It’s been almost four decades since the last moon landing, but you can relive them with 1989’s For All Mankind, a documentary that presents a stunning and even surprising portrait of the Apollo missions. The best part? It’s now available in its entirety (for free!) on Hulu. Perhaps sensing the shelf life of such a program, NASA had the good sense to thoroughly tape each journey to the moon. Surprisingly, they also promptly filed this footage away, until director Al Reinert found it and turned it into a feature-length documentary. The film, composed entirely of the NASA footage, communication recordings and astronaut interviews, provides an intimate perspective on the program and the men who flew in it. To see the actual footage—the room-size early computers, the rough-and-ready emergency fixes, the astronaut’s giddy reaction to the lunar surface (“Look at the size of that rock!”), the smoke-filled command center—is to see how amazing, dangerous and perhaps naïve these missions were, and how far, indeed, we’ve come.
I look up at the Moon and wonder, when will we be going back, and who will that be?
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