To the Moon, Buzz! Apollo 11 at 40

James Marsters, left, and Daniel Lapaine in “Moonshot,” a docudrama on the History Channel.

My fundamental memory of watching the Apollo missions — not just No. 11, which put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon 40 years ago Monday, but also the equally nail-biting Nos. 8 and 13 — is of fear. I recall being balled up on the couch in front of the television, clutching a pillow, convinced that there was no way this could work.

Watching them now, with the knowledge that everyone made it home, I find my fear replaced by fascination. How did that work?

As the 40th-anniversary hoopla for Apollo 11 peaks on Monday, television offers a variety of programs explaining how it happened (or questioning whether it happened at all). Each makes heavy use of those images and voices that riveted us 40 years ago, slicing and dicing them to different purposes. With some careful planning you can watch the lunar module touch down and hear Neil Armstrong say, “The Eagle has landed” four or five times by the end of the day.

The newest of these shows is “Moonshot,” a two-hour docudrama on the History Channel that promises to be “the story of what was seen, what was said and what might have happened when the cameras weren’t running.”

The film mixes documentary and fiction to an almost unnerving degree. Scripted scenes featuring a cast that includes James Marsters as Mr. Aldrin and Daniel Lapaine as Mr. Armstrong alternate with documentary footage of the real people, sometimes shot by shot. Things get really crazy inside the lunar module, where the voices that come out of the actors’ mouths are sometimes their own and sometimes, when the words are famous enough, the recorded voices of Mr. Aldrin and Mr. Armstrong.

Despite this, “Moonshot,” a British production with a script by Tony Basgallop (who wrote the well-received mini-series “To the Ends of the Earth”), is a better than average television movie. The dialogue is sensible, the performances adequate and the opportunities for cheap emotion mostly avoided. Viewers will feel an honest pang, though, during several excerpts from the broadcast coverage by Walter Cronkite, who died Friday.

By contrast the Discovery Channel offers a straight documentary telling of the Apollo 11 story in “When We Left Earth: 40th Anniversary Special.” The hourlong program was shown last year as one chapter of Discovery’s “When We Left Earth” mini-series; remastered footage of the moon landing, recently released by NASA, has been incorporated for this broadcast.

Surviving astronauts like Mr. Armstrong, Mr. Aldrin, Jim Lovell, Frank Borman and Gene Cernan and engineers like Gene Kranz reminisce and tell stories about one another. One of the best comes from Mr. Borman’s wife, Susan, who recalls being told by a NASA official, “You know, Susan, I think we’ve got a good 50-50 chance of getting them back,” to which she replied, “Oh, thank you, because that’s a lot better than what I was thinking.”

Turner Classic Movies covers all the bases, showing one of the most honored documentaries about the Apollo program, “For All Mankind,” as well as Philip Kaufman’s vibrant drama about the Mercury program, “The Right Stuff.” These films are part of an all-day marathon of Moon movies beginning with “They Came From Beyond Space.”

The Turner marathon ends at 3:45 a.m. Tuesday with the infamous “Capricorn One,” which imagines the American government faking a mission to Mars. That notion started with the Moon missions of course. For a comprehensive (and not entirely unconvincing) presentation of the case, you can check out “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?” on TruTV.