Apollo 17 DVD Set First Look

By Michael Benolkin

First Look

When planners laid out the roadmap for moon exploration, they hadn't planned on stopping at Apollo 17. Budget realities finally overtook the race to the moon and this would be man's last visit in the 20th century. That was the bad news.

The good news is that technology had continued to evolve during the space flights. Communications bandwidths had increased as well as television camera technologies, so the grainy black & white television images from Apollo 11 gradually improved through Apollo 16. With this mission, however, we have the first use of color television cameras on the moon!

While each mission collected more science and accomplished different objectives, Apollo 17 was the final visit and you can see it all in color.

This six DVD set is not an edited documentary, this is a compilation of pre-flight training, launch, flight to the moon, exploration of the moon, and return video and films collected during the Apollo 17 mission. Each disc is menu-driven to allow selection of events, and these events are not edited.

This series has been available now for a few years, but it recently caught my attention when I saw one of the other titles in this series on sale at Sam's Club. I purchased this one via Amazon and was impressed just how quickly they can deliver!

If you're looking for a better alternative to commercial-laden one-hour documentaries on television, this set is the next best thing to being there as you'll witness the long silences as well as the flurry of activities, just as the astronauts experienced them so many years ago.