In The Shadow Of The Moon

I bought this purely on spec as it was a Ron Howard documentary about the Apollo project.

It's really good.

It contains interviews with the surviving Apollo astronauts as well as re-mastered footage from the moon landings.

I'm a bit of a moon buff. I really enjoyed the From The Earth To The Moon series that Ron Howard and Tom Hanks produced, and this film was again full of trivia and little stories about the astronauts. For example, I knew that the navigation computer on the LEM effectively crashed twice on the decent. What I didn't know was that it was Buzz Aldrin's fault. Buzz is of course a nickname, but he has another nickname; "Doctor Rendezvous", because of his work on orbital rendezvous. Because he was concerned that the landing would be aborted, he left the rendezvous radar on so he could find the command module quickly. This radar continued feeding data to the computer, while it was simultaneously receiving data from the landing radar. The computer couldn't cope with this and spat out error message 12 02 (buffer over-run).

Also in the film are the usual shots of the spacecraft that we are familiar with, but the re-mastering really brings them to life and a lot of footage will be new to most folk.

Score: 7/10 Good documentary, and quite funny in places.

OQ: Neil had been two seconds from death that morning but afterwards he'd got up and just gone back to his office to do paperwork.