Documentary - 2008
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1233514/
EXCERPTS
(6 episodes, 3 parts)
The Soviet Union holds an early lead in the space race,
launching the first unmanned satellite to orbit the Earth.
On October 4, 1957,
when Sputnik went into orbit.
... But, on April 12th
NASA receives stunning news.
The Soviet Union puts a man into orbit and brings him back alive.
Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space.
Alan Shepard becomes America's first man in space.
Shepard's sborbital flight reaches 116 miles above the Earth,
then descends.
America is still coming in second in the race for sapce.
And NASA still hasn't fulfilled the primary goal of PROJECTY MERCURY --
launching a man into orbit and bringing him home alive.
As PROJECT MERCURY comes to an end,
PROJECT GEMINI is already preparing to blast off...
The Mercury program was the most challenging
of all the work that we've ever done in space.
I was bullet-proof, invincible, you know
there's nothing i couldn't do, just give me a shot.
Don't tell me i can't do it, 'cause i can do it.
... we've to be little arrogant.
... But nobody at NASA knows that
Soviet cosmonaut has already walked in space.
Gemini 7 flied nearly 6 million miles
in 14 days,
in those two weeks the sun rises and sets
on Lovelland Borman nearly 400 times.
PROJECT APOLLO
Apollo 8 will be the first manned flight
to leave Earth orbit for deep space.
Saturn 5 is already supersonic.
Well the Saturn 5 is still the most powerful machine
that man has ever devised.
20 tons of fuel a second. 7.5 million pounds of thurst.
Lunar Module
The interesting thing about the lunar module is
that you fly it standing up.
All the gauges, the panels, were set up so we could stand up.
Apollo 11
July 16, 1969
Only (Neil) Armstrong and (Buzz) Aldrin will walk on the moon.
the moon is a three-day journey.
The crew is the tip of the iceberg.
In Apollo 11, there were 400,000 people underneath
that all had to do their job or we weren't gonna make it.
It was a team effort of NASA that got us to the moon.
THAT'S ONE SMALL STEP FOR A MAN,
ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND.
15 minutes later, Buzz Aldrin is ready
to join Armstrong on the surface of the moon.
Lunar Rover
is a four-wheel-drive two-seater.
It has a top speed of 8 miles per hour.
A magnetic compass won't work on the moon,
so a computer constantly plots a straigt line back to the LEM.
Apollo 16
Johan Yount, Charlie Duke, and Ken Mattingly
blast off into the Florida sky.
Young and Duke use the lunar rover
to explore an area known as the Descartes Mountains.
Apollo 17, Dec 7, 1972 (final lunar launch)
Apollo 17 targets another geologically rich area
of the moon.
But this will be Project Apollo's final lunar landing.
Budget cuts force NASA to scrup three more missoins already scheduled.
Gene Cernan and harrson Schmitt
join an elite fraterity.
Only 12 men have landed on the moon.
Skylab
Over the next 8 months
skylab is the home to 3 crews,
each setting new records
for astonauts living and working in space.
Skylab is the first step
toward the human habitation of space.
Space Shuttle
McCandless spends more than four hours
flying the jetpack through space.
Challenger
For the first time,
NASA loses astronauts during a mission.
So We believe they were alive,
But we also believe they were unconscious
when they hit the water.
No shuttle flies for for 2.5 years.
Shuttle flights resume in September 1988.
Kathy Sulivan is the first American woman to walk in space.
Hubble is a pioneering scientific mission,
launching the most powerful telescope ever built.
SPACE STATION
The Russians had a long history
of long-duration flight under their belt.
We did not.
And so we hoped to learn some of the things from the Russians.
U.S. astronauts must learn to fly their rockets
and worked with totally different space technology.
November 1998,
a Russian rocket blast off with the first section of the space station,
weighing 21 tons.
The sapce station is already near the size of a 10-storey building.
With no sensation of speed in the vacuum of space,
Mike L-A drifts away from the shuttle 250 miles above the Florida Keys.
Throughout 2002, the pace of construction speeds up.
With Ken Bouwersox on the space station,
2003 is scheduled to be the shuttle's busiest year yet.
But first, Columbia flies a special science mission.
Unlike the majority os space-shuttle missions now,
which are space-station assembly
where they're doing essentially heavey construction,
Columbia STS-107 mission was a dedicated science mission.
.. We have booster ignition and lift-off
of space shuttle Columbia with a multitude of national
and international space-research experiments.
It's standard procedure to film every shuttle launch
with high-speed cameras.
We lost seven of our dear friends.
Terrible tragedy that's very hard for me
to go back and relive.
Some people said, "We don't want to risk astronauts' lives.
We need to stop doing this."
The astronauts don't feel that way.
Eileen Collins (Shuttle Astronaut)
We fly for country,
we fly for humanity,
we fly for exploration.
we fly for a variety of reasons.
and we don't stop flying because we have accidents.
When we left Earth,
it changed our world.
Curiosity is the essence of human existence.
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