The documentary film-maker James Bluemel has a technique that is more radical than it sounds: he lets the people who were there at the time do the talking. His preference for frontline witnesses, rather than decision-makers who wielded influence from afar and have reputations to protect, has previously enabled his Once upon a Time strand to show unique perspectives on Iraq and Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n
Political discourse often forgets how conflict defines or destroys the lives of the innocent folk it touches, so it\u2019s easy to see how those testimonies have value \u2013 and Once upon a Time has ended up offering big-picture analysis via their mosaics of personal experience. How will that work, though, with space exploration \u2026 an extraordinary activity only a select few choose to pursue?<\/p>\n
Once upon a Time in Space gets there, but it takes time to acclimatise to it. You expect a space documentary to be expansive and majestic; this is restrained and domestic. It starts by skipping quickly past Yuri Gagarin, Neil Armstrong and the first wave of explorers \u2013 although a clip of a ticker-tape parade for the returned Apollo 11 crew is one of many fabulous finds from the archive \u2013 and concentrates on the Space Shuttle programme, starting from the late 1970s.<\/p>\n
Two families dominate, each reflecting how the shuttles ended the dominance of white male astronauts. Anna and Bill Fisher marry in 1977, as they are going through the Nasa selection process: Anna gets in first. The birth of their daughter, Kristin, in 1983 means Anna becomes the first mother in space when she completes her initial mission the following year. Entering the shuttle programme at about the same time is Ronald McNair, an African American man whose impoverished upbringing in segregated South Carolina makes him an unlikely spaceman: \u201cThere were no Black people doing that,\u201d says McNair\u2019s brother Carl, his representative in this programme. \u201cThat wasn\u2019t our world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ronald McNair\u2019s story is one of triumph, as his excellence sees him ascend to the top of the space programme and his dashing demeanour \u2013 plus a generous spirit that prompts him to directly encourage other Black Americans to put aside their preconceptions of Nasa and get involved \u2013 turns him into a beloved celebrity. There is a wonderful clip of the McNair brothers\u2019 dad, car mechanic Carl Sr, speaking with uninhibited pride about Ron to a TV news crew: \u201cI just wish every father could have a son like I have!\u201d<\/p>\n
Generous spirited \u2026 Ronald McNair with the camera he used to capture footage of the first untethered spacewalk by Bruce McCandless, during the Space Shuttle Challenger mission. Photograph: BBC\/KEO Films\/Nasa<\/p>\n
Fisher\u2019s pregnancy, however, provokes wearingly familiar sexism from the press: \u201cIs she a good mother?\u201d asks a 1984 newspaper article, read aloud at the time by Fisher herself. \u201cThat will be the question on millions of minds when the first astronaut mother goes up, leaving a year-old daughter behind!\u201d That one-year-old is now CNN journalist Kristin Fisher, who is also interviewed: \u201cIt\u2019s a fair question,\u201d she says, \u201cbut it\u2019s also a question that people aren\u2019t asking the men.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Fishers also speak about family life in the shadow of their parents\u2019 risky vocation: Bill and Anna were told by their employers that there was an expectation that one in every 25 launches would fail. \u201cHow many other professions have an actual countdown clock to the moment when you might perish?\u201d says Kristin. The episode is, of course, building towards January 1986 and the launch of Challenger, which explodes soon after takeoff and kills all seven astronauts aboard \u2013 including McNair. His brother Carl recalls how bewildering it was for the instant of a loved one\u2019s death to be a global news event: \u201cIt was all over every station, over and over and over again. My brother dying.\u201d<\/p>\n
Interesting and affecting as these memories are, they are more a case of relatable experiences \u2013 overcoming self-doubt to chase a dream career; growing up unaware of the hard choices one\u2019s parents are facing; grieving for a family member suddenly lost \u2013 made remarkable by their unusual context, rather than the regular Once Upon a Time trick of making a complex political situation more comprehensible by showing us its simpler details. The three remaining episodes will look through a wider lens, investigating how America and Russia ended the space race by going into orbit as a joint venture, with those aboard the Mir and International Space Stations enjoying collaborations that turned enmity between superpowers into an absurd concept \u2013 until aggression down on Earth made those celestial relationships unsustainable.<\/p>\n
The more fundamental message is the one contained within Armstrong\u2019s line about man and mankind: this handful of humans, with their ambitions and emotions not much different from anyone else\u2019s, did something incredible on humanity\u2019s behalf. Once Upon a Time in Space opens with a caption reminding us that an era of mass space travel might soon arrive \u2013 but watching this, the cosmos already feels a little closer.<\/p>\n
Once Upon a Time in Space aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The documentary film-maker James Bluemel has a technique that is more radical than it sounds: he lets the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":228996,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-228995","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}