delmaxcomm The series was actually filmed in many locations including Chestertown, Maryland which was transformed into the town of Clay. While filming in Chestertown was proceeding, a second unit filming in Huntsville, Alabama fell behind schedule. One scene the second unit was supposed to film was the swearing in of the WWII German rocket scientists. It was decided to use the old Chestertown Courthouse for the scene.Like most folks around Chestertown I had grown accustomed to watching Harry Hamlin and Blair Brown play their roles of young sweethearts. I was in my 20's and training for a triathlon that summer and often road my bike through Chestertown. One day I was detoured down a narrow back alley because filming was occurring on Main Street. I was tearing down the sidewalk because the narrow street was filled with actor's trailers. Suddenly a lanky figure in a baggy Edwardian suite came bounding out of trailer and I had to slam on the breaks and nearly lay my bike down to avoid hitting him. It was Bruce Dern! I followed him and watched as he and Michael York took the oath of citizenship from the Mayor of Chestertown, Elmer Horsey!

hangarking After seeing the film in production and then watching it I would rank it 8.5 out of 10. I got to film as an extra in the MCC scenes and meet Dick Gordon as Capcom, Joe Sargent, Bruce Dern, Maggie Han and Blair Brown. I was a Rear Admiral in the viewing room scenes at Mission Control, filmed in Houston. At one point we were told to look shocked and sad at loosing the crew in the Lunar Module after lunar ascent. It was hard because we had only lost a crew on the pad many years before. Several Months later the Challenger accident happened. Scenes in Germany were accurate and one would expect Von Braun to emerge in the scenes with the allies taking over the rocket engineers.The political scenes in Washington hold true today and Garner, Brown and Martin Balsom played the roles well. We could have done without Strabismus but it was too deep in the story to root it out. An interesting twist his company United Scriptures Alliance (USA) was similarly used for the company name United Space Alliance (USA) for the major contractor for Shuttle work for NASA in later years.

wombat_1 My thoughts are essentially in agreement with the previous commentators. If you've read the book you'll know what to expect: an "epic" in the true sense of the word. The Mercury, Gemini and early Apollo astronauts are depicted pretty well as history shows them; in fact it seems difficult to separate the fictional from the might-be-real-but-not-well-known.The version I saw in Australia has a final section covering the destruction of the "Challenger". This is done is a somewhat different style to the rest of the movie (a bit too "soft focus" and "tearjerker" for my liking), and is not in the book, either.In style and approach, I would rate this as a little closer to "Right Stuff" than to "Apollo 13".

LouMaag This adaptation of James Michener's novel was especially well done and was made in the heyday of mini-series production. I was lucky enough to have recorded the original showing of the program and watched it just recently.This program depicts the race for space from the closing days of World War II through a fictional end of the Apollo program. It follows the lives of five fictional main characters, which interweave from 1944 through the late 1970's. During these years we see a fictional, but accurate, portrayal of how the space program in the US developed from early failures to successful moon landings.The cast of characters is lengthy and all of the main characters turned in very good performances. The technical and special effects were very good for the period. If you get a chance to watch a copy of this, please be prepared for a long viewing time, as even with the commercials edited out, it will last over 10 hours.