The Essential Component: Your Role in the Saturn-Apollo Program

Duration: 15:29

Year Published: 1960s

Format: 16mm

Sound: sound

Description: Produced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, this 1960s government film emphasizes the critical importance of every individual who contributes to the Apollo program. For, as the film argues, man possesses vital observational and judgmental skills that technology cannot match. Speaking directly to employees and laborers, the film highlights the significance of their awareness and responsibility to both the success of an Apollo mission and the very lives of its flight crew. It sadly also reflects the pervasive discrimination against women at the time, only depicting female employees as either clerks and secretaries or a distraction to male coworkers. While NASA deliberately prevented women from being astronauts, the agency actually employed a number of women mathematicians and engineers.