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Great empires leave markers of the new heights they reach, and a new documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon, about the first manned lunar missions, presents America's. Just as the Great Pyramid was a monument to a dead leader, the rockets firing skyward from Cape Canaveral were an homage to President Kennedy, who challenged his generation to reach the moon by the end of the 1960s. What a difference a muse makes: Has there been any other technological advance this spectacular, any cultural moment this transcendent, any patriotic episode that showed American character and innovation in such focus? Not when you hear from the astronauts themselves.
Other films have created one-note facsimiles of these thrill-riders—the agitated Ed Harris in Apollo 13, the stony Scott Glenn in The Right Stuff, or even the louche Jack Nicholson in Terms of Endearment. But Shadow portrays them as more nuanced and, as such, more memorable. Listen to their stories and you'll feel like a pledge in their fraternity. There's Michael Collins, a quirky techie still bristling at his wingman role; he piloted the command module while his Apollo 11 buddies got to make footprints in moondust on July 20, 1969. From the same crew, Buzz Aldrin's oddball intensity earned him the nickname Dr. Rendezvous—he would obsess about orbit schedules while his colleagues were busy eyeing women at cocktail hour. The reclusive Neil Armstrong is never interviewed, and his fellow astronauts suggest that after such a giant leap for mankind, terrestrial steps—and presumably, interviews—seemed tedious to him.
Some of the testimony is a little retrograde: Collins assesses the skills of his colleagues and declares, "There weren't any weak sisters in the bunch." But in general, the citizen spacemen returned with a new sensitivity. First of all, they got to escape the Earth's atmosphere instead of dropping napalm on Vietnamese jungles, and they express survivor's guilt that so many flight-school friends never made it home. Second, they feel literally blessed to have embodied the NASA heyday, which, when seen in this postcard from the American apogee, will reawaken a taste for Tang and a memory payload of cool contraptions that make today's space shuttle look like a clunky, orbiting minivan.
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