The first disc of the three-disc set is built around an original documentary shot in 2003 (or thereabouts) with a few of the surviving senior NASA engineers who lead the Saturn program. It's very good, fascinating to watch, and does a thorough job of explaining just what a bear of an engineering project this was to accomplish within a single decade.

The Day of Apollo 6

Miraculously, a completed Saturn V was ready to fly for the first time, in an audacious "all up" test of all its stages, each one fully fueled and activated, on November 9th, 1967.

There would be two unmanned tests of the Saturn V before it was first launched with a crew on Apollo 8, the first manned flight to the moon (daringly, without a lunar module. If the events of Apollo 13 occurred on that flight, the astronauts would have perished).

The first unmanned test went flawlessly. The second flight, on April 4 of 1968 threatened to wreck the whole timetable of the Apollo missions, which were etched in stone as far as NASA was concerned, once President Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963. This was Apollo 6, which also flew a mockup of the lunar module. The flight was marred with multiple engine failures, and what engineers call "pogo": rampant vibrations in the spacecraft, but its unmanned Apollo capsule splashed down safely, and NASA announced to the public that all mission objectives had been met. They had been--even though several elements had gone disastrously wrong (and would all be fixed).

But Mark Gray, the producer and writer of the documentary, misses a chance to tell one of the staggering bits of history that remind people just how turbulent the rest of the world in the 1960s, outside of NASA's button-down universe of astronauts, engineers, and slide-rules:

A few hours after Apollo 6's command module was recovered, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated.

The 365 foot tall Chevy Impala

The second disc contains footage of every Saturn V launch, from those first two unmanned flights, through each of the Apollo missions, to the launch of the Skylab space station--the last Saturn V flight. Since they're relatively easy to do on a DVD, I would have preferred see the format's captioning capability taken advantage of, to provide detailed descriptions that could be switched on or off of what we're seeing, or maybe some interesting trivia about each launch. The same approach could also be accomplished with a secondary audio track, perhaps with the original NASA audio on track one, a narrator on track two, and both on track three.

Speaking of NASA's audio, the voices of the men who staffed Houston's Mission Control are fascinating to listen during the launches. They're controlling a 365-foot tall machine, each of which cost something like $150 million to produce, weighed more than a Navy destroyer, and generating twice as much power than all of the hydroelectric power plants in the U.S. And yet they're each speaking in perfectly calm, mostly southern accents, like they're driving their '65 Chevy Impala to the hardware store.