Word: mooning
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...extravagantly ambitious and costly project Hanks has dreamed up is From the Earth to the Moon, a 12-part mini-series for HBO that tells the story of NASA from the first Mercury mission in 1961 to the last flight to the moon in 1972. It will be shown in one-hour episodes on various dates over a six-week period, beginning this Sunday, April 5, at 8 p.m. E.T. Hanks, who starred in the movie Apollo 13 in 1995 and has had a lifelong interest in space, conceived and oversaw the production. It was an extremely complicated undertaking, involving...
...crafted work that never spins out of control despite its grandiose conception. And yet, as anyone with an ear for faint praise can tell by now, it is pretty dull. That may seem hard to believe, given the subject matter--space exploration!--but watching From the Earth to the Moon induces a state of cognitive dissonance. The acting is first-rate; the details look right; still, the overall effect is boredom...
...this be? The simplest explanation is that the story From the Earth to the Moon tries to tell is too vast to be contained even in 12 hours. The movie Apollo 13 was a success largely because of its simple, intense narrative--guys go up in space, look as if they'll die, succeed in not dying. The mini-series is much more diffuse. Hanks and his colleagues have tried to be selective, but the smaller stories they tell either are not the right ones or are not dramatized effectively...
There are other problems--the flat, earnest tone, the lack of any bad guys, the by-now familiar re-creation of Mission Control. Ultimately, though, From the Earth to the Moon suffers from a fundamental problem that its creators could do nothing about: the moon missions were a disappointment. They were thrilling while they took place, but that effect dissipated quickly in the 1970s, as NASA lost its way. Mankind's giant leap never seemed to take us beyond rocks and golf shots. Hanks may want to restore NASA's glory, but on the evidence so far, he hasn...
Galileo has completed its original planned tour of the Jovian system and is on a two-year extended mission to study several of Jupiter's moons. Six other flybys of Europa are scheduled before the sturdy spacecraft, which left Earth almost nine years ago, at last shuts down in December 1999. On one pass, Galileo will observe Europa from an angle that will allow scientists to look for telltale volcanic plumes rising from its edge. If found, they'll indicate that the moon is warmer than it seems--and an even likelier incubator for extraterrestrial life...