We chose to go to the moon

It was 50 years ago today.

Our family watched on our 21 inch color screen, which we thought was hot stuff.

Walter and Wally, the great PBP team of CBS.

 

Oh ... perhaps in response to a concerned viewer email of a couple months ago , suddenly reavailable on HBO:

 

Marilou Henner telling Bob Costas that she lost her virginity standing up in a shower the night Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon is the best moon landing story. Still.

Starts at the 1:38 mark.

"Later with Bob Costas" was a talk show that aired for a time after "Late Night with David Letterman". In this clip, he unwittingly gets Marilu Henner to talk about her, ahem, first time.

 

I've watched the CNN special and last week's three-part "American Experience" on PBS and have been utterly fascinated. I was eight when it all happened so didn't quite grasp what was happening. And on top of that, my grandparents took me camping at Yosemite the weekend of the lunar landing. We heard the landing on the way back during a Giants-Dodgers game from Candlestick, the one Gaylord Perry famously hit his first home run in after touchdown. Saw the moonwalk in the basement of the other grandparents' house.

 

As soon as Apollo 11 made TLI, our family took off for a 2-day camping trip up north in the Michigan national forests, so I listened to most of the next couple of days on radio.

We were driving home hell bent on Sunday afternoon to watch the moonwalk on teevee, so we listened to the landing live on car radio.
I knew enough to understand some of the crew dialogue and some of the "47 forward" calls had me freaking out. (That meant they were coasting forward at about 30 mph.)
And just like everybody including Neil and Buzz, I had no idea what a 1202 alarm was.

 

What is the best moon-landing documentary available? I've heard good things about the CNN one.

 

The CNN special is excellent. The PBS series is very good.

FTETTM is a drama movie series, but it sticks pretty close to history.

 

Guy who runs my local insists the moon landing was faked. He also thinks the world is run by a group of seven families and that 9/11 was an inside job.

 

Yeah, I've fuckin' annihilated some of those people the last couple years. I don't put up with that shit in public no more.

 

Not to rain on the achievement, it remains this countries greatest achievement - but does anyone think this program would span multiple presidential administrations and be funded if it wasn't a defacto nuclear contest between the US and Russia to show who had the bigger rocket?

 

Probably not.

Ironically, the reasons the Soviets leaped out to a big early lead in the space race was that their nukes were bigger, heavier, clunkier, and they had to build their ICBMs bigger with much greater lifting capacity.

So they were able to get bigger spacecraft in orbit sooner.

In the actual technological arms race, the US was far, far ahead. Which
came to be a major factor as they moved through Gemini and Apollo and miniaturization became more important.

 

Not a documentary exactly, but I just finished up “13 minutes to the moon” a BBC broadcast about the whole Apollo program leading up to 11, but specifically about the 13 minutes leading to the landing.

It has great interviews, fresh ones with everyone you’d want (except Aldrin) and great archival audio, from the missions and from living history interviews with guys who’ve died. And it breaks that all down in excellent ways, really talking a lot about the capsule, the computer, the plan, the astronauts in ways I haven’t always heard.

Ha, I didn’t help make it. Just finished a 2,400 mile work road trip and was really impressed with it.