sspez While it was great to see and hear anecdotes from the actual team members inside the control rooms - real history - I just felt the whole movie was too light, too casual and missed the chance to go deeper into the Mission Control genesis, development, installation, maintenance, etc... How did the initial systems work? We are told that Chris Craft had a big hand in the software development, but it was glossed over. At one point, they mention that the first few Mercury missions were managed from ground control in Cape Caneveral from inside metal trailers and that simple "gauges" were the instrumentation in front of the controllers. The immediate film clip that follows this comment is a shot of more modern consoles with video screens. Were there no archives available of those earlier control rooms? Odd that a story about precision is delivered with simple misses like that. What about the politics that moved Mission Control from MIT and Kendall Sq in Boston to Houston? (LBJ forced that post Kennedy). What about the companies that provided these key systems and the interplay with how they were used, debugged and improved (or not) over time? Not a waste of time to watch, but left me feeling the filmmakers could have really brought some deeper research to bear.

Larry Silverstein This documentary, directed by David Fairhead, offers the viewer a most candid behind the scenes look at Houston's Mission Control Center during the early U.S. space program. If focuses primarily on the Apollo Program, of the 1960's and 70's, with plenty of archival footage of the times and interviews with those that manned the control room, as well as the astronauts that flew the early missions.The film includes the tragedy of Apollo 1 when 3 astronauts died in a capsule fire as they awaited liftoff at Cape Kennedy, the first manned orbit around the moon on Apollo 8, and, of course, the remarkable team effort to return Apollo 13 safely back to earth after a life threatening malfunction (you may have seen the movie).Naturally, I'm not forgetting Apollo 11, where Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon, setting off shock waves and awe around the world. It was fascinating for me, even though I have seen other movies on this subject over the years, to hear the intricate details of what went into each flight from the engineers, flight controllers, and astronauts that lived through every minute of it.

Dave McClain If you've studied your history, watched the Discovery Channel and seen movies like 1983's "The Right Stuff", 1995's "Apollo 13" or even "Space Camp" (1986), "Armageddon" (1998) or "Gravity" (2013), you may think you know about the U.S. space program. Those films are all excellent (as are many other similar movies), but they only tell part of the story. If you haven't seen a well-made documentary on the subject… you don't know NASA. 2017's "Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo" (NR, 1:41) fills in some of the gaps in our knowledge and increases our appreciation for the accomplishments of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (especially regarding the missions to the moon) and the men who got us there. What the terrific 2016 Best Picture Oscar nominee "Hidden Figures" did for black female NASA employees, this doc does for the pasty guys with crew cuts whom those ladies supported."Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo" starts by establishing its story's historical context. In 1957, the Soviet Union shocked the world by putting Sputnik, the first man-made satellite in human history, into orbit around the earth. The following year, President Eisenhower created NASA and both he and his successors, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, refocused our attention on the space race, but it took about a decade for the U.S. to pass the U.S.S.R. Besides launching the earth's first artificial satellite, the Russians also put a man into space and then into orbit before their American Cold War rivals accomplished those feats. But by 1962, the U.S. had caught up with the Soviets and, encouraged by JFK's famous 1961 message to Congress, had set its sights on getting to the moon before the 60s had ended.After the Project Mercury missions got American astronauts into space and Project Gemini increased the complexity and capabilities of American spacecraft, Project Apollo was created to fulfill President Kennedy's stated goal of "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth". Only, it wouldn't be a "him"; it would be "them", several groups of "them", groups of three men who would risk their lives to get to the moon. And it would only happen after much blood, sweat and tears. NASA was creating a space program from scratch and inventing the necessary processes and procedures as they went along. But they still had doubts as to whether they could even achieve the President's objective.The dangers inherent in a robust space program (and just how much work Apollo had to do) became painfully clear in 1967 when the three astronauts of Apollo 1 were killed in a cabin fire during a prelaunch test. After taking 20 months to re-evaluate every aspect of the Apollo program, progress resumed. As this documentary works its way through the Apollo missions, it pays special and increasing attention to those which made the most history, especially Apollo 8, Apollo 11 and Apollo 13. The Apollo story is told through a combination of interviews with several surviving members of NASA mission control during the Apollo years, a significant amount of archival footage and some modern animation."Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo" is a fascinating, well-balanced and entertaining documentary. It's always fun to learn something new and learning about the Apollo story through this film is about as much fun as such a thing gets. The interviews personalize the Apollo mission control experience and director David Fairhead and his team keep the clips short and the editing crisp. It's surprising how much archival footage exists to illustrate the history the film tells us and it's all well-placed throughout the movie. All this is supplemented by terrific computer animation which shows us some of the most important moments in Project Apollo like they've never before appeared in a single feature film. This documentary is so good, I was wishing it were longer than it is. "A-"

joepeartree I had the pleasure of seeing "Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo" during SXSW Film 2017. I thought the documentary was well constructed, juxtaposing stills and videos from the late 1960s and early 1970s with present-day video interviews of many of the engineers who ran Mission Control at NASA. This is the kind of documentary that could easily be 10 hours, so I can understand the challenges the director faced to determine what to put in and what to leave out from the primary feature.Several of the engineers interviewed in the movie were present on stage after the screening, including John Aaron and Jerry Bostick.The documentary included interviews with Mission Control managers and engineers Dr. Christopher Kraft, Gene Kranz, Glynn Lunney, Jerry Bostick, John Aaron, Gerry Griffin, Ed Fendell, Sy Liebergot, and several others. It also had interviews with astronauts Gene Cernan and Jim Lovell.The movie begins at the dawn of the Space Race with discussions of test pilots and moves quickly to the sense of urgency created when the USSR launched Sputnik and put Yuri Gagarin into space. It covers the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs well through Apollo 13, but then summarizes Apollo 14 through present-day ISS in only a few minutes. While the stories of Apollo 1, Apollo 8, Apollo 11, Apollo 12, and certainly Apollo 13 are incredibly engaging, I would have loved to see a bit more time devoted to events after Apollo 13, and a deeper discussion from the interviewees on how they felt as the program wound down and the last few Apollo flights were canceled.Nevertheless, the documentary is really great, and strongly recommended. In a few more years, all the great leaders who made six moon landings and much more at NASA possible will no longer be with us. Think about that as you watch this, and consider supporting continued space exploration.