Houston, We Have A Problem

Amazon.com had some great deals on movies over the black Friday weekend. I am not a huge movie fan, but with that being said there are some movies that I really enjoy so I decided to take advantage of their $8 blu-ray sale and picked up some movies for my film collection. One of the movies I purchased was the 15th Anniversary Edition of Apollo 13. I was able to watch the film again over the weekend and was reminded of what a great movie Apollo 13 is. We all know how the movie ends and yet it remains interesting because it does a great job of developing the characters and making us want them to survive. Plus it visually tells the story very well.

One of the interesting parts of the disc is all of the behind-the-scenes footage. There is an hour long clip describing how they made various parts of the film, including all of the shots in space where the actors were floating. They also interview Jim Lovell and several other people associated with NASA and the Apollo 13 mission and have a lot of stock footage from the real event. After seeing some of the stock footage and listening to people who were associated with the real event talk it becomes apparent that the movie is pretty darn accurate in telling the events that occurred during the space mission.

Apollo 13 was a space mission scheduled to land on the moon. While in transit an explosion in one of the oxygen tanks jeopardized the mission and what resulted was a string of issues that had never been planned for and had to be solved using only instruments and tools already on the spacecraft. There is so much engineering and math and thinking that goes into this stuff that it just boggles the mind. For instance, who would have thought that the spacecraft being 200 lbs lighter because they didn't gather moon rock would have made so much of a difference in their re-entry trajectory? Making things further amazing is when you look at the computer systems NASA was working with in the early 1970s which quite frankly are a joke in computing power compared to the PC I am using to type this blog in 2010.

I have been to the Kennedy Space Center in FL when I was younger and would love to go back again now that I am a bit older and understand things a bit more. I have seen a shuttle launch from a close distance (a few miles) and it is amazing. Apparently the current space shuttle is being retired in 2011. A space launch today still makes the news but is far from front page information. It is almost considered routine today. One of my favorite lines in the movie is when Jim Lovell is asked about what he thinks of the public opinion that the Apollo 13 mission is routine. He responds by saying "There is nothing routine about flying to the moon." I really couldn't agree more. I find flight in general fascinating and space flight to be just absurdly spectacular. The Apollo 13 film does a great job of telling this amazing, almost too good to be true story of NASA's "successful failure."