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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