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The Discovery Channel marks the 50th anniversary of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration with “When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions”, a six-part, three-night series crafted from what a network news release describes as "NASA's own secret film vaults."

As fliers who weren't involved in, you know, bombing anything, yet were continually putting their own lives at risk, astronauts were especially attractive: Indeed, they were potentially leading the country into a post-national, interstellar future, when we would all be simply citizens of Earth and aliens would come only from other planets. Wasn't John Glenn's spacecraft called the Friendship 7?

That is the spirit here. Although "When We Left Earth" covers the entirety of NASA missions from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo, from Skylab to Hubble, this is not an in-depth history of a large, complicated and often politically charged subject but a moving-picture book of a great, sometimes hair-raising, even deadly adventure. Most of the surviving main players are here, the oldest and boldest now white-haired (if haired at all), but inspired to youthfulness by reminiscence; clearly, they were in it for the fun. And it isn't so much that the pictures illustrate the story as that the story gives the pictures context. But even forgetting the context, it's quite a show. The NASA cameramen, including the astronauts themselves, didn't just point and shoot; they worked with style and sensitivity, and there is a poetry in the images that matches the essence of its huge and elevated subject.

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Photos courtesy of NASA

Original Source: LA Times

An excerpt of "When We Left Earth", Discovery’s series on NASA’s 50 years