Word: apollos
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...there's one thing the twin tragedies of the shuttles Challenger and Columbia taught NASA, it's that when a spaceship ain't broke, the last thing you want to try to do is fix it. The Apollo moonships and the Saturn rockets that launched them had an extraordinary safety and success record, relying on the old concept of throwaway parts: When one stage of a rocket is spent, dump it in the ocean; when you're through with your lunar lander, leave most of it on the moon...
...Hanks remembers the precise moment the moon made his head explode--or at least that's how he describes it. It was December 1972, and Hanks ran home from school to see the transmissions that the Apollo 17 astronauts were beaming back live from the surface of the moon. "There was no lunar module in sight," Hanks says. "All you could see were the astronauts in the distance as the camera panned around this incredibly alien, incredibly desolate place. I was just gone...
...years old, the actor, director and producer has made something of a second career out of spreading the lunar word, first with his star turn in 1995's Apollo 13, then with his 1998 HBO series, From the Earth to the Moon. Now Hanks is working the space beat again, preparing for this month's release of Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D, co-produced by IMAX and Hanks' own production company, Playtone. A 3-D, 70-mm, giant-screen spectacle that Hanks co-wrote and narrates, the movie re-creates what it's like to travel...
...capturing that kind of experience in Magnificent Desolation was piling up as much detail as possible. The title itself has historical resonance--it's an exquisite oxymoron coined by Apollo 11's Buzz Aldrin as he stepped onto the surface of the moon and took his first look around. To ensure that the rest of the film had the same historical pointillism, Hanks recruited Apollo 15 commander Dave Scott--who also served as a consultant on Hanks' other space projects--to explain how to do everything from operating the module control stick to walking in one-sixth G to maneuvering...
Hanks isn't the first to discover that there's a difference between rapture and rigor. The late Jack Swigert, command-module pilot of Apollo 13, said that the very thing that qualified astronauts to fly to the moon--a certain engineer's detachment from the outrageousness of the undertaking--disqualified them to speak about it terribly lyrically. Hanks, with lyricism to burn, decided to make the most of his astronomical talents...