When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions

• 1. Introduction

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  When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions arrived on Discovery Channel on the 8th of June 2008, timed precisely to mark fifty years of NASA. Six episodes, three Sunday nights, two hours at a stretch. By the final credits on the 22nd of June, the series had walked viewers from the first Mercury flights all the way through the construction of the International Space Station.

  But the ambition behind the project went beyond scheduling. Discovery and NASA had struck their partnership in September 2007, and the team that followed spent months in archives pulling together 500 hours of film. What they found there, and what they chose to do with it, would define why this miniseries felt different from anything that had come before. How do you make footage shot decades ago feel urgent and immediate? And who do you trust to narrate the most consequential chapter in American exploration?

• 2. The Archive Rebuilt

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  Five hundred hours of archived film were waiting when the Discovery team arrived. From that vast haul, they selected 150 hours worth preserving in high definition. The original footage had been shot under conditions that made no concessions to posterity, and transferring it to HD was painstaking work.

  When the transfer was done, Discovery did something that set the project apart from ordinary television. The high-definition prints were donated back to NASA. The agency now held a version of its own history that had never existed before, sharper and more detailed than anything in its vaults. Astronaut Charlie Duke put it plainly when he saw the result: "It captures what we see and what we felt and what we experienced, the reality, the vividness, the emotional side of it." The footage wasn't just preserved; it was, in some practical sense, recovered.

• 3. Voices in the Room

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  Neil Armstrong and John Glenn both sat for interviews. So did Charlie Duke. The astronaut roster drawn from Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the Space Shuttle programs gave the series a span of firsthand witness that few documentaries could match.

  NASA officials carried equal weight in the interviews. Flight directors Chris Kraft, Gene Kranz, and Glynn Lunney each described the missions from the ground side of the loop, where decisions were made under time pressure and with incomplete information. Former president George H. W. Bush and longtime NBC space journalist Jay Barbree added political and media context that the astronauts alone could not supply. Narrating all of it was Gary Sinise, who had played astronaut Ken Mattingly in the 1995 film Apollo 13. His casting was not accidental; Sinise had spent time in the same imaginative space these people had occupied for real.

• 4. Score and Sound

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  Richard Blair-Oliphant composed the score, and Benjamin Wallfisch conducted it. Wallfisch had already worked on Atonement in 2007 and would go on to score The Soloist in 2009. The music was not incidental to the project's aims; it carried the emotional register that the archival footage, however vivid, could not always supply on its own.

  The combination of music and sound design earned a nomination for a 2009 News and Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Music and Sound. That recognition placed the series in the company of work that journalism and documentary professionals considered the standard for the form.

• 5. Who the Series Was For

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  One stated purpose of the project was specific: to reach the generation under forty, the people who had not been alive, or not been old enough, to experience the space race as it happened. For them, Mercury and Apollo were history in the same way the Second World War was history, received rather than lived.

  Cary Darling, reviewing for Herald and Review, read the tone clearly. The series was less interested in NASA's failures and setbacks than in what Darling called a "great-to-look-at, old-fashioned hero worship of those who dare to reach for the heavens." High-Def Digest found something it valued in that approach: the focus on human elements over scientific milestones distinguished the series from more technically oriented documentaries. The same review noted one gap, wishing the series had found room for the efforts of other countries alongside the American story. The executive producers were Richard Dale and Bill Howard; the editing was handled by Peter Parnham and Simon Holland.

• 6. Afterlife and Re-Airings

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  The DVD release came on the 10th of July 2008, just weeks after the broadcast run ended. The Blu-ray followed on the 12th of August, the high-definition transfer that had required so much effort now finding its intended home in living rooms equipped to show it properly.

  The series kept returning to television at moments when the subject matter demanded it. The third episode, "Landing the Eagle", was re-aired on the 20th of July 2009 for the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. The first episode aired again on the 11th of December 2016, four days after John Glenn died on the 8th of December. Glenn had been among the series' most prominent interview subjects, and the re-airing served as something closer to an obituary than a repeat. His death at the end of 2016 gave the archive Discovery had built with NASA, and donated back to it, a renewed kind of purpose.