ABOUT midway through “When We Left Earth,” a sweeping new video history of the American space program, the former NASA flight director Eugene F. Kranz looks into the camera with an intensity that is almost frightening.
“The power of space was to raise our aspirations to those things that are possible,” he says, “if we will commit.”
He punches each of those last four words, so it comes out “If. We. Will. Commit!”
Those four words lay out the underlying argument of the six hours of a NASA documentary that goes far beyond recounting history, and which begins on Sunday at 9 p.m., Eastern and Pacific times, on the Discovery Channel.
Mr. Kranz is not just making a statement. He’s asking a question — will we commit? — and issuing a challenge: Well?
Mr. Kranz, who was the famous flight director on the nearly tragic Apollo 13 mission — Ed Harris played him in the 1995 movie “Apollo 13” — has still got the flattop. He’s still wearing a flashy vest, just like the ones he wore for missions stretching from the initial Mercury program to today’s space shuttle. But he’s decades older than that kid in the pictures from the early days.
So is the space program.
The future is 50 years old.
Last October marked a half-century since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the be-beeping, silvery ball that transformed science fiction to science fact. The next year the United States government pooled aerospace research resources under a new agency: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
So NASA has reached the half-century mark, and the Discovery Channel has set out to tell the tale. This, however, is not just another recap of the parts everybody knows: the hell-for-leather attempt to catch up with the Soviets’ first satellite and then chasing their countryman into space in 1961; President John F. Kennedy’s stunning pledge, just a few weeks after Alan Shepard’s flight, that “before this decade is out” America would put a man on the Moon; Neil Armstrong’s “one small step for a man,” and the famous flags and footprints and lunar buggies and rocks.
Mr. Shepard and Mr. Armstrong get their due, of course, but so does the long-ignored Gemini program — the essential middle step between the original Mercury flights and the Apollo missions that laid so much of the groundwork for reaching the Moon. And there is Skylab, the first American space station and the subject of an audacious rescue effort after damage during ascent threatened to render it useless.
And the series devotes hours to the current space program. Two episodes focus on the space shuttle, NASA’s attempt to make space travel routine, which for many people made it dull.
Kathryn Sullivan, a former astronaut who flew three shuttle missions, including the one that launched the Hubble Space Telescope, and who appears in the film, applauded the broader focus of the series in a telephone interview this week. She suggested that the breadth might be a function of the big, round anniversary itself. Maybe, she said, “given that your target and your assignment is 50, you found yourself discovering that the program didn’t end in ’73; you found meaning and purpose and significance to events that occurred in ‘spaceflight as Southwest Airlines.’ ”
Like many gadget-happy Americans, NASA took lots and lots of home movies. For this series it threw open the doors of its film and video archives, which have been transferred to stunning high-definition format.
The resulting episodes have the vividness of a dream: here are images many of us have seen all of our lives, but instead of showing up in grainy black and white or in still photographs in magazines, there is vivid color and motion showing moments like the first American space walk by the astronaut Ed White.
“This is utterly not just seeing it again,” Ms. Sullivan said.
The NASA videographers didn’t just focus on the hero shots. There are the Ban-Lon shirts and the ashtrays in mission control, and the tense, pensive faces of people waiting to find out if it’s a bad day. As mission controllers wait to hear if the crew of Apollo 13 has survived the fiery entry through the Earth’s atmosphere, the camera focuses on a pair of hands, with the fingers working a telephone cord as if it were a rosary.
The quality of the video and the very human touches “took our breath away” said Dan Parry, the head of research on the project, in an interview last week. “They’re not always wearing silver suits. Sometimes they’re hanging out on the beach,” he said. “It turns out that astronauts are people after all.”
Bill Howard, the executive producer on the series, said in an interview that the hundreds of hours of archival footage turned out to be “what amounts to dailies from an action movie shoot.” The series shapes a narrative around then-and-now intercutting of old footage of astronauts and mission managers, with voice-over narration by the actor Gary Sinise, who played the astronaut Ken Mattingly in “Apollo 13,” that stitches things together.
Mr. Armstrong, in a rare interview for the series, describes his descent to the lunar surface as his fuel supply dwindled. And there is an ebullient Alan Bean, who went to the moon on the second flight, and who says, “When you’re an astronaut, you buy into a lot of risk,” and “If you can’t buy into it, don’t be an astronaut.”
John Young, the astronaut whose career spanned the Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs, is chilling in a scene that leads up to the loss of the shuttle Columbia. The ship and its crew were doomed by a chunk of lightweight insulating foam that punched a hole in a wing during ascent, which allowed superheated gases into that wing during re-entry. “They told me you could hit the wing leading edge with a baseball bat, and you wouldn’t hurt it,” he said. “They weren’t exactly telling me the truth,” he deadpans, and then allows a chuckle and an infinitesimal quantum of smile.
Will the series find an audience? Mr. Howard said a generation gap was the biggest challenge. “One of the things we knew from the beginning of this: anyone under 40 doesn’t know” much about the Moon landings. “Anyone over 40 knows it like the back of their hand because they lived through it.”
Along with the drama of the Discovery programs and the overwrought musical score and the sometimes-portentous narration by Mr. Sinise is, always, the message of the series: Human space exploration is worthwhile, even necessary. While critics of the manned space program argue that robots outstrip the abilities of humans for less cost and risk, the film puts forward Edward Weiler, the former chief scientist on the Hubble Space Telescope program.
The telescope was famously flawed upon its initial deployment and had to be repaired in orbit through a bold shuttle mission that involved five spacewalks of unprecedented complexity. “I can say unequivocally that if it wasn’t for the human space program, Hubble would be a piece of orbiting space junk,” he says.
NASA is now in the process of winding down the shuttle program; no flights are scheduled after 2010. What comes next, a new generation of spacecraft known as Constellation, will not be flying until 2015 at best. In the middle is a gap that will be filled by buying seats to the space station aboard the Russian Soyuz capsules. That period to come will test the nation’s commitment to spending the billions of dollars it takes to send humans into space and keep them safe from start to finish. It will test the notion that we need to send people into space at all.
These are topics worthy of a spirited national debate. And the Discovery Channel has put the argument on the table.
To paraphrase Mr. Kranz: Well?
