Date of airing: April 19, 1998 (HBO)
All of a sudden I know a lot more about the Grumman guys that were mentioned and briefly seen during APOLLO 13, bitching and moaning about the fact that the lunar module had never been tested to be a lifeboat, let alone functioning for a series of course correction burns. Although the same could have been said about the command module, but because of all the spaceships and the techs the Apollo astronauts were steering between Earth and the Moon, one might get a little confused when not having enough knowledge about the tech used. Using an episode of FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON to depict what people had to go through to build a lunar module was pretty cool – very scientific, very much with an engineering eye (this episode has to be a must-watch for every newbie engineer out there), and very much without a big story, let alone the effort to put some emotion or depth behind the premise, as all the engineers went to work to invent an entirely new spacecraft (well, two spacecraft, to be exact) and probably never went home between 1962 and 1969.
Tom Kelly mentioned it when his company got the contract to build the lunar module, and that his workers won’t see their wives and children that much for the next bunch of years. I would have hoped a few minutes had been spent on getting into that, to showcase that advancing science and technology while screaming for a Moon landing does cost a family or two for some of the Grumman engineers and employees. It would have helped to humanize some of them and maybe even put some drama into this episode (by depicting their home lives for a minute or two), while the rest could have continued to dwell in the engineering porn of it all. “What if they don’t need seats?”, they asked. The audacity to go against all established knowledge of what spacecraft are supposed to look like...
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| The arts and crafts hour has begun. |
But yeah, I didn’t know how much I would be interested in seeing the lunar module come to be, and see myself as an engineer if I hadn’t been so freaking lazy in my life. Beginning with how the engineers envisioned it at the beginning (a 70-feet high space rocket), continuing with the notion of how the mission is set out to be (one rocket from Earth to the Moon, or multiple rockets with smaller parts and ships to come together for a rendezvous in space?), and finally, the montage of the LEM finding its forming and its footing, getting built. I especially loved the moment when the engineers talked about the windows and the astronauts not needing any seats, because really, would you want to sit comfortably while doing one of the dangerous missions mankind was taking on? Do you really need comfortability or do you just want to be part of one of the coolest missions in human history and could forego getting your butt into a recliner that was essentially thought of as a shock absorber in the case of a landing?
On the other hand, how revolutionary was the thought of removing the seats from a spacecraft? I mean, science fiction has seats in spaceships all the time, and pretty much everyone was expecting their astronauts to sit while landing the LEM on the lunar surface. Thinking about removing the seats must have been one of the hardest decisions to make. Then again, removing seats means less weight, and I can imagine for space engineers, less weight is everything and their life motto. The scenes with “We don’t need these big windows,” “What if they don’t need seats,” and “I don’t think we need shields” were hilarious to me. Building a spacecraft, and you tell everyone that you don’t need this and that. Only the bare essentials. And this is when all you need is what you can carry on your person. It brings me back to THE MARTIAN – no, you don’t need those windows that will protect you from the vacuum of space. No, you won’t need that wall that will keep the spacecraft together during launch. No, you won’t need the nose atop of the spacecraft that would make the ride and the breaking of the atmospheric layer more smooth.
At the end of the day, at least some character depth could have been included in this episode, but I am starting to think that FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON was supposed to be a scripted and theatrical, almost stage-like documentary, not caring about the persons involved, and instead just going through the facts, one by one. That by itself is great, as I am learning stuff I would have never thought of, let alone getting introduced to the Apollo missions no one can remember, because really, everyone just remembers 11 and 13, and 8 when they think hard or were preparing a presentation of the year 1968 in America.
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| It's like watching your kid go off to college. |
By the way, who would have thought that Apollo 8’s trip around the Moon would happen before Apollo 9 tested out the LEM in Earth orbit? Holy cow, shuffling around the missions at NASA must have been a nightmare, especially when you suddenly had to put on a mission you thought would happen in a year, but will happen in less than six months, because a part of the spacecraft wasn’t ready to fly yet, so you gotta have to hurry up and prepare your crew. It’s one of the other things that has been decidedly cut from the show, forgetting maybe could have brought an additional layer of character depth and tension into it, if it had been part of the narrative. This could have been an excellent moment to prove that the astronauts training for these missions were also critical about how those missions were run on the ground.
