Apollo Program: Tragedy and Triumph (All Parts)

This is the dramatic story of NASA's Apollo Program, beginning with President Kennedy's ambitious deadline for a lunar landing by the end of the decade, in response to Soviet success with Sputnik and cosmonaut Yuri Gargarin. We look at how Werner von Braun, a former rocket scientist of the Third Reich, played a leading role in NASA's planning. After groundbreaking success with the Mercury and Gemini missions, NASA was rocked by the Apollo 1 disaster, in which all three crew members (Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee) were killed in an accidental fire on the launch pad. NASA overhauled its designs and methods to achieve a successful manned launch with Apollo 7. Then came the launch of Apollo 8 aboard the mighty Saturn V rocket - the largest and most powerful rocket ever seen. The mission was a complete success, culminating in the first manned orbit of the moon, and the capture of the legendary 'Earthrise' photograph by astronaut Bill Anders.

NASA's next challenge was to test the world's first true 'spacecraft' - the Lunar Module, as well as identify what risks the moon's unexpected 'mascons' posed to future Apollo missions. But in 1969, everything was in place for the Apollo Program to make history, with the first lunar landing attempt - a mission which would test the skills of crew-members Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins to their limit.

Following the success of Apollo 11, and the fulfilment of Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the Moon, questions hung over the future of the Apollo Program. With declining public interest in Moon missions, and government funding slashed, NASA focused on scientific research. But the final phase of the Program is best remembered for the dramatic near-disaster of Apollo 13, in which the ingenuity of astronauts and Mission Control was pushed to the limit.