In a little over a month from now, the world will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, the first time man landed on another world.

Commander Dave Scott salutes the Stars and Stripes, Apollo 15, July 1971.

As part of the leadup to this occasion I’ve come across a superb podcast series being run from the BBC: “13 Minutes to the Moon“. The series started broadcasting a few weeks ago and an episode comes out every Monday, with the final episode coinciding with the actual 50th anniversary of the moon landing on the 20 July.

You can also catch them on Radio NZ’s programme, Windows on The World, every Wednesday night: here’s the link to the first one back on May 22.

The host is Kevin Fong, a British guy who studied Astrophysics and worked for NASA in Houston for quite a few years.

Each episode is 40-50 minutes long and what’s different about them is that each one focuses on a part of what made it all possible, rather than just on the flights themselves, let alone just on the first landing.

It being a radio broadcast there’s a clever emphasis on what people actually heard at the time and how they reacted.

For example, the second episode focuses on Mission Control (MC), and they have audio of what the support crews would have heard in their earpieces, by simultaneously playing two actual recordings from the Apollo 11 mission. In fact there were usually three or four of these “loops” as they called them, playing in their earpieces and they needed to be able to follow each one, relying on tone and key words to pluck out the information they needed.

It’s staggering that anybody could even think, let alone make decisions, with all that going on in their head. One Mission Controller said that after you got used to it, you could not help but listen in on multiple conversations when you walked into a room, even when you didn’t want to: their brains had been re-wired.

They’d love to have feedback and even though it’s the BBC I think encouragement for such efforts should be rewarded, so find a quiet spot in your house, close your eyes and have a listen. It’s worth it.

In the leadup to July 20, you could also watch the superb 1998 HBO mini-series, From The Earth To The Moon, produced by Tom Hanks and Ron Howard, with each episode introduced by a frighteningly youthful Hanks. Episode one covers the years from Kennedy’s announcement to the end of the Gemini programme, while episode two focuses on the Apollo 1 fire that killed astronauts Grissom, White, and Chafee. But after that each episode deals with each moonlanding. Favourites of mine are the goofball crew of Apollo 12, Alan Shepard’s fight to return to flying and get to the moon on Apollo 14 (so that he wouldn’t just be known for his 15 minutes in space as the first US astronaut), and the Apollo 15 flight with all the geology training involved (“The Mystery of The Dead Cat“).

It’s tough to track down a streaming version of the series – up yours, YouTube – but I found all the episodes on the DailyMotion website: From The Earth To The Moon.

Enjoy.