A la conquête de la Lune

I grew up watching the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space fights in the 60s and 70s. My parents made sure I was in front of the TV for every mission and once I started school the teachers brought TVs into the classrooms or marched us all down to the auditorium to watch together. It was a wonderful to be growing up.

I have one tiny quibble. It's tiny but it's one of those mistakes that was so easy to avoid it makes me nuts that they missed it. Why couldn't someone, anyone have told the narrator how to pronounce Wally Schirra's last name ?

Other than that, perfection.

You know, when you go to a concert, you're there to see a band. It's just a few people at most on stage. Behind that band are scores of people to put on the show. That's what Moon Machines is really about.

It goes away from focusing on the astronauts and mission specifics. It concentrates on building the machines to take humans to the moon and bring them back alive. It's very touching to see all of these engineers and project managers from back in the day. Most of these people I'd never heard of. Without them nothing would have gotten off the ground.

It really makes you think that over 400,000 people had to get their job done right. If one person made one mistake, lives could have been lost. Case in point is Apollo XIII with a simple short in a wire causing that explosion. Thankfully resources were available enough to re-purpose the spacecraft as a lifeboat.

You'll be taken from concept, to creation to implementation. You'll get to see and hear about multiple design challenges and failures. Some these failures and challenges put the program in jeopardy or halted it altogether, such as Apollo I.

I really want to get these on DVD. I'm a nut on this subject. If you're at all interested in the space program, this series is a gem.