I watched a great documentary on the Discovery channel last night. It was called NASA's greatest missions. The full page ad in the Guardian Saturday magazine said we should expect "access to NASA's archives and never seen before footage." And it didn't disappoint. Episode one covered the Mercury programme, America's first attempt at manned space flight.

The first 30 minutes reminded me of Tom Wolfe's fantastic book 'The Right Stuff' when he described NASA's efforts to launch successfully. He wrote that the American people believed that "Our rockets always blow up." And time after time in beautiful technicolour they did. Hardly surprising really with all that highly flammable, highly volatile rocket fuel. So perhaps it was a tad surprising that everyone,and I mean everyone wandered around with a naked flame dangling from their mouth. Still they took precautions, the best piece of "unseen footage" I spotted last night was in a rocket loading bay. As a truck full of Liquid oxygen passed through frame it had this warning written on the side:

" No smoking within 100 feet."