1968

From the Earth to the Moon is on HBO OnDemand, so I've been watching them today and so far the fourth episode, 1968, about Apollo 8, is my favorite. For one, obviously Apollo 8 was a pretty exciting mission - as the precursor to Apollo 11 it knocked off such achievements as the first human spaceflight mission to escape from the gravitational field of planet Earth; the first to be captured by and escape from the gravitational field of another celestial body; and the first crewed voyage to return to planet Earth from another celestial body. The crew became the first humans to see the far side of the Moon with their own eyes, as well as the first humans to see planet Earth from beyond low Earth orbit. Also they were the ones that took the famous picture of Earth that inspired Earth Day (aka "Al Gore's a Fag-ivus.") The mission was accomplished with the first manned launch of a Saturn V rocket  (Xmastimed before a la  Wehrner von Braun....also, I remember reading once* that before his 1927 flight, Charles Lindbergh had used a piece of string to measure the distance from New York City to Paris on a globe and from that calculated the fuel needed for the flight. The total was a tenth of the amount that the Saturn V would burn every second.) Also, Joe Hackett from Wings plays Jim Lovell, so that's pretty cool. And a main character is also Tom Hanks' wife, whom I would looooove to bang nuts on ("eeeeewww Xmastime, you so naaaaaasty!!!!") Also, the episode points out that alongside the calamitous times (Vietnam, wild cultural unrest at home, Sebastian Bach born, cities exploding like LA and Detroit etc etc), the government brought together some of the greatest minds in the world and pulled off the greatest engineering/physics/math/ballsy feats in human history. Not too shabby.





* ie "read in Wikipedia"