Humans have been sending unmanned expeditions to our Solar System neighbors for half a century now. In that time we have amassed libraries of data and imagery that we'll be processing for decades to come.


There's been triumph and defeat. From the vivid color photographs of the Voyagers first visitations of the Gas Giants to the comedy of the Soviets crashing probes into the Moon.

There is heart breaking beauty in the story of Carl Sagan recording Ann Druyan's heartbeats as they were in new found love and sending it on the famous Voyager gold records. There are, I'm sure, many other personal stories to be told about the armies of engineers, Mission Control operators and other personal associated with these missions. We have yet to forget about Curiosity's 'Mohawk Guy' Bobak Ferdowsi but a talented documentarian could find great stories in many of the these people.


There has also been many missions whose memory in the collective consciousness fades as time goes on such as Stardust, a NASA mission that was the first to encounter a comet. The Surveyor probe which was the first successful soft-landing on the Moon by the U.S.

To be sure there are countless popular science documentaries that utilize and reference many of the discoveries of these missions and there was the excellent 'When We Left Earth' series but the latter focused entirely on manned missions and the former do not tell comprehensive stories of the entire history of these missions.


So, talented and able documentary makers, steal this idea and GO! Illuminate the discoveries of the individual missions but also get to the heart of the human experiences involved in each. Imagine a marriage of the Cosmos series and Ken Burn's Civil War....