lucasw's Journal: From the Earth to the Moon & Heroes in Space

From the Earth to the Moon was an HBO dramatization of various events surrounding the Apollo program, and has quite high production values and lots of good and familiar actors. Heroes in Space is a book about the whole of the space race until the Challenger accident (when it was published, and despite its cheesy title and style appropriate for younger readers.

FtEttM was produced by Tom Hanks, who appears before every couple of episodes to say something that always ends with the phrase "from the Earth to the Moon", and before that there's a nice opening sequence that has burned into my brain the fragment of JFK's famous address in which alternate pronunciations of 'decade' are showcased (something about going to the Moon in there as well).

The most amusing episode has the Kids in the Hall and Talk Radio star Dave Foley as Al Bean goofing off and falling down on the Apollo 12 mission.

The episode about Apollo 13, rather than duplicate the film's territory, focuses on fictional reporters covering the story. This use of fictional characters is annoying however closely they may be modeled on real people, and is the largest flaw in the series. To a lesser extent, there's also mixing of real footage and voice recordings in with the reenactments, but fortunately not enough to generate significant inconsistencies: it would be bad to have one actor portraying a certain astronaut in one episode while showing the actual person in another, for instance.

The dramatizations of the Moon walks are pretty well done- it seems a lot less dusty than in the real footage. It's a lot harder to falsify the behaviour of grains of material in reduced gravity than hopping astronauts.

The Heroes in Space book is pretty good, though has more than a few innaccuracies that previous library patrons have kindly pointed out in the margins ("Apollo 11 was launched in July, not January. Idiot!'). The worst error is a chapter entitled 'The $500,000 Handshake', which in the first paragraph say the Apollo-Soyuz mission of 1975 cost $500,000,000.

That aside, the book focuses on the astronauts (as the title suggests), even pointing out their heartrates and various points in some missions, but ignores their lives prior to entry into their U.S. or Soviet space programs, and summarizes their lives afterwards in a sentence or two.

The balance between coverage of the U.S. and Soviets is pretty good given the limited information available from the Soviet side. Speculation is kept to a minimum (I was perusing the very lurid 'Red Star in Orbit' and scanned several paragraphs where the author describes the recovery of the fatal Soyuz 11 mission is wrapped in multiple 'perhaps' and 'maybes'), except for the final paragraph, written during the investigation in the Challenger accident where the future of the U.S. program was in doubt, the author wonders if Russia will launch manned Moon and Mars missions before the century is out and far bypass NASA's efforts. Secrecy offers very fertile ground for fantasy.

Oddly enough, that final portion resonates with the present, where only nations capable of launching and returning people from orbit is Russia and China.

I await the 100th of the flight at Kittyhawk with mixed feelings. Important figures from NASA and individual critics have all been calling for a reaffirmation of the U.S. commitment to a manned presence in space, and most of all a 'vision'. The most opportune time for revealing that vision would be on December 17.

What administration could have scraped together in the last couple of weeks:

A few pages taken from the Space Exploration Act, and equally unfunded. It'll make for a good sound bite and never happen.

It'll be funded, but the already huge deficits will have more budget-minded presidents and congresses cutting it and along with every other excess.

It'll be funded and actually be pulled off, and be a spectacular achievement. The '00s or '10s will be largely considered a shrill and pointless decade marked by civil unrest, economic turmoil, and increasingly destructive and unresolvable conflict overseas, but at least we won't be hardpressed to find something redeeming amid it all.