From the Earth to the Moon DVD

Average Rating:

HBO did a wonderful job on this endeavor. Seeing Band of Brothers, and Apollo 13, I thought I would enjoy From the Earth to the Moon. I wasn't prepared for the quality and entrancing effect of this series. My wife and I found ourselves watching two episodes a night, instead of the agreed upon single installment!

I indentified with the engineers at Grumann as they worked the problems out of the LEM. I was intrigued by the political and media aspects surrounding the space program which I was too young to have known about. Alan Bean's trip to the moon was presented in a wonderfully hilarious way. And the characters had depth with common-man heroics as well as failings.

Do yourself a favor, and get a copy of this DVD to watch, learn and enjoy.

In 1957 Russia Launched Sputnik then launched a man into space. The race was on. Each episode tells of the planiing an effort that went into the space program. There was one goal and that was to put a man on the moon before the Russians. Tom Hanks opens each episode with some background about the episode. The first six episodes tell of the efforts that led to the Apollo 11 landing. The first episode dealt with the Mercury and Gemini program. Episode 2 dealt with the Apollo 1 tragedy. The epidode on 1968 dealt with the turbulent social packground as well as the space program. On Christmas 1968 Apollo 8 became the first ship that orbited the moon. As one lady wrote "You have saved 1968". Spider tells the story of the developing the lunar module. Mare Tranquilitatis (Sea of Tranquility) tells the story of Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon. Episodes 7-12 deals with rest of the apollo program to Apollo 17. This includes the near distaster of Apollo 13. This episode dealt with what was hapenning on earth during the Apollo 13 flight. The Original Wives Club (Episode 11) tells the story of the wives of the astronauts. This series is a pure classic and greatly illustrates the human achievement that occured during the space program.

It is very kind from the filmmakers to finally show Mr. Werner von Braun who played a major role in the Moon program. The moonlanding is truly a great success , not just for the Americans but for the whole world. For example I am very proud when I remember that a Hungarian engineer (Ferenc Pavlics) designed the Lunar Roving Vehicle. And as we can see in this series it functioned very well :)

It would be very interesting if somebody finally made a mini series (or movie) about the Russian space program (at that time) and we can see that spaceheroes weren't born just in the US, but in Russia too...