My co-workers will not be surprised to hear me admit that I am an unabashed space geek. When I was little my mom, who was an astronomy major at Wellesley, used to take me out with our cute red Edmund AstroScan to look at the Pleiades. In college I interned at Sky & Telescope magazine, and just about died of excitement when I got to do a feature story on the meteorite of Ensisheim. And I even managed to marry an astronomy writer, whose brother and sister-in-law work for NASA. 
So I’m just about the prime target audience for a new six-part series on the Discovery channel, called When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions. The first two hours debuted last night; the remaining installments will come over the next two Sundays. The heavily-promoted series promises rare footage, behind-the-scenes access, yada yada yada … the sort of thing a TV channel needs to promise to draw in viewers who’ve watched NASA footage for decades.
But this series actually delivers.
There’s footage of Alan Shepard and John Glenn inside their capsules on their record-setting Mercury flights; you can actually watch Glenn as he asks mission control why they want him to leave the retro package on for re-entry. (They think his heat shield will fall off without it, but they don’t want to tell him that.) There’s footage of all the weird things astronauts used to do to try to train for zero gravity; in the days before the underwater neutral-buoyancy lab, they did things like get suspended sideways above the ground, then run along a vertical wall while using thrusters to get used to the sense of maneuvering in space. Neil Armstrong pops up for a rare interview session; Ed White’s first spacewalk (see picture) is transcendent.
The third hour of this series is set to be Apollo. The only problem is, it’s all going to go downhill from there. How is Discovery ever going to maintain interest in the rest of the series when NASA did all of its fabulous human exploration four decades ago?
Elsewhere, the Los Angeles Times has a solid review here; John Schwartz of the New York Times takes a historical perspective here. And Robert Pearlman of collectSPACE.com challenges the ‘never-before-seen footage’ claims here.
Image: NASA (who else?)