Amazing documentary series. What’s more, it’s in HD, which makes the images that much more amazing to see. I still get chills seeing a Redstone or Titan III lift off, let alone a Saturn V.
The third or fourth installment which covers the shuttle missions is particularly hard to watch, because you know that two crews and shuttles are going to be lost. And of course, unlike the days of Apollo when Grissom, Chaffee, and White perished, you’ve got non-test pilots, literally “ordinary” people in space.
The Columbia disaster was hardest for me to watch. I’m going to choose these words carefully, but what is saddest about Columbia to me is that the crew represented what America so completely. It was a racially, ethnically, gender diverse crew, quite far removed from the test pilot days of Mercury to Apollo. Scientists and doctors were in the ranks. It just hit me particularly hard. Of course the Apollo and Challenger accidents were just as devastating.
Anyway, it’s a brilliant series and I might purchase the Blu-Ray DVD - the images are stunning. The one thing that I sort of regret about being my age is that I was born just as we were going to the moon for the last time. I remember watching Columbia launch when I was a kid in Florida - which was huge, but it must have been amazing to see us get closer and closer to landing on the moon. This series sort of made it possible for us post-Sixties kids to get a sense of what it must have been like to live during that time.
Basically, it’s space program porn… set your DVRs to get it if you haven’t already.