Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The new podcast 16 Sunsets opens with archive audio from Nasa’s mission control in 1981, in the build-up to the first flight of space shuttle Columbia, aka STS-1. On this clear, cold April morning, thousands had gathered at Cape Canaveral to watch the launch and millions more were watching the live broadcast at home. Twenty minutes before lift-off, the Nasa operator notes “there is a mood of calm” in the control room.It was a moment designers and engineers had been working towards since well before the 1969 Moon landing. It was also 20 years to the day since the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin first went into space. The shuttle was a spacecraft like no other: vast, sleek, able to house a crew of seven and, says host Kevin Fong, “the most capable space vehicle ever built”. The roar from that first launch is remarkable. I initially listened through crummy laptop speakers but then put on headphones and replayed it. The second time it felt like an earthquake.16 Sunsets is about the dream of space travel and how it became a reality through the American space shuttle, a system of reusable crafts which spanned 30 years and 135 missions. The podcast’s title refers to the number of sunrises and sunsets seen from the International Space Station in a single day. It is written and presented by Fong, who made 2019’s 13 Minutes to the Moon, a series plotting the build-up to the Apollo Moon landing against a Hans Zimmer soundtrack. That series went out on the BBC and was hamstrung by too much signposting and repetition, essentially treating its listeners like dolts. Two episodes in, and its successor, now an independent production but scored once again by Zimmer, doesn’t shy away from complexity. A bit like the shuttle, it is more streamlined.In the early episodes we learn how the shuttle programme was revolutionary in terms of design and technology, though there were disagreements about the role it should play. Nasa needed to prove its economic and scientific credentials, but battles raged behind the scenes over whether the shuttle should be considered an intelligence asset. No doubt analysis of the failures that led to fatalities in 1986 and 2003 is to come.Included are interviews with assorted historians, commentators and Nasa veterans. There is much pleasure to be had from the crackly archive audio in which preternaturally calm Nasa operators intone “T minus seven minutes and counting and we have retraction of the orbiter access arm” as music pulsates in the background.One irritation: the series is introduced as the “extraordinary, untold story” of the shuttle programme, a claim that doesn’t exactly square with the mountains of books, articles, films and indeed podcasts on the subject. Listeners tend not to mind old stories being retold and re-examined, but they are less keen on daft claims that are easily disproved. sixteensunsets.com
