User Reviews

This accomplished documentary aired on PBS stations back in 1985 and would certainly be worth a repeat viewing now, perhaps on Discovery or The Learning Channel. Martin Sheen's eloquent yet spare narration (written by filmmaker Blaine Baggett) perfectly complements the superb imagery. As a longtime sci-fi fan and space aficionado, I remember being riveted by this one. An excellent musical score. Worth a look!

In the sixties my father worked for a NASA sub-contractor and thus had a small role in the American space program. He would bring home NASA film clips (PR stuff) and show them on our 8mm projector for the neighborhood. Watching this series in 1985 brought back a lot of good memories of that amazing time. It was marvelously done, with archive footage both familiar and lesser-known, combined with new interviews with a stellar list of individuals, many of whom are no longer with us. It captured the excitement and uncertainty and humanity of the endeavor. And the music was spine-tingling good! Top it with Martin Sheen's narration and you have a corker of a documentary series that puts most modern efforts to shame. It's hard to believe this series was first broadcast twenty years ago!

This would be a marvelous series to have on DVD, unfortunately it appears to only be available on VHS for now.

I first saw this documentary series on television in 1986, and I have subsequently re-screened my recordings several times. This is partially why it feels more important to me than many of the other similar documentaries of the space age. Its strength lies in writing and execution: the familiar footage is interspersed with poignant original interviews, woven into a persuasive and compact narrative and varnished with an excellent score – heroic and sentimental, certainly, but executed very tastefully and given a fittingly ethereal sheen to make it highly compelling and memorable. Its fluid but far from grandstanding visual execution renders it comfortably timeless, when compared to some more impressive but already dated CGI enhancements in certain bigger-budget productions of 1990s. The series pushes enough emotional buttons to absorb especially an adolescent viewer, but for most part doesn't lose its factual content in melodramatics.

Looking back from two decades on, I can also see its flaws. It is very much an American documentary from the very last years of the Cold War and subject to the limitations in viewpoint and available material that this entails. This is especially noticeable in the second and third episodes, which map out the actual manned space race of the 1960s from Vostok 1 to Apollo 11. The Soviet space programme is given a rather cursory glance, while almost every American achievement is gleefully acknowledged, ending in a requisite "America is first to the finish line" blurb. This does convey some sense of the political fears and public fascination underlying the space programme in the United States at the time, an impression of what it meant to the collective consciousness, rather than just a recitation of its actual scientific achievements. It also serves to remind that these, some of humanity's greatest accomplishments, were driven at least as much by primal hunger for power and by ideological polarisation as they were by quest for empirical knowledge and technical achievement. With these limitations in mind, Spaceflight excels.

The final episode, which looks at the state of global space exploration in the mid-1980s, is probably the most balanced, most encompassing and also the most dated. The number one topic of the time, SDI, is given a fairly even-handed presentation, though the inherent absurdities of the world situation and nuclear stalemate logic are now more blatantly obvious (unlike the fact that the same tensions have not disappeared as much as we often like to think).

The number two focal point, the hopes and lofty ambitions bestowed by NASA on its space shuttle fleet, strikes an unavoidably sad chord after the destruction of Challenger and Columbia and the dwindling of the shuttle programme into a kind of crippled white elephant. The optimism and misgivings about the manned space programme close the episode, and they are much as they are today. In some respects the horizons are no closer today than they were twenty years ago.

In short, while some parts may be obsolete, the core of Spaceflight still feels relevant after two decades. Many later documents in Europe and the USA have come up with new material and new angles to the story of space race, but few have told it with such gravity and taste.

As a kid playing with my legos i could sit there all day and watch our VHS taped copy on this series as an adult I realize now how much has come and changed in this age and also how much is so easily forgotten this show covers the truth behind a lot of REAL early day heros people who did what they did because they loved it there a lot of risks involved in testing out anything. Today's world we have robots computers back then all we had was people with real guts. It's documentary but with Stories being told often much as one would hear from one's older relatives The music behind the series is also outstanding Just enough to lend to the feelings without smothering them or going astray I believe that last episode was re filmed after the challenger's tragedy Of course a lot of the info is now past date and some of it in speaking of future possibilities as outdated as a computer running windows 3.1 in the modern world yet there is much to be gained from watching this show