When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions [Review]

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Posted to SciTech on Wed Jul 09, 2008 at 11:26:42 AM EST (promoted by 1fastdog). RSS.

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the US space program, NASA and the Discovery Channel recently released a new 6 part documentary chronicling the history of American space flight, from the early Mercury missions right up to the present. The documentary revisits many iconic images, but also contains much footage from the NASA archives that is being shown for the first time.

The documentary was released in HD, and while much of the earliest footage was shot on relatively low resolution film the techs have done an excellent job cleaning things up and up-converting it all to hi-res quality. The footage varies widely, from hand-held shots by the astronauts themselves, to fixed-camera shots from Mission Control, to official footage of the various launches (and failed launches). Some clips from the episode can be found here, on the show's official website.

More interesting, perhaps, are the interviews of the different astronauts and NASA officials which are interspersed throughout. Many of the original surviving Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts were interviewed, as well as Shuttle astronauts from some of the more memorable missions (such as the Hubble Space Telescope repair mission). The interviews themselves were often quite illuminating, and the astronauts themselves often exhibited quite a bit of frustration with and even anger towards the NASA bureaucracy (the most revealing quote, perhaps, came from John Young, commander of the first Shuttle flight and veteran of both the Gemini and Apollo programs, when he noted (in regards to the strength of the Shuttle's heat shielding tiles) "They told me you could hit [it] with a baseball bat and it wouldn't hurt it...they weren't exactly telling me the truth." Earlier in the series, John Glenn made a similar comment when criticizing Mission Control for not telling him that they believed his heat shields had malfunctioned and that he would burn up on re-entry after the mission in which he became the first American to enter orbit around the Earth.

These exchanges reveal some of the contradictions of the program - while it makes some attempts to show the warts and problems of the space program, it still seems fundamentally forgiving of NASA. Almost all the interviews are with either current or retired NASA employees or astronauts, with the lone exception being a few appearances by media correspondents who covered the space beat. Because of this, many of the accidents and failures get glossed over with someone saying something like "mistakes will happen - space is dangerous!" The Apollo 1 disaster barely received any consideration, other than a brief summary of what happened and some images of the burned out capsule. Apollo 13 was covered in detail, but the focus was far less on how it was allowed to happen (or why there were so few safety procedures worked out in advance) and far more on the heroic aspect of the story.

Later accidents received somewhat more coverage. The Challenger explosion did receive quite a bit of detailed coverage and the NASA folks were more than willing to self-criticize, but the coverage of the Hubble mistakes and the Columbia explosion both had a very odd tone. The fact that mistakes happened was acknowledged, and exactly what happened was explained, but no effort was made to assign blame or to accept blame. It was difficult to escape the feeling that the culture at NASA still has difficulty coming to terms with its culpability for those events. This was especially disconcerting in light of the coverage of the Columbia disaster, as the program interviewed two surviving family members of the crew, as well as showed footage from home videos taken by one of the crew members right before the explosion - to this viewer it seemed like a great betrayal to expose those emotions to view and then not make an honest assessment of what went wrong.

Overall the show provides a coherent, heroic narrative of the American space program and it is certainly entertaining to watch and full of amazing footage of the space program. At the same time, the series left this viewer with a strong sense of despair over what might have been. The progress from the first Mercury mission through the end of the Apollo program was truly stunning, and the Shuttle was an undeniable technical achievement, but there is no denying the feeling one gets in the later episodes that NASA has perhaps lost its way. Although a return to the moon is scheduled for 2020 or so, with long-term plans for a manned mission to Mars sometime after that, the next generation set of space exploration vehicles meant to get us there - Project Constellation - is still largely on the drawing board. Will humanity ever establish permanent habitations beyond Earth's orbit? Or, perhaps, the more compelling question might be whether NASA as it's currently run has either the will or the way to get us there?