If by chance you had an opportunity to look at the night sky last weekend, you would have noticed a full moon. How many of you, I wonder, might have marveled at the fact that men had actually walked on that shining sphere?
I was dwelling on that myself. I had just seen the Tom Hanks presentation of "Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D" at the Pacific Science Center's Boeing IMAX Theater.
IMAX, Lockheed Martin and NASA have joined forces with the legendary actor Hanks and filmmaker Playtone to produce the newest IMAX-3D space film.
On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy challenged the United States to go to the moon. NASA employed 420,000 people to reach that goal, and NASA achieved its objective on July 20, 1969.
Approximately 600 million people watched the Apollo 11 lunar landing on television. I remember that my family was on vacation at the time, staying in a resort cottage on a lake in central Michigan. We all had to crowd into the resort owner's house to watch the landing because they were the only ones with a television set.
Hanks himself was only 13 years old when astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin took that first 238,860-mile trip to the moon. Along with young boys worldwide, Hanks had a new set of heroes.
In the history of mankind, only 12 individuals have walked on the moon. "Magnificent Desolation" tells their tale - the story of the actual time the astronauts spent on the moon's surface.
The film's title takes its cue from Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, the second astronaut to set foot on the lunar surface. After Aldrin had leapt from the lunar module, Armstrong had queried: "Isn't that something? Magnificent sight out here." To which Aldrin replied: "Beautiful, beautiful. Magnificent desolation."
The lunar module, by the way, required less computer power to land on the moon than is contained in today's average cell phone.
Together the astronauts of Apollo (during missions 11, 12 and 14 through 17) logged almost 300 hours - approximately 12 and one-half days - outside the lunar modules, exploring and documenting the surface of the moon.
The spacesuits the astronauts wore were, for all intents and purposes, tight-fitting spaceships providing basic life support of a temperature-controlled atmosphere along with food and water.
The suits were designed to withstand the moon's average daylight temperature of 300 degrees Fahrenheit. This allowed the astronauts to remain outside the lunar module for hours of exploration and experimentation.
Speaking of the Apollo astronaut's mission and their spacesuits, Hanks has said: "It's a billion-dollars worth of science experiments, performed by tired men in very bulky white suits with big, thick gloves that were only breathing as much air as they could carry on their backs and they were always pressed for time."
After the color television camera on board Apollo 12 failed to work, it was learned that the $78,000 camera could have been fixed with a screwdriver. Although there was a million dollars' worth of tools aboard Apollo 12, the craft didn't contain a screwdriver. The Apollo 13 mission included a screwdriver in its tool kit.
Hanks' earlier work in Ron Howard's film, "Apollo 13," and then in HBO's "From the Earth to the Moon," had whetted the actor's desire to do a film about the actual time the astronauts had spent on the moon.
NASA helped the project immeasurably when it granted access to the 32,000 photographs that were taken by the Apollo astronauts, as well as the pages upon pages of transcripts depicting the astronauts' verbal exchanges.
The film is a combination of actual footage taken during the moon flights, newsreel footage and shots taken within a studio on a specially constructed stage.
The filming took place on the soundstages at the Sony/Columbia lot, one of the older film studios in Los Angeles; for instance, "The Wizard of Oz" was filmed in the lot adjacent to where "Magnificent Desolation" eventually would be shot.
To further help with the authenticity of the film, the IMAX crew was loaned by Kansas Cosmosphere and the Spacecenter a reproduction of the lunar rover, a collection of tools actually used by astronauts during pre-mission training, an exact replica of the LEM or Lunar Module, along with other props.
The large film frame - combined with the 3-D projection technology and remarkable digital sound - immserses Pacific Science Center moviegoers in an extraordinary cinematic experience.
The film is 45 minutes in length and opens Friday, Sept. 23, at Pacific Science Center's Boeing Imax Theater. The theater features Seattle's largest screen and has more than 400 stadium seats.
Gary McDaniel lives in Magnolia.[[In-content Ad]]
