My first impression, after finishing the first disc of the three disc set of Apollo 11: Men On The Moon by Spaceflight Films, is that if you're at all a fan of the space program, run, don't walk to your local store (I saw them at Target this past weekend), or buy them online from Amazon.
This is absolute space geek nirvana.
I was just young enough to not remember firsthand much of the Apollo missions, with the exception of the last one, Apollo-Soyuz. But I certainly devoured lots of books on the subject, as well as the DVDs of For All Mankind and Apollo 13.
But watching Apollo 11: Men On The Moon, I felt like that whole period was right before me. Probably because it was! This set of three DVDs was assembled by a small organization run by Mark Gray, a 20 year TV veteran, whose father was worked as a NASA contractor. The discs are distributed by 20th Century Fox. Gray and his team basically assembled all of the 16mm and 35mm film and video that NASA shot to document the mission, beginning with the incredible footage of the Saturn V being assembled, all the way through to the moon landing. (And to the landing back on Earth, but I haven't gotten that far yet!)
In a way, it really reminds me of the stately pacing of 2001: A Space Odyssey. On the one hand, this is staggering footage of one of the most important events in mankind's history. On the other hand, because it's largely raw and unedited, it sort of reminds you why the Apollo missions quickly lost the interest of the American public: the pace of a lunar spaceflight, given the enormous distances involved, is waaay too slow to be television friendly.
The Saturn V assemblage at the beginning of the film is just astonishing. Seeing the components with men from NASA and Rockwell standing next to them to place them into scale, it's a bit like Mies van der Rohe was asked to make one of his skyscrapers fly: the individual stages of the Saturn are that huge, and the Vehicle Assembly Building they're mated together in is even bigger. And seeing non-stop footage of the tank-treaded platform that hauls the whole thing to the launch pad is equally astonishing: how many skyscrapers move?
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