{"id":51,"date":"2006-08-10T22:01:16","date_gmt":"2006-08-11T05:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/?p=51"},"modified":"2006-08-10T22:01:16","modified_gmt":"2006-08-11T05:01:16","slug":"earth-to-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/2006\/08\/10\/earth-to-moon\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Earth to the Moon"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"FromWe choose to go to the moon!<\/em> says JFK, as if it’s simply a matter of making up our minds. I think if I’d been alive during the Moon decade, as an adult, I wouldn’t have felt that going to the moon was a big priority. I mean, it seems there are a lot of social issues pretty “close to home.” The Vietnam war was going on concurrently!<\/p>\n

But, I was totally captivated by this drama-documentary (produced by Tom Hanks.) I didn’t expect to enjoy it nearly as much as I did. Twelve episodes, each exploring the Moon project from different angles and perspectives. We got to see through the eyes of the computer geeks at MIT, the wives of test-pilots-turned astronauts, the TV anchorman battling an upstart reporter, the engineering firm president whose brain child was the Lunar Module. Alan Shepard was 47 when he landed on the moon – after a decade hiatus from being an astronaut. Al Bean was a goofy young rookie along for the ride with his goofy pals – in their matching yellow corvettes, and on their journey to the moon. Jack Schmidt was a geologist who helped turn his fellow astronauts on to studying rocks, and finally got to land on the ultimate rock himself, in the last trip to date.<\/p>\n

The miniseries is definitely dramatized, with characters and facts adapted to make a good story. Each episode was quite different – even the cinematography varied to fit the theme. I had a little bit of trouble keeping track of all the people, because they were sometimes introduced in a rapid-fire succession and each episode had mostly a different set of characters altogether. But on the whole, the acting was excellent. And, the scenes in the spacecraft and out on the moon were very convincing. I literally forgot that it wasn’t actual footage of the mission.<\/p>\n

The “moral of the story,” which was emphasized more toward the end, is that the moon landing was proof that the human race is capable of anything – we can do anything we put our minds to. (If we all work together and have a little faith… no, just kidding, this wasn’t a Disney movie.) I guess that’s pretty inspiring, even to me, and I’m not exactly a modernist, certainly not a humanist, and not even that much of an optimist. I wouldn’t have agreed with Kennedy that making it to the moon was very essential. But, I have to wonder – if we hadn’t done it, would the world (or at least America) be a different place? Maybe the accomplishment had wider reaching effects than I realize.<\/p>\n

If you have Netflix and are up for a fascinating educational\/entertaining show, get From the Earth to the Moon!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We choose to go to the moon! says JFK, as if it’s simply a matter of making up our minds. …<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}