What an awful film!
I had the bad luck to see this "documentary" in my science class yesterday, I didn't learn a damn thing. What a bore.
"...a bird which flies into your house is an angel."-House of Sand and Fog
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I don't know how they can call this 40-minute-long NASA recruitment ad an actual documentary. I would have rather watched 'Son of the Mask' again.
Wait, I take that back.
"...a bird which flies into your house is an angel."-House of Sand and Fog
Where is your sense of wonder, kid?
Through the magic of movies, you are "there" when humans first walked on another heavenly body. Fantastic! Imagine if you could have been on the beach watching Columbus stumble onto the "New Word", or travel with the first Asian explorers finding their way to a North America entirely empty of people thousands of years ago. That would be something like watching the Apollo missions.
I grew up watching cheezy make-believe tv and movie productions about going to the moon before it actually happened - this is probably as close as you or I will ever get to actually being on the moon. I sat in front of my B&W tv with my 8mm home movie camera recording the screen when Armstrong first left the lunar lander. 600 million people watched live along with me. A thousand years from now, all the stupid wars and politicians and rock stars and everything else will be a footnote, if that, in history. If there are any folks around then, the 20th century will be remembered for what a few members of the human race first accomplished in those short few years.
Go out sometime and look at the moon. We've BEEN there.
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A very large fraction of the planning and engineering for Apollo was working out "what if?" scenarios just like the one depicted here. The crews and ground support people studied. And trained. And practiced. And trained. And they trained some more before every mission, running simulations of every emergency scenario they could think of.
This was a very large part of why the missions went as well as they did. Without it, Apollo 11 probably would have aborted its lunar landing. Apollo 12 probably would have aborted right after launch when it was struck by lightning. The Apollo 13 crew would have died. And so on.
If this emergency scenario gave the audience even a hint of the hazards of space flight and what it was like to plan for, anticipate and work through emergency scenarios, then I think it was a very worthwhile thing to have in the film.
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"Where is your sense of wonder, kid?"
My sense of wonder is reserved for films that deserve it. We already KNOW that we've been to the Moon. We don't need a cheesy-ass documentary to prove this to us.
"...a bird which flies into your house is an angel."-House of Sand and Fog
Sure I know we've been to the moon (unlike some, it seems). No, I don't need to have it proven to me.
But this movie still rekindled the sense of wonder I had as a kid watching Apollo as it happened. It was that sense of wonder that prompted me to pursue my career in engineering. And it makes me wonder how we lost all that wonder about space travel, and why, after 40 years, we haven't continued with a much more aggressive program of both human and robotic exploration of space.
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NASA is recruiting for more moon missions? Great! Where do I sign up?!