On Friday I had a NASA scientist lying around the house, so I encouraged the youngest Chip off the Old Hack to take him into class for a bit of show and tell. There was a moment of struggle, with some muttering about being an engineer and not a scientist. But through my finely calibrated manoeuvring of a Ford Galaxy, the Eagle landed at T minus 10 mins, with USB memory stick in pocket, loaded with images for an estimated 15-minute presentation. Eager questioning from 32 curious nine-year-olds turned this into more than an hour. One small step…

In my capacity as taxi-driver and provider of rocket fuel, I facilitated a prime-time public service. What goes around doesn’t necessarily come around, however; searching the TV schedules yesterday for child-friendly space programmage led into the void.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter any more. You should just record stuff. Later in the evening the documentary/drama Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 came on, but this overlapped later on and after midnight with In The Shadow Of The Moon. This I managed to record to PC, along with two mistaken hours of “live” Big Brother and a Whoopi Goldberg movie. There goes the hard drive. But, if it was worth putting a man on the moon, forty years later you might reasonably expect the public service broadcasters to do a better job, particularly to inspire kids on the road to knowledge acquisition.

But don’t despair. Sometimes that which is lost and broken resurfaces. The BBC did perform its civic duty on Saturday morning by interviewing film director Theo Kamecke. He had been invited by NASA to make a so-called time-capsule documentary of the Apollo 11 mission. Even NASA’s PR seemed to understand that it would get ignored once it appeared, because the public would by then be all mooned out. And so it was. Languishing for nearly four decades, Moonwalk One was rediscovered by the makers of In The Shadow Of The Moon. It has been given a digital dusting off and released on a collectable DVD.

CNN provides three minutes with Kamecke here, where he talks about the smell of fear and the contribution of little old ladies to the space race:-

[16.01.10 Addendum: the video above  seems to have been withdrawn, but a full video of Moonwalk One looks  like it was made available in the past 10 days, and so is now pasted below.]

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