Review: Apollo 8 – “First To The Moon”
“A new documentary on Apollo 8, “First To The Moon”, by filmmaker Paul Hildebrandt has been released. I am not going to mince words: this is the finest space documentary I have ever seen. Full stop. As we prepare to celebrate the 50th anniversary of first human landing on the Moon, everything Apollo is new again. While most of the attention is focused on the Apollo 11 mission one documentary focuses its gaze back in time to the first human mission to visit the Moon: Apollo 8.”

Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member...

12 replies on “Review: First To The Moon”

  1. Glad you enjoyed it. As a Kickstarter backer I was really impressed with how it came out.

    2. Pretty much all the streaming services (Amazon, iTunes, Google, Vudu) have it for rent and buy.

    3. Yes as mentioned in the review First to the Moon is “available on iTunes, Vudu, Amazon Video, Vimeo, Google Movies, and on Blu-Ray/DVD on Amazon”.

  3. I watched today. Simply awesome, and finely crafted. 5 stars. The crew are still heroes to me. Thank you for sharing.

  4. Is this the documentary that was on PBS last Christmas? I watched it at the time, and it was excellent.

    edit: It isn’t. That one was a NOVA episode called “NASA’s Daring Mission”.

  5. Interesting comment on Soviet interference with these missions in the Vanity Fair article on Joann Morgan:

    “Oh, yeah, it happened. On Apollo 8, the Russians were offshore with a trawler and submarine, and they tried interfering with our transfer of command. They would try to block frequencies so we couldn’t give commands to the pad and the capsule. And it continued some on 9 and 10. What we had to do is put different antennas on and direct them differently so we could block them from interfering with our command process.”

    https://www.vanityfair.com/…

  6. While looking around for digital venues, I came across several of the usual denier sites (We can’t go back to the moon because we never went there!).

    I started to wonder: what if Apollo, rather than a glorious capstone, were actually the cornerstone of an on-going space program? What if we’d continued, logically, to develop our space program?

    And in that non-existing future, I wondered: how would this movie be regarded, without the wistfullness so important to this film? How would an audience react?

  7. Nice piece, watched it last night. Not the same visceral impact of this year’s Apollo 11 documentary, but the interviews with the astronauts are great. And nice to see some of their back stories.

  8. I particularly liked the crew cabin dialog. A personal story from those fine astronauts, my childhood heroes.

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