My brother David called Sunday night to say “Alert! TiVo Alert! Space Week! Science Channel!”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. “How We Left Earth. Saw it.” Saw it; TiVoed it; blogged it.
“NO! Moon Missions! New!”
And I’ll be darned, it is new. It’s a new slant on the Apollo missions. First of all, they tell the story from the engineer’s point of view. Last night was about the Saturn V rocket, and they talked to every engineer BUT the engineer who painted USA on the side. (And, of course I realize now they didn’t use fossil fuel in the Saturn V, or even rocket fuel, but hydrogen fuel cells. The hydrogen fuel cells that Pres. B. has been promising in every State of The Union for his tenure of eighty million years.)
Tonight’s episode was on engineering the command module and I swear to you, I saw new footage I had never seen before. They showed the “drop tests.” Hysterical footage of the command module slamming into the ground before they decided on water landings.
The most touching part of tonight’s episode was when the engineers described the Apollo 1 deaths from their point of view. And I never realized it before, but Gus Grissom was in the Mercury capsule that trapped him after splashdown with its outward-opening door, then the resultant inward-opening door trapped him in the Apollo 1 fire. (You just want to go back in time and say, “Hey, look at this show Star Trek. No hinges on any of the doors. They just slide.”)
So, as I say, the moon program continues to draw me in. However, Gary has had it with MoonTV. Gary was going into the bathroom when tonight’s episode began. It started with John F. Kennedy saying, for the fifteenth time this week, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon…”
“Kennedy!” Gary screamed from the hall, “That’s Kennedy! Am I right? Am I right?”
6 responses to “Space News”
Just yell back at the G-man “Yes, Kennedy! That’s 10 points and you go to the next level!”(I’m watching the Moon Missions, too)
Damn, between work and ballgames the past month I’ve missed almost all of How We Left Earth. I’ll have to try to catch Moon Missions. I love old gov’t video footage. I think it’s all the short sleeve dress shirts and flat tops!
Sherri – Ha! If only I had you here, like Mystery Science Theater.Amy in StL – I keep looking at the faces and wondering if they’d be considered attractive today. It’s so hard to look past the hairstyles.
Short sleeve dress shirts and ties. What a look. Thanks for the giggle, Amy.
Argh! This makes me wish even more fervently that we had the Science Channel. We always see ads on Discovery, but we can’t watch because we don’t have access. Science Channel, you horrible tease!
Caroline – Didn’t Brad Pitt wear that look in The Good Shepard?Velocibadgergirl – There’s some Trio artsy channel we don’t have. I feel your pain. It will show up on Discovery or Bravo sometime soon, I’m sure.