Review: Chasing the Moon finds engaging new stories to tell

Nearly every major media outlet has a series of programs scheduled for this month to celebrate and remember the Apollo missions. Some succeed better than others. Nearly all of them will teach you something new about the mission or the people behind it.

Among the more impressive and comprehensive documentaries is the three-part Chasing the Moon , directed by Robert Stone, which PBS is running throughout this month as part of its American Experience series. The films tackle the US space program from four distinct angles: the competition with the Soviet Union, the public and private reactions to NASA’s missions, the rediscovered stories of the women who worked at NASA, and the experiences of Edward Joseph Dwight Jr, who in the 1960s almost became the first African American to go to space.

The race between the US and USSR

Stone, who worked on the films for five years, says that his memories of the Moon landing guided the way he approached the project. “I was a kid in England, and my mother woke me up at 4:00am,” he says. “My focus with the film was to recapture the emotion and feeling I felt as a 10-year-old when we were going to the Moon, when the project was developing, and when we achieved it.”

The story starts, as do most histories of the space program, with Wernher von Braun in Germany during World War II. A charismatic figure who was able to persuade Adolf Hitler to fund a missile program, von Braun managed to build thousands of V1 and V2 rockets for the war effort. After the war, von Braun and many of the most experienced rocket scientists were spirited to the US and started working for the US Army in Alabama.

Other German scientists and engineers found themselves in the Soviet Union, a side of the story less often addressed in Apollo documentaries. In the early 1950s Sergei Korolev, the head of the Soviet space program, managed to persuade the Soviet politburo that a true Russian rocket was the way to instill national pride. Korolev’s counsel, and his rocketry, enabled the Soviets to put the first satellite into orbit with Sputnik 1 in 1957. Sputnik‘s launch put serious pressure on NASA to catch up to Soviet spaceflight technology—pressure that only intensified when the Soviets made Yuri Gagarin the first man in space in 1961.

In spite of worries that Soviet rocketry was outstripping US technology, in the late 1960s nearly 60% of Americans surveyed thought that the price tag for going to the Moon was too expensive . Even President John F. Kennedy, who had made the call to take on that goal, at times said he was “not that interested in space.” To build support in Congress, NASA decided to place many of its facilities, including Mission Control, in the southern districts of the Democratic politicians who controlled the money.

NASA also initiated a public relations campaign. Astronauts spent some of their time reporting to the NASA press office, which sent them to give speeches at schools and on Capitol Hill. They hated doing it, but the efforts paid off: NASA gained strong support for its programs.

An African American astronaut candidate

Chasing the Moon‘s discussions of astronaut selection and early PR campaigns for Apollo highlight the overlooked story of Ed Dwight, a fighter pilot who nearly became the first African American astronaut. Dwight had an outstanding military record, and the Kennedy administration was keen for NASA to have an African American astronaut. After passing his medical exam, Dwight was sent to Chuck Yeager’s flight school, the testing ground for potential astronauts. According to Dwight , Yeager pulled all the instructors into a room and ordered them not to speak to Dwight, not to interact or provide advice to him, and not to socialize with him outside of the base. Yeager’s reason was that he didn’t want “a colored guy” to be an astronaut.

The hostile atmosphere affected Dwight’s record. He placed 14th in the school’s rankings, and only the top 10 were supposed to go to NASA for the next round of training. However, NASA still wanted Dwight. Yeager insisted that if Dwight was going, then NASA should take all the pilots rated above him too. NASA did exactly that.

Dwight appeared in many media interviews during the early 1960s, and he was sent to schools to drum up enthusiasm for the space program. There was a lot of confusion between Dwight and astronaut Ed White, confusion that was encouraged by NASA. When White was in orbit aboard Gemini 4, NASA distributed pictures of Dwight in the neighborhood near the ground station in Kano, Nigeria. When White returned from orbit, he found two sackloads of mail addressed to Dwight.

Dwight’s career trajectory stalled. He was not one of the 30 Apollo candidates chosen from a group of 271 to go to Houston for final training and selection in 1963. Why remains uncertain. His nonselection caused an uproar in the African American press (see Ebony magazine, June 1965, page 29 ) and led Dwight to resign from the Air Force in 1966. Eventually, after a varied career, he became a sculptor . Another African American, Robert H. Lawrence , was selected four years after Dwight for astronaut training in June 1967, but he was killed in a simulated spaceship landing six months later. It would be more than a decade before another was picked. Guion Bluford became the first African American to reach orbit in 1983.

