For a few brief years between 1968 and 1972, humans left the Earth and visited the Moon. The flights took the combined efforts of nearly half a million people working across the world and cost about $160 billion in inflation-adjusted 2015 dollars. The result of that work and money were the Apollo landings—six successful lunar touchdowns, each of which gave us a vast amount of scientific knowledge and a priceless trove of samples. Twelve people walked on our nearest heavenly neighbor, leaving 12 sets of footprints that will linger in the regolith for millions of years—possibly outlasting humankind itself.
Apollo occupies a unique place in human history—a flashbulb moment when economics and technology suddenly aligned with world politics in a way that likely will never happen again. The program was a monumental achievement—arguably the greatest engineering achievement in human history—but the story of Apollo is the combined story of each of the thousands of men and women who worked to make those flights happen.
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We’ve been working since January of 2017 on something to celebrate 50 years of Apollo, and we’re about ready to show you what we’ve been cooking up: “Apollo: The Greatest Leap” is an hour-long documentary about the program, produced in-house and featuring new interviews with Apollo luminaries like Chris Kraft, Sy Liebergot, Rod Loe, Walt Cunningham, and many others.
Starting next week, we’ll be running a series of weekly Apollo features written by our Senior Space Editor Eric Berger. Each of Eric’s pieces will highlight a different aspect of the Apollo program and will be accompanied by a chunk of “The Greatest Leap.” We’ll run the first three segments back-to-back across three weeks in December, and then, after a break, the last three will run back-to-back across three weeks in February. I’ve also got a one-off piece that will focus specifically on the spacecraft of Apollo and probably run during the break.
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Interviewing Chris Kraft, the father of Mission Control.Lee Hutchinson
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Interviewing Walt Cunningham, who flew on Apollo 7—the return to flight after the infamous Apollo 1 fire.Lee Hutchinson
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Interviewing Ars Technica’s favorite Apollo EECOM Sy Liebergot, who was sitting on-console when the Apollo 13 crisis kicked off and who helped bring the spacecraft and crew home.Lee Hutchinson
A few dozen people at Ars have been elbows-deep in our Apollo project for months (it’s taken up part of every working day for me since June!). We’ve never before tried to produce documentary-quality video, and while we’re new to the arena, my (biased) opinion on the work is that it’s just flat-out excellent. Video helps keep the lights on here at Ars, but we’re committed to making sure that when we do produce video, it’s worth watching—and, more to the point, that it serves the subject being shown. For this, shooting video lets you not only hear what our interview subjects have to say, but how they say all of it. And when you’re listening to stories by this particular group of storytellers—people who shaped the course of humankind’s journey from the Earth to the Moon quite literally with their hands and hearts—the only thing better than seeing and hearing them tell their tales is being there yourself.
Or, more succinctly: I wanted above all else for this project to be something I personally would want to watch, and we’ve absolutely succeeded by that metric. My hope is that you folks like it as well. (And, hey, even if you don’t, we’ll still have about 50,000 words of tasty-tasty Apollo-themed longform articles to read, too!)
But wait, there’s more…
One unique thing that we pushed hard on doing is that, in addition to producing and releasing “The Greatest Leap,” we’ve also cleaned up the raw interviews with each of our more-than-a-dozen interview subjects, and we’ll be releasing those videos (with transcripts) as well. So if you really like what Chester Vaughan or Chris Kraft or Milt Heflin had to say to us, you can download and watch/read the full 2-3 hour interview and soak up all the rest of the talk that didn’t make it into the final documentary. These extra bits will run as regular Ars stories throughout the week (and we’ll have them all linked up from a series page once they’re all run).
We’ll want as many folks as possible to see the documentary and read the pieces, so, while they’re up, Ars will be using a slightly modified layout that puts a lot of focus onto the current story and its video (logged-in users will be able to revert to their preferred layout, fear not).
This is far and away the most difficult thing I’ve participated in over the five years I’ve been at Ars, and I hope you folks love the results as much as I do. Can’t wait for you to see it.