All," which is being shown at various special functions across the U.S. right now but seems never destined for general release.

-the other Doug

It's great to see these guys honored as they should be, finally, and their achievements publicized. Other then the Apollo 11 crew, of course, the rest of them never got the recognition they deserve. Wish Pete Conrad had lived to see it.

BTW, if anybody ever has to deal with particularly obnoxious 'Apollo-denying' types, here's a nice resource:

http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/space/apollo.html

Many amateur astronomers observed & tracked the flights, and they captured things like venting, S-IVB burns, etc. I know it won't convince the hard-core tin hats, but in my case at least it convinced one guy I used to work with who is a rabid Art Bell fan (US late-night radio personality well known for promulgating whacko pseudoscience & conspiracy theories). Additionally, many ham radio operators monitored CSM<-->Houston communications, even when they were in lunar orbit, and there are too many websites to list documenting these events.

Just givin' everybody some ammo, here...

... and .... Dangerous Films is producing ....MOON SHOT - "New major docu-drama co-production" for launch in 2009.

Yes, for those of us who stayed with the moon topic through the bleak late 1970s, 80s, 90s, this is an astonishing come-back for the subject...

Kenny

Here's the web site for the movie.... click on the mission logos

In the Shadow of the Moon

The documentary was absolutely wonderful for what it showed, both the archival stuff and recent interviews. But should we worry about what the movie didn't really explain? How easy is it for the uninformed populace to believe that the technology and the engineering came out of nowhere, just because the President made an inspiring speech and rallied political support to spend the money? How easy is it for even the engineering community to overlook physical limits to what is possible, if the general consensus is that anything can be done if the President wants to?

John W.

Well, John -- I certainly can't speak for the uninformed populace of the 21st century. But back in the early 1960s, one of the points that Kennedy hammered over and over again was that he had made *this* committment precisely because it required us to expand the envelope in engineering and materials sciences. He didn't think that anyone, much less the engineers and scientists, were going to be able to pull new technologies out of the hat simply because their President said it was possible.

One of the main reasons for going to the Moon was to develop technologies, and moreso, to develop the technologists required to do the developing. Kennedy thought (and rightly so, IMHO) that America needed the new engineers and scientists that a Moon program would create more than it needed a political victory or a few hundred kg of Moon rocks.

-the other Doug

Thanks for the encouraging comments oDoug. A friend who was a news photographer in the mid-20th Century reminded me that Life Magazine had an exclusive contract to run stories about Apollo (or perhaps just the astronauts?). His joke was that Life didn't realize at first that they couldn't keep other news orgs from capturing the launches on film.

I assume some of the footage in the documentary came from Life, because the part which shows the person crawling around between the F-1 engines on the back of the S-IC was shown as a still photograph in Life magazine, December 20 1968 (the week of the Apollo 8 launch). To close the loop here, that story, titled "Men and Machines," begins with a statement that the Saturn V was created by people out of metal and plastic and chemicals. In addition to the general public's lack of appreciation, I worry that the word "create" might not even be in the aerospace vocabulary anymore, as today's terminology suggests that everything "emerges" from a bureaucratic process. And engineers should spend their days doing the kinds of things that accountants do. Of course I want my cynical perspective to be wrong, terribly wrong.

John W.

Is the movie kid-friendly? I have a 5 year old who would love to go. I notice the poster had "Contains mild scenes of peril".

As far as the difficulty of it all, I personally loved the "Spider" episode of From the Earth to the Moon. I suspect that captures some of difficulty and hardship the design teams had to go through to get it done. The time lapse of the little model changing over and over...Man, I can relate to that one!

Great episode, but I kind of feel it's the "Apollo 1" episode that actually best captures the difficulties in designing a spacecraft and repercussions of certain design choices.

That was basically referencing the Apollo 13 discussion. The "peril" was in fact more than mild, but it's difficult to present it as such via documentary footage.

-the other Doug

FYI-- It is possible to save this movie to your Netflix queue.

UK screenings annonuced:

http://www.itsotm.com/itsotm.html

Hope there is one near you

Phoenix in Leicester it is

Doug

Imagine the scene - I walk into the Phoenix centre in Leicester, up to the Box Office

"Hi, I'd like to order two tickets for In the shadow of the moon for the 30th please"
"Hmm - not heard of that, just a minute."
tap tap tap tap tap
"No, sorry, we don't appear to be showing it"

W
T
F?

Fortunately, a theatre not to far away in Loughborough is showing it as well!

Doug

Hmm... The web site certainly indicated that it would be shown in Leicester.

I saw it in Kingston on Monday. Total audience of about 6 -though that's probably not bad for 2pm on a Monday afternoon.

FWIW I found it hugely interesting and would certainly rate it. Though for an undertaking as huge as Apollo, there's so much more that I wish could have been included.

Rob

Just got a chance to check out this documentary (from Netflix). I thought it was a very interesting film. There weren't a lot of details that I didn't know already (except for what Aldrin was doing right before he set foot on the moon), but a lot of the Apollo footage certainly was new to me, like the spent stage footage. A very nice prospective on this pivotal event in human history.

Yeah -- there are very few pieces of film in the documentary I had never seen The only thing I know I had never seen before was film of the escape tower and boost protective cover jetting off the vehicle, taken from inside the spacecraft.

Still, I think the best thing about this film is the commentary by Mike Collins, the best writer and most interesting storyteller of the first five astronaut groups.

BTW, Aldrin has said elsewhere that his First Whizz on the Moon took place just after he set foot on the surface, not just prior...

-the other Doug