Listening space

Television has the pictures but the most spine-tingling moments in the recordings from the Apollo space missions are the bursts of crackling conversation between the spacecraft and mission control. Never a word wasted, absolute precision and the most surprising clarity even when there are only seconds to spare before total disaster is averted. The wonderful documentary on BBC2 last week gave us those awe-inspiring shots of the Earth emerging from the dark side of the moon, taken by Buzz Aldrin from the Eagle, but it was the World Service’s podcast, 13 Minutes to the Moon, that made real just how incredible those 13 minutes were, when the Apollo 11 lunar module was blasted off from the command module and made its way down to the surface of the moon.

The big selling point of this no-expense-spared podcast (produced by Andrew Luck- Baker) was Hans Zimmer’s special score (if you don’t know Zimmer’s work, he’s been composing music for blockbuster films and TV since the 1980s, including Thelma and Louise, Gladiator and Blue Planet). But it was completely over the top, drowned out impact-wise (if not decibel-wise) by the extraordinary nature of the story and the sense of immediacy in the archive material from Nasa. (Interestingly, the BBC2 documentary eschewed a lavish score, instead using a muted electronic soundtrack that perfectly matched the eerily stark images.) Those voices speaking out with perfect precision, communicating so fast through space, were thrilling enough.

The luxury of the podcast format, though, did mean that there was time (ten episodes of approximately 45 minutes each) to go into the detail of how those space missions were accomplished, and how in just ten years the American team went from sending up chimpanzees in rockets to that moment when Neil Armstrong gingerly stepped off the ladder and on to the dusty, bleak surface of the moon.