One Small Step

July 21, 2009

It's been all moon, all the time, for the last week or so, with every major media outlet covering some aspect of the historic moon landing (my own pop-culture-influenced offering in the Washington Post is here), and an entire Carnival of Space devoted to the subject over at Out of the Cradle. My personal favorite was the History Channel's airing of Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11. (h/t: Whedonesque) It's a classy project, directed by Richard Dale.

Technically a docudrama, Moonshot deftly interweaves stock NASA footage from the 1960s with new re-enactment footage featuring various actors -- most notably James Marsters, best known for playing the vampire Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as Buzz Aldrin (center, in photo).

The story is as much about the astronauts as human beings, as it is about the voyage to the moon, although about 50% of the film takes place in space. We see their home lives, their struggles, personal tragedies, as well as catching a glimpse of what life as a NASA astronaut (or astronaut's wife) is like.

Dale's crew built their own version of the lunar and command modules, just 10% larger than the originals so that lights and cameras could be squeezed into the space without sacrificing verisimilitude. They hung an enormous light overhead to simulate the sun, and they salvaged parts from scrapped Russian fighter jets in Lithuania (where the film was shot) for the control panels.

Dale also had to be creative in simulating the weightlessness of space, since Moonshot lacked the enormous budget of, say, Ron Howard's Apollo 13 (who placed his actors into NASA's infamous "vomet comet" -- an expensive proposition). "We used a see-saw device," says Dan Parry, head of research at production company Dangerous Films in an interview with the Coventry Telegraph. "By running one end into the spacecraft, an 'astronaut' could sit on it -- and with four heavy blokes sitting on the other end he could be made to gently rise and sink as if he were floating."

The crew relied on wires to suspend stuntmen to replicate the trademark "moonwalk" in one-sixth earth's gravity. And Dale borrowed an old trick from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey: he attached a pen to a clear plate of glass, suspended it on a wire and then rotated it in front of the actors, creating the illusion that it was floating in weightlessness.

It's easy to forget just how dangerous the Apollo 11 mission -- indeed, any space mission -- actually was: there were even odds the astronauts might never get back home. Then-President Nixon even had a speech prepared should the worst happen. Apparently, as the Aldrin and Neil Armstrong tried to lift off to return to the command module after their historic walk, the worst almost did happen. A circuit breaker connected to the ascent engine breaks. The two astronauts solved the problem by jamming the nib of a pen into the switch to throw it. And they got home just fine.

Anyway, if you missed Moonshot, never fear: you can order the DVD from the History Channel here. And since everyone else is posting that historic 1969 footage: