When We Left Earth: A Review

Modern documentaries about the glory days of the space program (Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, more or less) tend to make the same mistakes over and over. But the new Discovery Channel documentary When We Left Earth avoids all those mistakes with uncanny poise and it ends up turning into perhaps the best documentary on the subject.

What does it do so right?

1. It uses genuine documentary footage and completely avoids the use of computer-generated BS. The directors seem to have said "If footage exists, we'll use it. If footage doesn't exist, we won't fake it." This gives the documentary a strongly contemporary feel - I felt as though I was there again without jarring and clumsy CG to destroy my immersion. Much of the footage is stuff I've never seen before, or have seen only rarely - how many times have you seen fire-in-the-hole staging of a Titan booster, to cite just one example? Or footage of Armstrong and Scott getting rid of the Agena while they were trying to figure out the control problem in their Gemini spacecraft? The use of vintage footage and the avoidance of CG, which never looks right, is so good it practically makes the whole documentary. I extend my heartiest thanks to whatever group of people made that decision.

2. It avoids the modern tendency to recast all of these spaceflights in terms of how dangerous and edgy they were. Spaceflight is dangerous, sure, but the producers chose not to turn into drama queens about it. When danger existed, it was acknowledged - Gene Cernan almost passing out during his EVA, the control problem in Gemini 8, the risks of flying within six inches of one another during Gemini 6 and Gemini 7. But they didn't dredge up a bunch of Cassandras to whip up drama about dangers that were manageable.

3. It has Neil Armstrong. This is quite a coup. I don't know why Neil Armstrong chose to participate in this documetary (even now, the narrow-tie engineer in me wants to call him "Mr. Armstrong") but I'm glad he did. Since his retirement from NASA he has been either private or unapproachable, depending on who you're talking to, and I think it's a significant coup for this documentary that they got him - how can you in good faith do a serious documentary about the first moon landing without the first guy to land on the moon?

4. It begins with footage of the X-15. If you propose to make a documentary about spaceflight and you want my complete approval, throw in some footage of the X-15 and say good things about it. It's like honey for a bear; I just can't get enough of the X-15 (I have, built and unbuilt, nine X-15 models floating around the house). I won't say that the X-15 is the quickest way to my heart, because that would be pathetic, but I will say that I'm favorably disposed toward anyone who knows what the X-15 was.

5. It includes plenty of Gene Krantz and Chris Krafft. Gene Krantz is, for me, the bona fide voice and face of the space program. Not having him would be like trying to do a documentary about baseball without, say, Cal Ripkin.

It's not perfect. Some of the footage is used out of place - they kept using a piece of Gemini re-entry footage in situations where Gemini wasn't re-entering, but at least it was real footage. And it's not very technical at all - where technical problems like EVA or rendezvous and docking crop up, they're discussed only in the broadest of terms, usually with the last sentence "by such-and-such a mission the issue had been solved." And I thought it was particularly commercial-heavy on a channel that's already notorious for having a lot of commercials.

I recommend it quite highly, mostly for its very immersive use of real footage, much of it stuff that hasn't been given wide circulation before. But it's pretty well written and respectful of the subject matter, and it includes authoritative comments from people like Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell, Gene Krantz, Gene Cernan and Chris Krafft. Very good stuff indeed.