TV Review: 'Beyond the Moon'

Director of Mission Operations Gene Kranz celebrates the landing of STS-41C. CREDIT: NASA.

NASA's efforts to build on its moon landing triumphs between the 1970s and the present are the hallmark of a new documentary set to air tonight.

Unlike its predecessor, which focused on NASA's space race with Russia to send astronauts to the moon, Beyond the Moon: Failure is Not an Option 2 picks up after the contest is already won. The two-hour program will air tonight at 9:00 p.m. EDT on the History Channel (check local listings).

Based on the memoir Failure is Not an Option by former flight director Gene Kranz, the program highlights NASA's struggle to maintain its relevancy and develop space stations and shuttles, even as public interest in human spaceflight flagged.

"I always looked at it as something broader than just the Cold War," Kranz says. "I looked at it as the spirit of our nation."

Beyond the Moon covers a lot of ground - in space - to relate the more than 30 years that spanned NASA's launch of its Skylab space station in 1973 through the development of the orbiter fleet, Hubble Space Telescope and International Space Station (ISS), as well as the two tragedies - Challenger and Columbia - that killed 14 shuttle astronauts. The primary storytellers are past and present flight controllers, from Kranz himself during the post-Apollo years through Paul Hill, LeRoy Cain and others who oversaw the shuttle Discovery's most recent STS-114 flight.

With so much focus on the astronauts who fly NASA's space missions, it's refreshing to revisit the space agency's landmark missions from the point of view of flight controllers.

However, with the exception of some astronaut comments on NASA's difficulties with Skylab, which included one stuck solar panel and the loss of another one entirely, the spacefarers themselves are curiously absent.

Kranz serves as a solid anchor, though the recollections of former flight director Jay Greene, who was on duty when Challenger exploded during liftoff in Jan. 28, 1986, and Hill and Cain - who also worked on Columbia's doomed 2003 flight - are key to understanding the weight flight directors carry when they make decisions that could spell success or disaster for their astronaut crews.

"That is our job, to live with this risk, and some days it's bad," Kranz says.

The film stops short of detailing the safe return of Discovery's STS-114 mission that landed on Aug. 9 after a 14-day trip to the ISS - NASA's first shuttle flight since the Columbia disaster - where the risks of human spaceflight weighed heavy on mission managers.

But while it may seem slightly dated, Beyond the Moon offers a different side of human spaceflight, one that sheds light not on the rockets and spacemen, but the people who put them in orbit.

Beyond the Moon airs at 9 p.m. EDT on the History Channel. Check local listings.

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