Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo

source: Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo

This is an outstanding documentary that is the perfect companion to "Apollo 11." The interviews bring a very human quality to the flight controllers as well as to the astronauts themselves. The organization, engineering and commitment made the Apollo program such a wonderous achievement. Sit back, relax and enjoy.

When a documentary is able not only to inform accurately but also to engage emotionally its audience, well that's a hell of an accomplishments... Mission Control does that as only a few other documentaries do; without slipping into nostalgia for the sake of it or cheesy celebration of the good old times, Mission Control brings us back in the heart of the action of the critical Apollo missions, from the desks of the Houston centre. Its ability to highlight the human side of such actions alongside the technological one is stunning. What particularly amazed me is how much these guys could accomplish with a technology that, compared to what we have now, it stone age...

The movie makes great use of historical footage and insightful interviews to paint a picture of the human side of the Apollo missions. A side that is easy to go overlooked and as far as I know have not been revealed before. Tough and compitent. Respect.

Amazing, just amazing. If you like documentaries, you will love this one. As a movie it was good, but as documentary fan it was as bliss

This is an actual good documentary which in my opinion is underated. Interviews with numerous engineers that worked on the apollo program as wel as archival footage mixed with VFX really give a good representation of what the missions were like and how special of an achievement the apollo missions were.

This documentary, directed by David Fairhead, offers the viewer a most candid behind the scenes look at Houston's Mission Control Center during the early U.S. space program. If focuses primarily on the Apollo Program, of the 1960's and 70's, with plenty of archival footage of the times and interviews with those that manned the control room, as well as the astronauts that flew the early missions. The film includes the tragedy of Apollo 1 when 3 astronauts died in a capsule fire as they awaited liftoff at Cape Kennedy, the first manned orbit around the moon on Apollo 8, and, of course, the remarkable team effort to return Apollo 13 safely back to earth after a life threatening malfunction (you may have seen the movie). Naturally, I'm not forgetting Apollo 11, where Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon, setting off shock waves and awe around the world. It was fascinating for me, even though I have seen other movies on this subject over the years, to hear the intricate details of what went into each flight from the engineers, flight controllers, and astronauts that lived through every minute of it.

I am so glad I was able to view a special presentation of this incredible film!! Growing up in the Apollo era, I was always intrigued by the men on the ground wearing headsets and staring into small TV screens, who broke into applause and hugged each other at the moment they knew the mission was successful. This film tells the story of these "Unsung Heros", mostly in their own words, and with lots of photos of them at work in that special room we know as Mission Control. It shows how they reacted to failure as well as success, and how failure served to strengthen the inherent integrity each brought to this crucial part of manned space flight. It shows how they figured out how to do their jobs in this new era of space exploration, and how important teamwork was to their endeavor. It illustrates how individual dedication works to to make the sum greater than its parts. Mission Control was, and is, a crucial part of all space flight! I am grateful to have this documentary of the special individuals that gave so much of themselves to assure the success of the Apollo Special Program!!

I had the pleasure of seeing "Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo" during SXSW Film 2017. I thought the documentary was well constructed, juxtaposing stills and videos from the late 1960s and early 1970s with present-day video interviews of many of the engineers who ran Mission Control at NASA. This is the kind of documentary that could easily be 10 hours, so I can understand the challenges the director faced to determine what to put in and what to leave out from the primary feature. Several of the engineers interviewed in the movie were present on stage after the screening, including John Aaron and Jerry Bostick. The documentary included interviews with Mission Control managers and engineers Dr. Christopher Kraft, Gene Kranz, Glynn Lunney, Jerry Bostick, John Aaron, Gerry Griffin, Ed Fendell, Sy Liebergot, and several others. It also had interviews with astronauts Gene Cernan and Jim Lovell. The movie begins at the dawn of the Space Race with discussions of test pilots and moves quickly to the sense of urgency created when the USSR launched Sputnik and put Yuri Gagarin into space. It covers the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs well through Apollo 13, but then summarizes Apollo 14 through present-day ISS in only a few minutes. While the stories of Apollo 1, Apollo 8, Apollo 11, Apollo 12, and certainly Apollo 13 are incredibly engaging, I would have loved to see a bit more time devoted to events after Apollo 13, and a deeper discussion from the interviewees on how they felt as the program wound down and the last few Apollo flights were canceled. Nevertheless, the documentary is really great, and strongly recommended. In a few more years, all the great leaders who made six moon landings and much more at NASA possible will no longer be with us. Think about that as you watch this, and consider supporting continued space exploration.

If you've studied your history, watched the Discovery Channel and seen movies like 1983's "The Right Stuff", 1995's "Apollo 13" or even "Space Camp" (1986), "Armageddon" (1998) or "Gravity" (2013), you may think you know about the U.S. space program. Those films are all excellent (as are many other similar movies), but they only tell part of the story. If you haven't seen a well-made documentary on the subject… you don't know NASA. 2017's "Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo" (NR, 1:41) fills in some of the gaps in our knowledge and increases our appreciation for the accomplishments of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (especially regarding the missions to the moon) and the men who got us there. What the terrific 2016 Best Picture Oscar nominee "Hidden Figures" did for black female NASA employees, this doc does for the pasty guys with crew cuts whom those ladies supported. "Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo" starts by establishing its story's historical context. In 1957, the Soviet Union shocked the world by putting Sputnik, the first man-made satellite in human history, into orbit around the earth. The following year, President Eisenhower created NASA and both he and his successors, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, refocused our attention on the space race, but it took about a decade for the U.S. to pass the U.S.S.R. Besides launching the earth's first artificial satellite, the Russians also put a man into space and then into orbit before their American Cold War rivals accomplished those feats. But by 1962, the U.S. had caught up with the Soviets and, encouraged by JFK's famous 1961 message to Congress, had set its sights on getting to the moon before the 60s had ended. After the Project Mercury missions got American astronauts into space and Project Gemini increased the complexity and capabilities of American spacecraft, Project Apollo was created to fulfill President Kennedy's stated goal of "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth". Only, it wouldn't be a "him"; it would be "them", several groups of "them", groups of three men who would risk their lives to get to the moon. And it would only happen after much blood, sweat and tears. NASA was creating a space program from scratch and inventing the necessary processes and procedures as they went along. But they still had doubts as to whether they could even achieve the President's objective. The dangers inherent in a robust space program (and just how much work Apollo had to do) became painfully clear in 1967 when the three astronauts of Apollo 1 were killed in a cabin fire during a prelaunch test. After taking 20 months to re-evaluate every aspect of the Apollo program, progress resumed. As this documentary works its way through the Apollo missions, it pays special and increasing attention to those which made the most history, especially Apollo 8, Apollo 11 and Apollo 13. The Apollo story is told through a combination of interviews with several surviving members of NASA mission control during the Apollo years, a significant amount of archival footage and some modern animation. "Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo" is a fascinating, well-balanced and entertaining documentary. It's always fun to learn something new and learning about the Apollo story through this film is about as much fun as such a thing gets. The interviews personalize the Apollo mission control experience and director David Fairhead and his team keep the clips short and the editing crisp. It's surprising how much archival footage exists to illustrate the history the film tells us and it's all well-placed throughout the movie. All this is supplemented by terrific computer animation which shows us some of the most important moments in Project Apollo like they've never before appeared in a single feature film. This documentary is so good, I was wishing it were longer than it is. "A-"