There's a good series on "Apollo: Mission to the Moon"
this week on National Geographic & another About the space race
on Science Channel all week, select times
a couple other channels have some documentary stuff too
I find it all extremely interesting, great part of US history
there were some 36,000+ (? IIRC) NASA employees
& some 360,000+ (? IIRC) contractors, some 400,000 that contributed
it's amazing the logistics, demographics & procurement processes,
it must have been mind boggling
average age of the NASA engineers was 27 y/o
I find that telling & patriotic
both shows have been really good
some 1st hand accounts & some documentary style narratives
there's another one on the AHC network,
usually all military stuff, has some NASA/Apollo programing stuff too
Cold war era stuff, NASA (CIA even) it was really
a race to get to the moon
Russia was kicking our *** prior to the Apollo program
1st manned space craft to orbit the earth or in space (?)
1st satellite launched & orbit the earth (Sputnik)
we were truly chasing them
the prior Gemini space program was sort of the tipping point
we were catching up & surpassed them
the 1st Mercury program was sort of behind, rocket development was behind
until we got the Saturn V rockets
Russia USSR was still trying to use huge 32+ engine rockets
massive & complicated way more chances of failures
Saturn V was 5 huge rockets millions of pounds of thrust each
out of only 5, instead of 32 like the Russians...
Crazy to think they were originally going to try to land
a
huge full rocket on the moon surface...
1 sole engineer came up with the separate LEM idea
& re-launch back into Moons orbit off the surface
back to the space capsule, dock get back into the capsule
& go back to earth
Race to the Moon
there were covert CIA space programs
right along side that we didn't ever see,
trained right beside the famous "Right Stuff" guys
SPACE FORCE next