Hypothetically if Hanks, or someone else, made another mini-series which missions or events from NASA's history would make a good 1 hour episode?
I'd love one on the Skylab rescue mission.
Possibly Deke Slayton's story combined with the ASTP.
I guess there could be episodes on the Challenger and Columbia tragedies.
There'd have to be one on the Hubble repair mission.
It depends on whether you're talking about another episode of this series, or a whole other series on a different subject. The former, of course, isn't going to happen. Nonetheless, ones I can at least vaguely conceive of:
- In the original time frame (or possibly partly earlier), but focusing on the rockets. Could be too much a rehash of the "Spider" episode, which already delves into the engineering side of the project. If they had done this in the context of the original series, it would've made most sense in connection with Apollo 8 (first use of the Saturn 5), but they (wisely) went with a different theme for that mission.
- In the original time frame, and going to a subject that doesn't get addressed in the show: the political and financial background. I recall that there's a little of this at the beginning ("Can We Do This?"), but it's a "behind the scenes" subject that didn't really get delved into. You could follow the show's framework of hooking most episodes to a particular missiong by making it about Apollo 18 (the real planned mission, not the recent movie, of course).
- If you want to jump beyond the time frame of the Apollo project, it might be interesting to see one or a few Apollo astronauts up to various and unexpected things later in life. That could, I suppose, have encompassed Deke Slayton, as you suggest.
Subjects for completely different series, on similar subjects and with a similar treatment across multiple episodes:
- The Soviet space program of the same period.
- Just Gemini. It's kind of the red-haired stepchild of early American space adventures. The problem is you don't get any big boffo payoff, like the first American in space or orbit, or landing on the moon. First American EVA, rendezvous with the Agena and Gemina 6 and 7 flying together are kind of exciting, though.
I think a decent episode would be one that dealt with the real behind the scenes people. They are alluded to in Episode 2 (Apollo Fire) at the testimonials for the Apollo 1 fire. Astronaut Frank Borman mentions that Ed White (one of the men who died in the fire) once personally thanked the "guys who make the tools that make the spacecraft".
Maybe if From Earth to the Moon had an extra episode, it could have been one dealing with such men and women who were the nuts and bolts-turners at Rockwell and North American, and the garment makers at International Latex Corporation (who made the space suits).
Of course, if staying in the confines of the miniseries' timeline (mainly Gemini and Apollo), additional episodes might be hard to come by. Redundancy and the limit of script-able historical events would be barriers to overcome. As much as I wish FTETTM could have gone on forever, there's probably enough material from those days at NASA to have generated a few more episodes.