Mission Control profiles NASA heroes who never left the ground

Popular-culture depictions of spaceflight often focus on the people inside the capsules, and with good reason. The astronauts, after all, are the ones strapping themselves to a multistage rocket and journeying to the most inhospitable of environments. But those trips are made possible by huge teams of highly trained men and women back on Earth—people who tend to be in the background of stories about the space program.

Slowly, however, our picture of American space history is changing. The 2016 blockbuster Hidden Figures brought the story of women mathematicians at NASA to the big screen (see the Physics Today review ). Now NASA’s flight directors and ground support engineers get a film of their own, the documentary Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo, which profiles the people who oversaw and directed the Apollo flights.

More than a dozen members of Apollo-era mission control are interviewed for the documentary, and their stories and personalities come through despite the film’s somewhat shaky narrative structure. The men (in the 1960s and 1970s, it was all men) who sat at the command consoles in Houston arrived there via diverse paths. Some came from the military or industry; several were air traffic controllers or military weathermen with experience interpreting complex data to ensure flight safety. Others arrived at NASA straight out of school. Chris Kraft, whom astronaut Gene Cernan describes as “the creator of mission control,” was snapped up by NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, shortly after he finished his engineering degree at Virginia Tech.

The early segments of Mission Control give a rough sketch of the history of the space program, including the American response to Sputnik 1. The film tends to assume that viewers are familiar with NASA’s history, and the absence of a narrator can occasionally make the background material difficult to follow; it may not be an ideal film for viewers new to the subject.

The film finds its footing when it moves into the Apollo missions, beginning with the tragic Apollo 1. By the 1960s NASA was under enormous pressure to place men on the Moon as soon as possible. In January 1967, three astronauts were killed in a training exercise when the command module they were testing experienced an electrical malfunction. The pressurized oxygen inside the capsule turned the resulting fire into a deadly inferno. Kraft’s pain and remorse over the deaths of the three astronauts on board are still clear decades later. “We knew that there was bad workmanship, we knew that the wires were exposed,” he says. “I think that we killed those three men. It was almost murder.”

The interviewees have powerful memories of the speech that flight director Gene Kranz gave to mission control after the Apollo 1 disaster, in which he said that they were responsible for the deaths of the crew. “We could have gone to the program manager and said we weren’t ready, and we didn’t,” Kranz recalls in his interview. Kranz quickly becomes one of the most memorable figures in the film; it’s easy to see how his charisma and fast-talking intelligence made him a NASA legend.

Eventually spaceflight resumed, and the flight of Apollo 8 is arguably the film’s standout sequence. That mission was the first to attempt a lunar orbit, and mission control knew it would lose contact with the astronauts when they passed behind the Moon. The documentary builds tension with video and audio from 1968 and with a well-executed animation of the craft’s orbit. Apollo 8 has faded into the background over time, overshadowed by later achievements, but Mission Control makes it clear that the exciting, nerve-racking flight was a major milestone for NASA.

Mission Control also finds new things to say about NASA’s two most famous missions, Apollo 11 and Apollo 13. The film gives a wonderful window onto the hectic atmosphere at mission control in the weeks leading up to the first Moon landing. The engineers were running test flights around the clock, trying to anticipate every possible scenario. At least one mission control veteran tells his interviewer that if he were given a do-over, he might not take the job again because of the toll the hours took on his family. But when the flight day for Apollo 11 came, the experience from countless test flights—plus a handwritten table of error codes and their meanings—saved the mission from being aborted when an error message showed just before landing.

The Apollo 13 sequence is even more memorable. The third lunar landing mission famously suffered an explosion in space that almost cost the astronauts their oxygen supply. Mission control veterans are frank about the panic that followed astronaut James Lovell’s famous words, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” Engineers slept on the floor and all but lived at mission control until the flight’s conclusion. There is an especially evocative discussion of the cigarette smoke that filled the room as the team lit up to cope with their stress. The documentary highlights the equipment challenges that the engineers faced and gives viewers a new appreciation for the tremendous dedication and ingenuity that brought the crew home. For instance, NASA engineers had to work with the astronauts to develop procedures for flying the lunar lander with unexpected baggage—the 20 000-kg-plus service module—attached.

Mission Control is available on Vimeo , iTunes , Amazon Video , and Google Play Movies ; DVD and Blu-ray versions will be released on 13 June. Space history buffs and fans of Ron Howard’s classic film Apollo 13 will find it well worth their time and money. The documentary casts a well-deserved spotlight on the engineers that supported the astronauts from the ground, bringing to life the extraordinary effort that went into sending humans into space and bringing them home safely.