Good TV

I spend a lot of time on my blog complaining about TV shows and TV commercials, but I'd like to offset a bit of that by recommending a particularly good TV show. Well, I think it's particularly good, but if you don't have any particular interest in the Apollo program, it's not likely to strike your fancy.

It's called Moon Machines and it purports to tell in the span of a commercially-interrupted hour the story of each major chunk of Apollo hardware. The first one covered the Saturn V booster; the second the Apollo command module; the third the navigation computers in the complex. They persistently make it sound like one computer, but it was actually three - the IU at the top of the Saturn V, the computer in the CM and the computer in the LM. I scanned ahead 24 hours and the subject of tomorrow's installment is the Lunar Module, which still (so far as I know) holds the distinction of being the only true manned spacecraft ever built.

The shows are modestly technical - not enough to give me geek thrills, but enough that I can enjoy the show. For example, in the show about the Saturn V, there was a fascinating nugget of information on the cause of the F-1 engine combustion instability problem that I'd never heard before, and this one bit of lore was worth the whole TV show, to me. Though the show, really, is about the engineers, and the best part of the shows are often the idle recollections of the engineers, and the then-and-now photographs of them.


If you're into the space program, by all means give Moon Machines a gander. I don't think you'll be disappointed. If you aren't into the space program, well, I suppose The Singing Office might be on, I don't know.