Chasing the Moon Celebrates 50 Years Since the Moon Landing

In American Experience's upcoming series, viewers will experience the thrilling era of the space race, from its earliest days to the 1969 moon landing.

Monday-Wednesday, July 8-10, 9-11 p.m.

In American Experience's upcoming series, viewers will experience the thrilling era of the space race, from its earliest days to the 1969 moon landing. Chasing the Moon features a fascinating mix of scientific innovation, political calculation, media spectacle and personal drama. This summer, the series brings the Space Age to vivid life.

chasing moon poppy — Poppy Northcutt became the first woman in an operational support role to work in NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston with the flight of Apollo 8. Photo taken in 1968.

Chasing the Moon thoroughly reimagines the race to the moon for a new generation, upending much of the conventional mythology surrounding the effort. The three-part series recasts the Space Age as a fascinating stew of scientific innovation and PR savvy, political calculation and media spectacle, visionary impulses and personal drama. With no narration and using only archival footage — including a visual feast of previously lost or overlooked material — the film features new interviews with a diverse cast of characters who played key roles in these historic events.

Among those included are astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Frank Borman and Bill Anders; Freeman Dyson, the renowned futurist and theoretical physicist; Sergei Khrushchev, the son of former Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, who played a prominent role in the Soviet space program as a rocket engineer; Poppy Northcutt, the 25-year-old “mathematics whiz” who gained worldwide attention as the first woman to serve in the all-male bastion of NASA’s Mission Control; and Ed Dwight, the Air Force pilot selected by the Kennedy administration to train as America’s first black astronaut.

Watch the extended trailer:

While other documentaries have largely painted a familiar narrative of goals set, obstacles overcome, disasters averted and missions accomplished, Chasing the Moon tells a vastly more entertaining and surprising story. As the film reveals, the drive to land a man on the moon was fueled as much by politics as it was by technology and was a controversial undertaking during a volatile time.