Re: Memory Lane...
A vote for 13 Minutes to the Moon. It jumps around a bit, as all professional media people are now convinced that we have the attention span of gnats, so everything has to be repeated and individual technical sections can't be too long - but it is excellent.
And one bit of repetition is brilliant. They keep repeating sections of the radio between Houston and the spacecraft, plus they've been using the internal tape from Eagle and the internal Mission Control "loops" - the separate circuits between individual controllers and their back-up teams and the flight controller's circuit. Each time they go off and explain some technical point or jargon, and often use interviews they've done or NASA archive ones with the people in question.
So as the series builds up you're starting to recognise the voices, and understand more of what's going on in the conversations. So while I complain about some of the jumping around in the show, some of it is very deliberately done for a very good reason - and apparently a later episode is going to play you whole chunks of the transmissions that you will now be equipped to understand because you'll be able to recognise the voices through the static and know what they're talking about in more detail.
I also have to comment on the Fred Dibnah username of our commentard above. Because that comment about the BBC coverage being inspiring about engineering and the username made me think of how different the Beeb's coverage of the Moon landings would have been with Fred Dibnah...
My mental image has him climbing up the Saturn stack on the launchpad, in order to do an interview with the astronauts through the Apollo capsule hatch, and then the later flights would have had him talking about the steam engines they'd used for the lunar rovers...
What would the astronauts have made of his accent?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
