ASTRONOMY 101: NASA'S APOLLO PROGRAM

In 1961 President John F. Kennedy promised that the United States would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The sheer audacity and scale of Kennedy’s vision is now hard to comprehend. It would cost $120 billion, employ 400,000 people at its peak, use rockets and computers not yet even imagined, let alone designed, and new alloys yet to be discovered.

Before the Apollo project began NASA's Mercury and Gemini programs put astronauts into Earth orbit and tested docking procedures necessary for a lunar landing. Launched by the largest rocket built, the mighty Saturn V, the Apollo spacecraft was made up of three parts.

It's Christmas Day, 1968 and the crew of NASA's Apollo
8 take a photograph that would become the iconic image
of the sixties. It would also become the most profound
environmental photograph of all time.
They called it 'Earthrise'.

These were the command module where the astronauts lived on the journey and the only part that returned to Earth; the service module that provided the power and consumables; and the lunar module that would allow the astronauts to descend to the lunar surface.

The first manned spacecraft to orbit the moon was Apollo 8 on Christmas Day, 1968, famous for the iconic ‘Earthrise’ photograph that showed the fragility of our planet along with Commander Jim Lovell’s beautiful Genesis narrative. On July 16, 1969 Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Kennedy with astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins on board. On July 20, 1969 the lunar module "Eagle", with Armstrong and Aldrin aboard descended to the Sea of Tranquillity on the lunar surface, an event watched by millions worldwide on television. Armstrong lowered a ladder and stepped down on the moon's surface. It was "one small step for man, but one giant leap for mankind." It was the first step by mankind on another world.

THOSE MAGNIFICENT MEN IN THEIR MOON MACHINES

ByANDY FLEMING

A review of a superb documentary series that reveals the astonishing and gargantuan engineering task that faced NASA and its contractors in meeting President Kennedy's challenge of putting a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s.

The Moon landings are often regarded as mankind's finest achievement, and this 2008 Discovery Science Channel miniseries certainly gives an in-depth account of why.  At its peak in the 1960s, NASA's Project Apollo employed nearly 400,000 people, and this series is a tribute to the scientists, engineers and astronauts who made Kennedy's audacious dream come true.

Moon Machines is a series of six forty-five minute programmes, each focussing on a particular piece of essential hardware developed specifically to place an American on the Moon by the end of 1969.  It includes episodes concentrating on the Saturn V rocket, the Command Module, the Lunar Module, the Lunar Module's Guidance Computer, the Apollo Spacesuits and the Lunar Rover.

Using hours of original historic footage from NASA and its contractors, and interviews of the surviving engineers and scientists Moon Machines records those brief years in the sixties when (regarding spaceflight at least), anything seemed possible and when if materials orcomponents didn't pre-exist, they were almost magically developed and created by NASA and its engineers.