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To All

Unless they mention it on the next program, the Apollo-Soyuz flight was not even mentioned.

Clear Skies.
Rich (RLTYS)

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Nope, it was left out. The series continued to be a little uneven in the way it covered things. It started with the first test flight of the shuttle (STS-1) with some pretty good coverage and then "boom", quickly went to the Challenger disaster. It made the same mistake of over-simplifying the reason for the disaster, putting the entire cause on the weather (cold), rather than on the faulty field-joint design and the decision by flight directors to launch despite some dissension from some of the engineers at Morton-Thiokol. The program also missed things like the capture of the two wayward satellites and the rescue and servicing of the Solarmax solar observatory, both of which occurred before the Challenger accident. The music also was a little tiring, as it was kind of monotonous with the same theme played over and over. Tomorrow night (9 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time), The Discovery Channel again gives you a good chance to compare this long series with the very nice film "In The Shadow of the Moon", which I kind of liked a bit more. Clear skies to you.

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In terms of appealing to a larger audience, I thought Discovery did a good job of covering the various phases of the Shuttle program in the 2 hours it had. Like it or not, the program has only had 5-6 dramatic instances that drew people in, and those are the areas where Discovery focused. The show certainly won't win any awards for completeness and attention to every detail, but I thought it was a good watch.

As to the Challenger disaster, I again think they spent the appropriate amount of time and covered the appropriate details. Sure they didn't go into covering the design flaws and poor communication as much as they could have, but the show stated the obvious facts; the cold weather led to the o-ring failure, nobody spoke up with their concerns, and everything culminated with the very preventable loss of the vehicle. I would hardly call such simplification a mistake on Discovery's part, it's the very essence of what happened. Just my $0.02 anyways.

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As a whole, don't misunderstand me, the program wasn't all that bad. It's just that it could have been a whole lot better. The unevenness in coverage was probably the most bothersome issue with me, but the overall tone of the narration also gave me a feeling of "disconnection". At times, the flow of the program seemed to get a little stuck on one thing and then just jerked forward past some non-covered but interesting events and on to other things. There were a lot of things I would have covered somewhat differently (and a few things I would have shortened or left out completely). For example, the program covered the Hubble deploy OK, but then kind of "played-up" a section on the balky solar panel deployment as it if was the major pivotal point of disaster. In fact, it was a relatively minor incident that was easily fixed by a little playing with the way the panel motors were commanded. The deploy was backed up by the astronauts being trained to crank out the arrays manually, but the incident was hardly a show-stopper. This part could have been shortened or eliminated to allow for something else (like the pre-Challenger achievements of the shuttle). Another slightly odd segment concerned the first flight of the Manned Maneuvering Unit. It was nice, but a little on the long side, and again, slighted the first major "application" use of the MMU on STS-41C with the rescue and servicing of the Solarmax satellite. That rescue was far more "hairy" than the solar panel issue with the Hubble release, and would have made a much better way of introducing a little drama to things.

In total, the program just left me with a kind of flat "been there, done that" sort of feeling. There have been other space series from Discovery that have been somewhat better, so this one was just a bit of a let-down. For coverage of the space program prior to Skylab, I would have to recommend the HBO series FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON as a better alternative. It is kind of "docu-drama", in that some of the events are somewhat fictionalized, but most of the facts are correct and the *feel* of the overall story is much more gripping. Clear skies to you.

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David W. Knisely
Hyde Memorial Observatory
http://www.hydeobservatory.info

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