[FPSPACE] When We Left Earth on The Discovery Channel starting this Sunday

[LARRY KLAES]

When We Left Earth on The Discovery Channel starting this Sunday

NYT review Here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/arts/television/06eart.html

To quote from the article:

Mr. Shepard and Mr. Armstrong get their due, of course, but so does the 
long-ignored Gemini program — the essential middle step between the original 
Mercury flights and the Apollo missions that laid so much of the groundwork 
for reaching the Moon. And there is Skylab, the first American space station 
and the subject of an audacious rescue effort after damage during ascent 
threatened to render it useless.

And the series devotes hours to the current space program. Two episodes 
focus on the space shuttle, NASA’s attempt to make space travel routine, 
which for many people made it dull.

Kathryn Harrison, a former astronaut who flew three shuttle missions, 
including the one that launched the Hubble Space Telescope, and who appears 
in the film, applauded the broader focus of the series in a telephone 
interview this week. She suggested that the breadth might be a function of 
the big, round anniversary itself. Maybe, she said, “given that your target 
and your assignment is 50, you found yourself discovering that the program 
didn’t end in ’73; you found meaning and purpose and significance to events 
that occurred in ‘spaceflight as Southwest Airlines.’ ”