Painstaking account of how Nasa failed its astronauts
The loss of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003 has not, it seems to me, had the same longterm cultural impact as the Challenger disaster in 1986. Perhaps it was because the US was still deep in the fog of 9/11, or perhaps it was because Columbia disintegrated in a series of small white dots on re-entry, rather than exploding dramatically during launch; or perhaps it was because this was Columbia’s 28th mission and it was recognised that the shuttle programme was petering out, not soaring skywards. But whatever it was, with Columbia there was a melancholy lilt to its demise. As one Nasa manager was said to have put it, “There was nothing that could have been done.”
The contention of The Space Shuttle That Fell to Earth (BBC Two), an exemplary three-part study of the disaster, is that plenty could have been done. Across three episodes and three hours of exhaustive, sober testimony the series creates a bow wave of anger but retains its composure throughout. It pieces together its argument like the thousands of pieces of debris that were searched for, recovered and analysed. It makes for painstaking programming, but it constructs an irresistible case.
Although every viewer will have been aware of what was coming, episode one still engendered a sense of excitement and trepidation among the astronauts and their families as they counted down to launch. It was dutifully thorough – the astronauts’ spouses, children, friends and tutors were all interviewed. Even among the hoopla, one of the wives notes that Columbia, the first shuttle and a veteran of 27 missions, looked a little rickety.
What followed was classic management failure and denial of the sort that four hours of ITV’S recent
Mr Bates vs The Post Office has made depressingly familiar. Straight after the launch, Nasa noted film footage of a piece of debris striking the shuttle. But calls for photographs to be taken of the shuttle using satellites went unheeded. It later emerged that there had been known foam debris problems in the preceding years that had been ignored. Meanwhile, in cheery footage that was almost unbearable given the context, the crew continued their mission, unaware of any concerns.
The one question the series has left unanswered was whether space exploration has learned from these mistakes. The Shuttle programme was cancelled in 2011, but with missions now shifting to the private sector, projects of similar ambition and technical complexity are again in the offing. Everyone involved could do worse than watch The Space Shuttle That Fell to Earth. There’s always something that could have been done.
Although Sunderland AFC’S most famous rivals are their neighbours Newcastle United, in TV terms I’m guessing that the Black Cats must really hate Wrexham.
Welcome to Wrexham, Disney+’s footballing underdog story, is essentially a rehash of Sunderland ’Til I Die with some Hollywood sparkle and a bigger budget. Yet Sunderland ’Til I Die launched on Netflix in 2018, four years before anyone outside of Wales had heard of the Racecourse ground or Super Paul Mullin.
Both series were hits when they launched, but they charted clubs with differing trajectories. Where Wrexham
has, at least so far, told an uplifting story, Sunderland ’Til I Die was car-crash television that prospered in lockdown, depicting a side on the slide. What it got right – and what WTW
unashamedly nobbled – was the understanding that the most interesting thing about a football club is its supporters. You can tell a story of an entire culture around what happens on Saturday at 3pm.
Series three of Sunderland ’Til I Die
will be the last we see of it, and that is probably for the best. It follows the club’s bid for promotion at the end of the 2021-22 campaign, and is thus hamstrung by the same problem that besets all of the recent tranche of sporting documentaries, which is that anyone with even a passing interest in the subject matter knows what happened already.
In this case, it all happened nearly two years ago, an eternity in footballing terms. Really though, the time lag highlights how much has changed not so much in football as in television.
Sunderland ’Til I Die helped create the whole sports doc-as-social-drama genre, but over five years it has been superseded both in documentaries (by
Wrexham, which is funnier, and comes with the added lure of fish-out-of-water Hollywood stars as central characters) and in fiction (by Ted Lasso, which also understands the cruelty of obsessive fandom). There are only three episodes in this series, which suggests a lack of interest from Netflix. The feeling is that everyone knows that the game is up.
The Space Shuttle That Fell to Earth ★★★★
Sunderland ’Til I Die ★★★