Following on from last week’s discussion on manned space exploration, we’re screening this feature film which includes a wealth of original archive material on the Apollo programme and the Moon landings.

The film, 10 years in the making, contains extraterrestrial film footage shot by the astronausts themselves that has only been brought out of storage a handful of times sionce the sixties and seventies. The film footage is considered so unique and so valuable that the original film is stowed under liquid nitrogen. You can understand why the NASA authorities feel so precious about it. After all, there’s not been any more footage of the Moon shot by a living breathing human being since Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt blasted off from the lunar surface in 1972. In 2005 this rare material was removed from storage once more and carefully transferred onto High Definition Tape, to ensure its survival.

These precious reels represent only the tiniest fraction of the footage filmed by technicians between NASA’s inception in 1957 and the termination of the Apollo program in 1972. Thankfully the management at the time considered it a priority to preserve this visual record of their most remarkable endeavour, in which 400,000 scientists and engineers came together to make Kennedy’s dream of landing a man on the Moon ‘before the end of the decade’, a reality.

Registration required:

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Free:

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