—Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing, This Six-Hour Series Explores the 10-Year Space Race Odyssey—
CHASING THE MOON, a six-hour documentary series about the space race, from its earliest beginnings to the monumental achievement of the first lunar landing in 1969 and beyond, premiered in 2019 on PBS.
CHASING THE MOON thoroughly reimagines the race to the moon for a new generation, upending much of the conventional mythology surrounding the effort.
The three-part series recasts the Space Age as a fascinating stew of scientific innovation and PR savvy, political calculation and media spectacle, visionary impulses and personal drama.
With no narration and using only archival footage — including a visual feast of previously lost or overlooked material — the film features new interviews with a diverse cast of characters who played key roles in these historic events.
Among those included are astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Frank Borman and Bill Anders; Freeman Dyson, the renowned futurist and theoretical physicist; Sergei Khrushchev, the son of former Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, who played a prominent role in the Soviet space program as a rocket engineer; Poppy Northcutt, the 25-year-old “mathematics whiz” who gained worldwide attention as the first woman to serve in the all-male bastion of NASA’s Mission Control; and Ed Dwight, the Air Force pilot selected by the Kennedy administration to train as America’s first black astronaut.
While other documentaries have largely painted a familiar narrative of goals set, obstacles overcome, disasters averted and missions accomplished, CHASING THE MOON tells a vastly more entertaining and surprising story.
As the film reveals, the drive to land a man on the moon was fueled as much by politics as it was by technology and was a controversial undertaking during a volatile time.
Filmmaker Quotes:
“When we think of that breathtaking moment of the 1969 moon landing, we forget what a turbulent time that was,” said Mark Samels, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE executive producer. “The country was dealing with huge problems — Vietnam, poverty, civil rights — and there was a lot of skepticism about the space program. ‘Chasing the Moon’ explores the unbelievably complex challenges that NASA was able to overcome. Not a week goes by when someone doesn’t say, ‘Why can’t we do something today as ambitious, as grand as putting a man on the moon?’ It was a century-defining achievement, and our film tells a familiar story in an entirely new way.”
“As a 10-year-old kid in England in July 1969, my mother woke me up in the middle of the night to watch two Americans set foot upon another world, the Moon quite literally staring at us through the window above our television set,” said Oscar and Emmy Award-nominated filmmaker Robert Stone. “I’d recently seen Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the one-two punch of those two intensely visceral experiences ignited a fire in my mind that’s stuck with me ever since. It’s when I first began to want to be a filmmaker. In many ways, ‘Chasing the Moon’ is the culmination of a lifetime of thoughts that have been churning through my mind about this extraordinary period in which I grew up, about the boundless ambition and promise of a brighter future that space travel inspired, the belief that anything is possible if we join together in a common goal, and the urgency it ignited to preserve and care for our home planet. Having PBS as a partner to take this film out worldwide is a real honor for me.”
READ THE BOOK:
Ballantine Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, will publish the book “Chasing the Moon,” by Stone and writer/researcher Alan Andres, to coincide with the PBS premiere. The book will include and expand on the stories examined in the documentary.
READ AN EXCERPT: From Vision to Reality: Chasing the Moon" by Robert Stone and Alan Andres
EPISODE GUIDE:
PART 1: “A Place Beyond the Sky” begins in 1957 and tracks the early years of the space race as the United States struggles to catch up with the Soviet Union. The episode reveals breathtaking failures and successes of the nascent American space program and demonstrates the stakes and costs of reaching the moon.
PART 2: “Earthrise” covers 1964-1968, four heady, dangerous years in the history of the space race, focusing on the events surrounding the Apollo 1 and Apollo 8 missions. As Americans moved through the 60s and reflect on the challenges ahead, many begin to wonder: What exactly is it going to take to beat the Soviets to the moon?
PART 3: “Magnificent Desolation,” which covers 1969-1970, takes Americans to the moon and back. Dreams of space dramatically intersect with dreams of democracy on American soil, raising questions of national priorities and national identity. The final episode also considers what happens to scientific and engineering programs — and to a country — after ambitious national goals have been achieved.
Watch On Your Schedule:
Watch Episode 1
Watch Episode 2
Watch Episode 3
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Credits:
A Robert Stone Productions film in association with ARTE France for AMERICAN EXPERIENCE. Written, Produced and Directed by Robert Stone. Producers: Daniel Aegerter, Keith Haviland, and Ray Rothrock. Music by Gary Lionelli. Edited by Lindy Jankura and Robert Stone. AMERICAN EXPERIENCE is a production of WGBH Boston. Senior producer is Susan Bellows. Executive Producer is Mark Samels
