Video: See our full interview with NASA legend Christopher C. Kraft

Video shot by Joshua Ballinger, edited and produced by Jing Niu and David Minick. Transcript will be available shortly. (video link)

We've just kicked off our celebration of 50 years of Apollo, "The Greatest Leap," with the first of a seven-part series on the people and technology that put 12 humans on the Moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first part, which we ran yesterday, examined the accident that claimed the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee—a tragedy known within NASA simply as "the Fire." The piece is based around dozens of hours of interviews with the men and women who were at NASA and witnessed the events as they happened.

It's the nature of documentary filmmaking that you always end up with more miles of footage than you can ever realistically use, and it felt like a tragic waste to let so much historically important discussion sit unseen in an archive somewhere. So, starting today and continuing over the next few weeks, we're publishing the full interviews with all of our Apollo stars. Think of 'em as DVD special features. The interviews are un-redacted and complete, though they have been cleaned up and very lightly edited to remove stuff like lighting changes, equipment adjustments, and bathroom breaks.