Fly me to the moon

From the TV film Moonshot. Photo / Supplied

The word "hero" may have been devalued in recent times by association with lucky survivors and overpaid sportsmen, but for some historical figures it's a title easily worn.

Like the astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission in 1969 who flew to the moon, landed and flew back again — three pioneers who risked their lives in every moment of what was truly a journey into the unknown.

"They were some of the last heroes," says British actor Andrew Lincoln, who plays astronaut Michael Collins in tonight's Prime television docu-drama Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11. "They went up strapped to a rocket they used to launch nuclear warheads on. They sat on that and went to the moon. They are heroes those guys, they're unreal."

The youthful looking 36-year-old Lincoln, best known for his role as Egg in the 1990s hit BBC series This Life, and for his appearance in the hit film Love Actually, spent six weeks filming Moonshot on location in Lithuania.

The feature-length drama was made to mark the 40th anniversary of the moon landing on July 20, 1969. Collins was one of the three men on that mission, although his fate was to stay in the command module alone in space while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the lunar surface to make the first life-changing moon walk. Lincoln (whose real name is Clutterbuck) says he and fellow actors Australian Daniel Lapaine and American James Marsters (best known to New Zealand audiences as Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer), were acutely aware of the responsibility of playing historical figures who carried out possibly the most famous act of all time.

The first week of shooting included extensive lectures in physics so the actors would understand the complex tasks they were required to portray.

"This moment was like the Kennedy assassination," says Lincoln of the moon landing. "It had a profound effect on the whole world. A lot of people are very, very well informed about it. It's difficult dramatising something the whole world knows about. That's why when you do something like this you want it to be absolutely authentic. There was no point in doing it half-heartedly. It's an extraordinary story on every level."

However, one thing that was not authentic was the location. The producers decided to shoot in Lithuania because, in Lincoln's words, it was "cheap as chips". Lincoln says it did get surreal at times. "I couldn't believe the locations. We used Gorbachev's old home to fill in for the Space Centre and we had people like the Cadillac club of Lithuania turning up with all these rockabilly guys. I thought 'what on earth are we doing here?' The producers made $2 million look like $7 million."

The production, by Dangerous Films, the company behind 9/11: The Twin Towers and Human Body: Pushing the Limits, employs a mixture of conventional drama, CGI effects and archive footage to perfectly recreate the era of the space race and demonstrate how the push for the moon was accomplished over many years.

It still seems scarcely believable that they could have succeeded with such comparatively crude equipment and untested technology. Lincoln is in awe of the men who accomplished their extraordinary mission four decades ago. "Their computer had the processing power of a digital watch. Collins had to press 93 buttons to programme the setting for the computer in the command module. These guys were f***ing machines. They were the top guns."

The film reveals that President Nixon had two speeches written — one to mark the success of the mission and another to mourn the three astronauts if they had perished.

At one point the lunar module broke down as Armstrong and Aldrin prepared to leave the moon. The entire fate of the mission rested on one of the astronauts being able to jam the nib of a pen into a circuit breaker switch to get the vehicle started.

But, while Moonshot vividly portrays the technological challenges and sense of history, the heart of the drama lies in the complex, even competitive, relationship between the three astronauts who Collins later described as "amiable strangers".

Lincoln says Collins and Armstrong have always been "notoriously shy" since the mission, but Aldrin had some contact with the crew during the making of Moonshot. Lincoln says the clash of egos could not be ignored in the telling of the wider story.

"It was a very important part of that mission. These were the most famous people on the planet."

It is partly as a result of the almost mythical nature of the moon landing that an industry of conspiracy theories has dogged the event since the 1960s, with some maintaining that the "landing" was filmed in a secret studio as a Cold War propaganda tool.

Lincoln has no time for doubters. "If it was a conspiracy theory why would they continue to send people to the moon? It's bizarre. The more I read, the more I think there can be no doubt. We would have heard. We live in such a cynical age. I think it's deeply insulting to the bravery and extraordinary efforts of those men."