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New Moon Documentary Offers View From Titusville

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By JESSICA GRESKO, The Associated Press

Published: October 1, 2007

TITUSVILLE - There's a scene in the new space documentary 'In the Shadow of the Moon' that provokes whispers in the movie theater here.

It's 1960s-era footage of people clogging a mall parking lot near Cape Canaveral, straining for a glimpse of a lunar launch. The whispers are ones of recognition: 'That's us.' That's Titusville.

If there is a town that has lived in NASA's shadow, this is it. On launch days, people still line the shoulder of U.S. 1 to cheer the space shuttle. NASA employees - current and retired - live here. And at the Searstown mall where the documentary is now playing you can (if you stand in just the right place) look across the Indian River and see the building where NASA prepares the shuttle for launch.

Watching the movie here means sitting beside people who participated in the space race. Seeing the film on its opening day Friday were a former NASA physician, one of NASA's first employees, a contractor who worked on the lunar module and a former NASA propellant expert, among others.

'This is a quiet little town, but a lot went on here,' said Titusville resident Janet Robinson, who came to see the movie with her husband, Ronald, who worked for a contractor on the lunar module.

Robinson remembers standing on her home's roof with her young children to watch launches, and other moviegoers said it was a heady time to be living in the area, especially on launch days.

'It was just a carnival, really,' said Graydon Corn, 77, a former propellant specialist, who saw the movie with his wife, Shirley.

Sam Beddingfield, one of NASA's first employees, remembered long work hours and catching sleep when he could.

'It was exciting,' said Beddingfield, who retired from the agency in the 1980s as deputy director of shuttle operations.

For Wyckliffe Hoffler, 73, a former NASA flight surgeon, watching the documentary was 'very much like opening a family album.'

The movie does outline the standard history with archival footage: President Kennedy's bold challenge to go to the moon in 1961, astronaut selection and training, the deadly Apollo 1 launch pad fire, Neil A. Armstrong's famous words on reaching the moon in 1969, and the drama of Apollo 13.

The real substance of the film, however, is the candid interviews with 10 of the Apollo astronauts. The notoriously reticent Armstrong is absent, but the cast is impressive. And if moviegoers arrive thinking only of the men as heroes, they leave impressed with their humanity and, in some cases, their humor.

There is, for example, Apollo 11's command module pilot, Mike Collins, who sums up NASA's challenge this way: 'Do what? Moon,' he says. 'When? End of decade.'

Moviegoers learn Armstrong may have been the first to walk on the moon, but Aldrin was first to slightly fill up his urine bag there. And during the closing credits Apollo 16's Charlie Duke asks disbelievers why, if the moon landings were faked, NASA had bothered to do it nine times.

But lurking behind the humor is danger, too. Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean reveals he has always felt he was one of the more fearful astronauts and that he considered what would happen if a window on the spacecraft were to break. The movie includes a speech prepared for President Nixon to read if Armstrong and Aldrin did not return from the lunar surface: 'Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.'

The movie gives a sense that somehow the Apollo fraternity returned to Earth changed, that seeing the Earth from so far away left a profound impression.

Bean says he hasn't complained about traffic or weather since returning. 'Why would people complain about the Earth? We are living in the Garden of Eden,' he says.

It's hard not to wonder what would happen if more people had the same experience.

Says Collins: 'Maybe some of our terrestrial squabbles don't seem as important after having flown to the moon than they did before.'

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