Washington Goes To The Moon PART 1

The first episode brings me back to a high school moment: standing in a classroom doorway, the packed room of students and teachers silent, alert, eyes glued to the television, watching the moon become mysteriously concrete. Richard Paul’s nimble narrative of the funding challenges involved in transporting humans from here to there enriches my memory by providing a full banquet of information and experience leading up to that televised landing. I didn’t expect a program on budget funding to be so engaging, but this one is. We hear lively interview material from various historians, and scientists, as well as former White House Budget Director Charles Schultz; also, archival tape of Presidents’ Kennedy and Johnson, and other prominent voices from the sixties. Walter Cronkite offers perspective, and congressional testimony (read by actors) is included. Well-chosen music excerpts help the flow. The moon landing is considered one of our great national achievements. It is fascinating to look at it through the budget lens, as a budget line item in competition for tax dollars with the war on poverty and the war in Vietnam –– and to remember its morale boosting power in the midst of so much national turmoil –– a country divided, serious economic problems, the country at war. Kind of like right now. It’s timely listening all right, especially since Bush, however briefly, has floated a Mars balloon. Perhaps, like JFK, he sees the morale boosting potential, and similarly plans on being long gone when the bill comes due.

The second episode in many ways moves like a page-turner about tragedy and destruction. You’re immediately drawn in by an administrator’s recounting of the 1966 moment when Gemini 8 went out of control. Tape from the space docking gone awry runs alongside and underneath his compelling first-person account. It seems odd that space ships exploding in air no longer come as a shock. What almost shocks is to remember that the first astronauts to die in the space program died on the ground. Somber news reports after the Apollo One flash fire that killed three astronauts, and taut narration lead us into the heart of this piece, the aftermath and investigation into what went wrong. So much sounds familiar: NASA outsourcing work to shoddy contractors, NASA administrators scrambling to keep control of the investigation, congressional committees looking into what went wrong, concern about political influence affecting contractor appointments, investigative reports kept secret, conspiracy theories, a man’s death days after testifying before congress, a corporate culture in chaos, damage control in full force. This is the stuff of the Apollo movie that’s yet to be made. This series is timely now, or near any significant NASA dates. Can be aired as space, science, economics, history programming, or as a historical echo in light of current events today. And what was going on forty years ago, in fact, isn’t all that different: we’re at war afar, and culturally at home, the economy is rocky, poverty growing, privatization increasing. It touches on many issues on many levels.