Race to the Moon

The Soviets had been first to put a satellite into space and first to put a man in orbit. But as their focus turned to the Moon, their program began to struggle. Their equipment was already obsolete compared with the rapidly developing technology of the Americans. Their lunar lander was crude and unfinished, and they still needed a heavy lift rocket to get it into orbit.

Chasing the Moon has some rare footage of the N1 , the rocket the Soviets hoped to use to send cosmonauts to the Moon. But the N1 would never make the journey. After Korolev’s death in 1966, the tight design, management, and quality-control systems he had put in place began slipping. The N1 exploded on its first test launch. Its next failure, the second of four that would plague the program, was one of the largest nonnuclear explosions in human history. However, many of these failures were unknown in the West; all the CIA could see was a big rocket on a pad. As a result, NASA moved up the Apollo 8 flight to orbit the Moon by three months to speed up the program.

Because of the rush to launch Apollo 8, only one person at NASA had done the calculations for the return-to-Earth trajectories: Poppy Northcutt , a 25-year-old computer and engineer who was one of the few women involved with the mission. “I was still fixing errors when Apollo 8 was on the pad,” she says in the film.

Like Dwight, Northcutt was used by NASA’s media office as an example of how forward-thinking the agency was trying to be. Chasing the Moon includes footage from a cringeworthy interview of Northcutt in which a reporter asks whether it’s distracting for the men to have a woman in the control room. Northcutt gives a measured response on how, after time, she became just “one of the boys” who is respected for her intellect. In a modern-day interview, however, she frankly describes just how difficult it was to work in the macho environment of the control room. After she left NASA, Northcutt became a distinguished women’s rights lawyer in Texas.

Life of an astronaut

Stone’s films offer a rare view of the personal lives of the Apollo astronauts. Safety concerns placed enormous emotional strain on the astronauts and their families. By the time of the Apollo 8 flight, 15 of the 30 launches of crew-rated vehicles had ended in failure. A horrific fire during what should have been a routine training exercise in the Apollo 1 capsule killed Gus Grissom, White, and Roger Chaffee.

Viewers learn that Buzz Aldrin’s mother was deeply stressed by the media coverage of Aldrin’s Gemini 12 flight. Shortly after his selection for Apollo 11, she died by suicide, and the film shows a tense press interview with Aldrin not long afterward. That personal tragedy, along with the overwhelming media coverage of the astronauts after they returned to Earth—which none of them were really prepared for—led Aldrin to a nervous breakdown; he later talked publicly about depression and suicide at a time when few public figures did.

Other families struggled with alcoholism. White’s widow, Pat, began drinking after the Apollo 1 fire that killed her husband. Susan Borman, married to Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman, was one of Pat’s closest friends; their connection is illustrated by remarkable 35 mm footage obtained by Stone from Borman, showing Pat among the family and friends at the Borman house watching the Apollo 8 mission on television. The stress, and the later media requests, led Susan to begin drinking as well, ultimately leading her to rehab. The Bormans are among the few astronaut couples that remained married.

Apollo’s legacy

The last episode in the series could have been depressing; the Moon is reached, but layoffs start even before the astronauts reentered Earth’s atmosphere, and the last lunar flight happens in 1972. Apollo staggers on until 1976 with the Apollo–Soyuz program and Skylab before being canceled. But instead of taking a negative view, Stone looks at the next generation of engineers and scientists developing a new series of rockets. “I didn’t want to leave the audience with a bummer at the end of the movie, as a lot of good did come out of [Apollo], such as this infectious optimism of the future,” he says. “It demonstrates that any technological problem we face, like solving climate change … can be solved if there is political will and resources applied to it.”

A large number of Apollo films and documentaries are competing for your attention this month. Even in that field, Chasing the Moon stands out for its attention to detail and its focus on stories about Apollo that aren’t always told. It is a good complement to the superb Apollo 11 IMAX documentary and well worth your time to see.

Part one of Chasing the Moon premiered on PBS 8 July, and is now available to watch on the PBS video app. Part two and three appear on consecutive nights afterward at 9:00pm EDT.

Editor’s note, 8 November 2019: The article has been updated to correct the section about Ed Dwight. We removed a reference to a White House investigation into Chuck Yeager’s treatment of Dwight—the investigation was conducted, but its conclusions have not been made public. The previous version of the article also erroneously stated that white astronaut candidates had refused to fly with Dwight and that Deke Slayton, the chief of the astronaut office, had pushed Dwight out of the astronaut program. Although many have questioned why Dwight was not chosen to join the 1963 astronaut class, we know of no publicly available primary documentation that confirms those claims. We apologize for the errors.