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.
