NASA responds to John F, Kennedy's challenge of landing a man on the moon with a group of new astronauts for the Gemini Programme, who work toward the eventual lunar voyage with a series of risky and ground-breaking earth-orbit missions.

The tragic death of Apollo's first three astronauts during a pre-launch test haunts the spacecraft's designers as they struggle to come to terms with what happened and find a way to save the moon programme.

A documentary film crew follows the final preparations for the first manned Apollo launch. Now behind schedule due to the Apollo 1 fire, astronauts and launch pad personnel bet their lives - and America's space future - on its success.

NASA takes its boldest and most controversial step - an attempt to fly men around the moon and back for the first time in history - at the end of one of the most cataclysmic years of the century.

Engineers at Grumman Aviation work with NASA and the Apollo 9 astronauts to design, build, and finally test-fly the world's first true space ship - a "lunar module" which will hopefully land the first humans on the moon.

The glare of the public eye, conflicts among the crew, disastrous simulations, and a series of harrowing last-minute crises threaten the Apollo 11 astronauts' success at pulling off NASA's crowning achievement - the first lunar landing.

A jet crash that kills one of his colleagues moves rookie Alan Bean from "forgotten astronaut" to lunar module pilot on the second moon landing. He experiences fear, amazement, disappointment, hilarity, and, most of all, camaraderie aboard "history's ultimate anti-clima

As the life-threatening consequences of the Apollo 13 accident escalate in real time, so do the tensions among the NASA press corps covering it. Among them, a respected, old-school TV journalist questions the confrontational methods of a younger, slicker colleague.

America's first man in space, Alan Shepard, is grounded with an inner ear disorder. A thankless new desk job starts to look permanent, until fate - and surgery - bring him a chance to rescue the space programme.

Geology guru Lee Silver helps Dave Scott and his Apollo 15 crew unravel the moon's mysterious origins by teaching them to become his lunar surrogates, and thus the first fully-trained "field observers" on another world.

A group of young military wives struggle with their new "jobs" handling both the national spotlight and a demanding home front. Meanwhile, their astronaut husbands lose themselves in the pursuit of a national goal alternately competitive, glamourous, and deadly.

The bittersweet end of the Apollo programme - and the final manned journey to another planet - is juxtaposed with a light-hearted recreation of the first cinematic imagining of such an endeavour, the 1902 French silent classic "Voyage to the Moon".