Customer Reviews

Moon Race: The History of Apollo

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This two DVD set of NASA documentaries focuses on the Project Apollo missions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This box set combines Moon Race - The History of the Apollo, Vol. 1: The Eagle Has Landed - Apollo4-Apollo11 and Moon Race - The History of the Apollo, Vol. 2: Houston, We Have a Problem - Apollo 12-Soyuz at a price (when this was written) only $1 more than the price of either DVD alone! This is a terrific bargain for anyone interested in space exploration.

Disc 1: Moon Race - The History of the Apollo, Volume 1: The Eagle Has Landed

* The Time of Apollo (Project Apollo overview)

* Apollo 4 (unmanned launch of the gigantic Saturn V rocket)

* Apollo 5 (unmanned launch into earth orbit and flight test of the lunar module)

* Apollo 8: Go for TLI (first manned lunar orbit)

* Apollo 9: Three to Make Ready (first manned test flight of the lunar module)

* Apollo 10: Green Light for Lunar Landing (lunar orbit and test of the operations required for lunar landing)

* Apollo 11: The Eagle Has Landed (first manned lunar landing and exploration)

Disc 2: Moon Race - The History of the Apollo, Volume 2: Houston, We Have a Problem

* Apollo 12: Pinpoint for Science (second lunar landing finds a previously launched unmanned probe)

* Houston, We Have a Problem (Apollo 13's mission of exploration becomes a struggle for survival)

* Apollo 14: Mission to Fra Mauro (lunar landing searches for the oldest rocks ever found)

* Apollo 15: In the Mountains of the Moon (lunar exploration extends its reach using the lunar rover)

* Apollo 16: Nothing So Hidden (an exploration of the lunar highlands)

* On the Shoulders of Giants (Apollo 17, the last and longest lunar landing, brings the first scientist to the moon)

* The Mission of Apollo - Soyuz

This set provides a splendid overview of Project Apollo. It was nice to see the films of the unmanned flight tests. I haven't found these in other collections. (Perhaps documentary films were never made for the other unmanned test flights: Apollo 2 and 3 tested the Saturn IB rocket and Apollo 6, like Apollo 4, tested the Saturn V.)

One glaring omission is the first manned Apollo space flight, Apollo 7. I can't imagine why it was left out. But most of all, any history of the Apollo era is incomplete without discussion of the tragic loss of the Apollo 1 crew in a launch pad fire, and the effect that accident had on the space program.

So while there is room for improvement here, this collection of public domain video preserves the view NASA had of its work at the time. This view of history-in-the-making can often be more revealing than a slickly-produced retrospective.

Good coverage of Apollo space program from preliminary flights through actual landings. Videography is not up to today's standards, but then it is what was available when it was happening.

These videotapes are a set of documentaries that NASA made about the Apollo missions to the Moon shortly after they occurred. These are good summaries, with the segment on each mission running about 20 to 30 minutes and so not a lot of detail but enough to give a good idea of what happened. And collectively, the whole tape set runs almost 6 hours, which is considerable. These tapes have lots of great footage from the missions, with each segment going through every stage from liftoff to splashdown, and a narrator explaining the highlights. Sometimes the films do seem a bit prosaic in running through the summaries of the missions without much attempt to do so artistically, yet at the same time there's a historic sense of seeing films made during the same era of the missions. The first film, "The Time of Apollo," is a more poetic and expansive look at the whole program. The rest of the films are "Apollo 4 - The First Test," "Apollo 5," "Apollo 8 - Go For TLI," "Apollo 9 - Three to Make Ready," "Apollo 10 - Green Light for a Lunar Landing," "The Eagle Has Landed - The Flight of Apollo 11," "Apollo 12 - Pinpoint for Science," "Apollo 13 - 'Houston We've Got a Problem'," "Apollo 14 - Mission to Fra Mauro," "Apollo 15 - In the Mountains of the Moon," "Apollo 16 - 'Nothing So Hidden'," "Apollo 17 - On the Shoulders of Giants," and "Mission of Apollo-Soyuz." Strangely, films for Apollo 1 (with the fire that killed Grisson, Chaffee, and White) and Apollo 7 are absent.

The video and audio quality on these videotapes is not great, but tolerable, and vary a good deal from one film to the next. Some sections look very good. And as far as I know, this set is the ONLY way to see all these films. The 5-DVD set NASA: Ultimate Collection From Orbit to Beyond does NOT contain all of these. I have not seen the DVD set NASA: 50 Years of Space Exploration so I don't know if it contains all these or not. In summary, I'd say that "Moon Race: The History of Apollo" gives you a quite satisfying look at the Apollo program, with the qualifications noted above. And if this is the only place all these films are available to the general public, it's a very valuable set indeed! And I recently discovered that this collection is now also available on DVD.

The story itself was told well. I was surprised they glossed over the Apollo 1 disaster and how it delayed the program, but it was otherwise ok.

The video could have been cleaned up, but I wasn't expecting much at this price. They could stand to do some video processing, though. There's a lot of dirt on the films that could be digitally removed.

However, I have a serious beef with the DVD. I tried watching it on three different devices with different sound systems, and on each of them (so I know it wasn't my sound setup) there was terrible reverb on the sound track for the chapter "The Time of Apollo". It was terribly annoying, but thankfully it ended once the "Apollo 4" chapter started. DVDs should NOT ship with such a defect! I basically can't watch that chapter because the reverb drives me batty. It's like the old Stan Freberg skit where Elvis can't turn off his reverb machine, except it's 27 minutes long... AAAARGH!!!