This movie portrays an aspect of the historic Apollo 11 mission that almost nobody knew about. In an obsure sheepherding village in Australia was the dish which would receive the television transmission of the moon landing. Tended by several local scientists, an ambassador from NASA, and a gaggle of humorously eccentric smalltown people, it was the only facility on "that" side of the world capable of receiving televised images from space.

It's a story so goofy, in a human sort of way, that it could only be true, because if it were fiction, nobody would buy into it. A power outage, a failure of the backup generator due to human error, and Poof! The computer calculating the coordinates loses its data, the signal disappears, and nobody knows where to point the dish when power comes back up. Then NASA calls, wondering what has happened to the transmission. What do you tell them?

The humiliation would be too great. "Um... We're getting the signal just fine on this end. It must be a relay error." Riiight.

Then everyone madly scramble around in an attempt to calculate, estimate, or just flat-out guess the position of the Apollo. Then, the NASA ambassador (who had complicitly joined in the little deception out of sympathy for the local scientists) gets a bright idea. He looks out the window. "I know where the Apollo is going. Point the dish at the moon! It's got to be within a few degrees." lol.

Thanks to such seat of the pants ingenuity, a connection is re-established with the Apollo before the next rotation, and all is well again.

Then, just before the Eagle is going to land, another obstacle. A virtually unheard of for the area windstorm comes in, making it unsafe to reposition the dish. Doh!

Well, I'm sure we all know the ending. Of course, the world saw Neil Armstrong's walk, and heard his famous words. "That's one small step for [a] man. One giant leap for mankind." What most people didn't know was that it wouldn't have happened without some risk taking on the part of a small team of scientists in the middle of a sheep town in the countryside of Australia.

Inspiring, funny, witty, and quirky, this movie really gets its heart from the great cast of wacky characters which inhabited the town. What my dad said after the movie was right. "Looking at that bunch, it's amazing we ever made it off the ground at all."