@S1-A.ARPA,@MIT-MC:rsf@Pescadero (05/04/85)
From: Ross Finlayson <rsf@Pescadero>
I'm really looking forward to this series. It's a shame that there are only
4 1-hour episodes.
BC-SPACEFLIGHT ADV05
(FOR RELEASE: Sunday, May 5)
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
c.1985 N.Y. Times News Service
NEW YORK - Enough time has passed, more than a quarter of a century,
for the space age now to attract chroniclers who address the
historical dimensions of this new power to break the bonds of Earth's
gravity and travel out to a frontier unlike any other.
There is, it seems, a growing recognition of space flight as an
enduring phenomenon that may well transcend all previous human
experience.
Reflections on the origin, experiences and meaning of spacefaring
have been offered recently in books, movies and television programs.
Tom Wolfe's ''Right Stuff,'' the book and the movie, evoked the early
days of the American space experience.
James A. Michener's ''Space,'' the novel and the television
mini-series last month, enlarged on the experience to shape a
fictional epic of the past 40 years.
And last month, Walter A. McDougal, a Berkeley historian, published
''The Heavens and the Earth,'' the first definitive political history
of the space age.
Now, the Public Broadcasting Service has moved to the launching pad
a documentary, ''Spaceflight,'' covering the history of space
exploration from the early theorists, visionaries and rocket pioneers
through the dramatic moon landings to the flights of the space
shuttle and the prospects of star wars. The first of the four
hour-long segments will be shown Wednesday evening.
''Spaceflight'' is billed as the first prime-time television
documentary series to offer a comprehensive history of both the
Soviet and the American space programs.
Some film, previously withheld from the public, includes scenes of
an X-3 rocketplane crash. The Soviet Union also provided some rare
footage of Sergei Korolev, the ''chief designer'' of the Soviet
program, whose identity remained a secret until after his death in
the late 1960's.
The documentary takes note of the emerging competition of the
European, Japanese and Chinese space efforts. But perhaps inevitably,
owing to the availability of so much more NASA film, the visual
emphasis is centered on American endeavors.
Little attention is given to the unmanned explorations, the landings
of automated craft on Mars and Venus and the odysseys of Pioneers and
Voyagers to the outer planets and the fringes of the solar system.
>From the beginning, the manned program, Soyuz and Salyut, Mercury,
Apollo and the shuttle, have enjoyed political priority, and so they
do in this documentary conceived, written and produced by Blaine
Baggett.
Baggett fastened his initial hopes on space. It was, at first, an
act of faith. For two years of research and interviewing, he had no
outside financial support. Finally, he persuaded the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting and then the Du Pont Co. to back him.
''I read 'The Right Stuff' and found it fascinating. Wolfe had dealt
only with the Mercury astronauts, and I thought there must be so much
other fascinating material out there about space before Mercury and
after.
''I found that no one had ever done a really comprehensive look at
space flight, except on a sort of mission-by-mission basis.''
Moreover, space seemed to fit his own ambitions. ''I wanted to do
documentaries looking at American institutions - why we do the things
we do.''
Baggett interviewed and filmed more than 40 people for the series.
These included such early astronauts as Alan Shepard, Wally Schirra
and John Glenn.
Chuck Yeager, the incomparable test pilot, recalled his attitude
toward the new Mercury space program. ''It wasn't flying to me,''
said Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier. ''So, I
wasn't interested in it.''
Wernher von Braun, the German scientist who built the American
Saturn V moon rocket, is shown in one of his last filmed interviews
before he died in 1977.
A relaxed, reminiscent tone runs through the stories these people
tell, which probably reflects Baggett's off-camera interviewing
technique.
Baggett said he regreted not being able to interview some of the
Soviet astronauts, but his entreaties to the Soviet Embassy in
Washington were met with a cool response.
Mixing the recollections of the interviewees with the pictorial
record, the still photographs of early days and the striking movies
of exploding failures and soaring successes, Baggett produced the
kind of documentary that has all but vanished. Events are not
recreated. The only actor employed is Martin Sheen, who narrates the
series.
In the first episode, ''Thunder in the Skies,'' the story begins
with the launching of Sputnik I on Oct. 4, 1957, the opening shot in
the space age and the so-called space race between the superpowers,
but then properly turns back to the more distant beginnings. There
are scenes from rural Russia in the 19th century, when an obscure
school teacher laid the theoretical groundwork for space flight.
There is Robert H. Goddard, the American pioneer, firing his first
liquid rockets in the 1920's.
The second episode, ''The Wings of Mercury,'' concentrates on the
early days of manned space flight, both in the Soviet Union and the
United States. The third, ''One Giant Leap,'' recounts the struggle
to fulfill the Kennedy commitment to a moon landing, to the Apollo XI
landing at Tranquillity Base on July 20, 1969.
The final episode, ''The Territory Ahead,'' encompasses the Soviet
feats of endurance in the Salyut space stations and the flights of
the American shuttle, the world's first re-usable space ship.