Innovation & Tech Today – May 2019

70 INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | SUMMER 2019

tech
zone NASA

was dying of cancer, so there was a lot of chaos

in the house,” he said. “Apollo 8 for me was the

big memory, because it was prior to her getting

sick, things were more normal in our home in

Cleveland.... Christmas Eve, walking to the

store in the snow, seven years old, hurrying back

because I didn’t want to miss the Christmas Eve

broadcast everyone was talking about. I

remember looking up at the moon, rushing to

my house, thinking, ‘I’ve got to get home to be

in front of TV to watch the guys up there.’ I kept

that close to me, but I hadn’t actually seen the

Apollo 8 footage again until we got to work on

this film. And the Genesis prayer... memories

flooded in from Apollo.”

Because of his focus on Apollo 8, Jennings

wove in the amazing story of Poppy Northcutt

(see page 64), then a 24-year-old TRW engineer

and mathematics whiz – and the only woman

working in NASA’s Mission Control. She was

responsible for figuring out lunar orbit

insertions for Apollo spacecraft – and did so

with a candor and passion for her work that

made her a sought-after guest TV commentator

by the time of Apollo 17 in 1972.

“She was interviewed a lot back then, and we

found many with her – including one she had

not remembered, where she talked about

treatment of women at NASA,” Jennings

recalled as Northcutt sat alongside him. “The

reason she was interviewed often is because she

was the only woman on Mission Control. The

newsrooms were the same, so males interviewed

her. If it wasn’t the first question, it was the

second: ‘What’s it like to be a woman working

with all these guys?’”

Jennings turned to Northcutt, now 75. “You

had a very funny answer, the one we put in

the film.”

Northcutt leaned back and chuckled. “That

was the one about males dominating NASA. My

response was, ‘I don’t think it’s dominated by

males. I think it’s dominated by computers and

hardware.’” After the laughter subsided, she

added, “There’s some significance to that. The

Apollo program represented the first leap into

the world of big data, which is now quite

prevalent.”

Jennings said that Apollo came together

differently than any other documentary he’s

created during his illustrious career. For starters,

the process seemed backwards: while the most

dramatic moments happened in the first two-

thirds of the movie’s timeline – up to the

ill-fated Apollo 13 mission – the images were far

better from Apollos 14 through 17, when crews

stayed on the moon for several days and shot

with color cameras.

“From a filmmaking point of view, the way

Apollo ends is kind of frustrating. The best

images come from Apollos 14 through 17, but

they have the least amount of overall drama

compared to the other missions, which were

highly dramatic: the Apollo 1 tragedy; orbiting

the moon on Apollo 8, then dropping to within

eight miles of the surface in Apollo 10; the

Apollo 11 moonwalk; Pete Conrad nearly

hitting the landing target bull’s-eye on Apollo

12; and, finally, the Apollo 13 disaster. At the

end, though, they did discover oxidized soil on

the moon – a very big deal.

“We end the movie with Ray Bradbury talking

about how we will eventually have to leave the

planet because it’s going to fall apart in a million

years, or a billion years... and that we have to

keep on exploring. And yet, after [Apollo] 17,

everything was done. We stayed home, in Earth’s

orbit. It leaves you with a bittersweet sense of

‘What if ?’ What if we had continued? But we

didn’t, and the story just kind of stopped.”

Now it’s started again big-time, with the dual

massive efforts with NASA and private industry

to set up a sustainable work station on the

moon, then fly to Mars. Jennings feels Apollo

brings home both the human side of being an

astronaut, and the promise of what can happen

when everyone is focused on the same goal –

with available resources and buy-in.

“Another thing that caught me when making

the film was seeing the Apollo astronauts appear

on The Bob Hope Show. It made it a lot of fun,

really humanized them. When you look back to

those astronauts, The Right Stuff pilots and

Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts, their

lifestyles ... they were a lot of fun. Deadly

serious, brilliant men and brilliant flyers who

had a lot of fun.

“Many of us who were kids in the 1960s see

them as almost iconic gods, these action figures

we can’t get close to – then you find out they’re

normal guys with great senses of humor. They

laughed hard, worked harder – and so did the

400,000 workers who had something to do with

putting us on the moon. It’s an ultimate story of

human achievement. I’m honored to get to tell it

with actual footage.” Q

Missions to the Moon: In Real-Time

Photo: NASA Photo: Otis Imboden/National Geographic Creative

David Scott performing side hatch EVA during Apollo 9. An Apollo astronaut practices lunar module liftoffs and landings in California’s Mojave Desert.