From the Earth to the Moon - Part 4

Part Four of HBO's From the Earth to the Moon is simply titled 1968 -- and for good reason.

For the first 20 minutes, writer Al Reinert (director of the 1989 documentary For All Mankind, as well as writer of Apollo 13) broadens the scope of the series to put the Moon missions in the context of news events at the time. It seems the titular year was a particularly poor one for America: mass casualties in Vietnam, violent protests against the war taking place worldwide -- not least in America itself -- and the crushing of dreams and hopes with the assassinations of, first, Martin Luther King, Jr., and then Bobby Kennedy.

And amongst all this, the Russians became the first to send an unmanned flight around the Moon and back to Earth.

In response, NASA wanted to best them -- of course -- and so in the days leading up to Christmas 1968, Apollo 8 headed for the Moon, and on Christmas Eve entered orbit -- ten times! -- before eventually returning safely to Earth. Naturally it's this that the majority of the episode focuses on, although the opening section feels longer, so densely packed is it with news footage (both real and faked) covering the events of that year. It perhaps shows Reinert's documentary roots that it so precisely evokes and retells history.

While it's good to cover the details of the missions themselves, the context is also very important -- not just because it's interesting to see these events in the light of what else was going on at the time, but also because they directly impacted on it. Were it not for Kennedy's promise that America would put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, for example, they might not have strived so hard to do it so quickly. Numerous other examples abound throughout the series.

And, as one telegram to the astronauts on Apollo 8 put it, they "saved 1968".