A Son of the Rock

The Signature Edition. HBO, 1998.

This box set was one of the presents I received in December. I think it was for my birthday, though, rather than Christmas. I missed it when it was transmitted in Britain.

The series is Tom Hanks’s eulogy to and elegy for the Apollo programme. Said actor appears only in the last episode in a frankly ridiculous and unnecessary role as assistant to Georges Méliès whose early film Le Voyage Dans La Lune, disgracefully stolen by Thomas Alva Edison for US distribution, was the first to depict such a trip. Hanks does, however, introduce the other eleven in a walking shot at the start of each. He has a writing credit for episode twelve and part wrote some of the others.

All aspects of the US end of the space race from Kennedy’s decision to initiate the endeavour to the last Moon mission are covered.

Cleverly, or annoyingly depending on your point of view, the episodes do not all focus on the hardware and the voyages in space; though they necessarily have their place. In broader takes on the times one episode reflects on the upheavals of 1968, one on the changing attitudes of journalists, and another focuses on the astronauts’ wives. NASA expected them to shield their husbands from any domestic worries while at the same time acting as clothes horses in public and generally being uncontroversial. (Few of the marriages managed to survive in the long term. But that could be true of most US marriages, of which I believe 50% end in divorce.)

In passing we have the casual smoking of the 1960s, the unconscious sexism, and the sheer scale of the programme’s achievement which was so very shortly after unappreciated.

That’s actually not quite right; it was so quickly unappreciated that it was regarded as a commonplace by the time the last three Apollo missions flew.

The most interesting to a scientist was the episode in which the astronaut’s training in geology was outlined, a training which bore fruit during Apollo’s 17’s landing when they found a piece of anorthosite, in which an unmanned probe would likely have failed.

Each episode is prefaced with Kennedy’s still inspiring, “We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things; not because they are easy but because they are hard,” speech, making the series an homage to the men and women who took part in, supported, or built the equipment for the enterprise. In this it is perhaps a reflection of the belief that no such challenge faced Hanks’s generation, unlike those of their fathers (Apollo) and grandfathers (WW2.)

In all, it’s a worthy memorial to the participants in the Apollo programme and a sad reminder that in 40 years we haven’t gone back to the Moon.

I could have done without the syrupy music, though.

Edited to add:- There is a fifth disc containing trailers, behind the scenes and special effects “featurettes,” histories of famous astronomers and a history of the Moon; but I haven’t bothered to look at any of that one.