From the Archives: After the Apollo Program Ended, NASA Settled on a New, Less Glamorous Mission
The shuttle age commences, becomes routine, and draws to a close, while Mars beckons.
Al Reinert was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He wrote for Texas Monthly—first as a staff writer, later as a contributor—from 1973 to 2014. Reinert grew up in Fort Worth and got his start in journalism as a crime reporter for the Houston Chronicle. Texas Monthly’s founding editor, Bill Broyles, later recruited him to be one of TM’s earliest writers. Reinert cowrote the screenplays for the Ron Howard film Apollo 13 and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, but he is best known for directing and producing For All Mankind, an award-winning documentary about NASA’s Apollo program. He died in 2018.
The shuttle age commences, becomes routine, and draws to a close, while Mars beckons.
America finds inspiration and salvation on the moon—and then keeps going.
By Al Reinert and Skip Hollandsworth
After Ana Trujillo was arrested in the bludgeoning death of her lover, she hired lawyer Jack Carroll to represent her in what became Houston’s splashiest trial of the spring. Did I mention that Carroll is my brother-in-law? And that the murder weapon was a cobalt-blue, five-and-a-half-inch stiletto?
By Al Reinert
A dramatic increase in border security over the past six years has made the Sierra Blanca inspection station one of the nation’s toughest. And I oughta know.
By Al Reinert
Before you let this man into your living room, you should know that he drank with Clyde Barrow.
By Al Reinert
Few things are as majestic as the launch of the space shuttle. But after nearly thirty years, NASA is sending up its final orbiters. Here's the view from up close.
By Al Reinert
He made his first million before many kids finish college. Less than a decade later, Michael Dell continues to confound conventional wisdom.
By Al Reinert
Her critics used to say that Houston’s mayor was a great administrator but a bad politician. Now, on the eve of her toughest race, her critics are saying just the opposite.
By Al Reinert
Oscar-winning screenwriter Horton Foote continues to capture ordinary people coping with life’s difficulties.
By Al Reinert
One man’s quest to clear the reputation of an animal maligned.
By Al Reinert
Locked away in NASA’s storage vaults was some of the most glorious footage ever filmed. I thought turning it into a movie would be a snap. Ten years later I’ve revised my opinion.
By Al Reinert
A Houston bellhop by day, tenor saxman Grady Gaines has come out of retirement to bring back the trademark sound of a great rock and roll band.
By Al Reinert
An entrepreneur captures customers in public rest rooms. A high-tech plant moves from oil to medicine. Space and biomedical manufacturing are finally off the drawing boards. And a former union boss becomes a bingo mogul.
By Tom Curtis and Al Reinert
Cool, clear, and pure, it’s the bounty of the Edwards Aquifer, and if something isn’t done to limit pumping by Hill Country farmers and a thirsty San Antonio, it may also be dry.
By Al Reinert
Heat + pressure + yttrium + a politically savvy University of Houston physicist = a formula to change the world.
By Al Reinert
Time-honored Texas rituals by Paul Burka,
By Jim Atkinson, Al Reinert, Liz Carpenter and Alison Cook
The seeds of the Challenger disaster were sowed long ago, in the space agency’s conflict between its ideals and its politics.
By Al Reinert
What astronaut Alan Bean saw on the moon changed his life. Now, with paint and canvas, he’s trying to let the rest of us see it too.
By Al Reinert
Honest.
By Al Reinert and Will Van Overbeek
The best part of Texas high school football is that it’s the biggest thing in town—and still only a game.
By Al Reinert
Ten years ago the Apollo astronauts, technicians and scientists all, landed on the Moon and touched what poets only dreamed. But that touch changed their lives.
By Al Reinert
How a bountifully talented young Texas writer based a novel on Lyndon Johnson, won high praise, and then…
By Al Reinert
At the Fort Worth stockyards, cattlemen buy and sell amid the last vestiges of the Old West.
By Al Reinert
Nashville inspired Willie Nelson—to leave.
By Al Reinert
News flash: Lloyd Bentsen is still running for president.
By Al Reinert
The friendly folks at the morgue speak a body language all their own.
By Al Reinert
Two women—one a conservative Republican, the other a liberal Democrat—are the best politicians in Houston.
By Al Reinert
John Connally on trial.
By Al Reinert
A candid celebration of ten years of the Astrodome and Astrothink.
By Al Reinert
The White House is the only challenge left.
By Al Reinert
Beneath the phony outer schmaltz of Jack Valenti one finds the real schmaltz of a true believer.
By Al Reinert
The GOP and Democratic chairmen are both from Texas. Right there the similarity ends, or begins, no, ends.
By Al Reinert
TEXAS ON THE POTOMACTHE TOSTADAS WERE (LET’S BE honest now) kind of stale, and the chile con queso was soggy, but, well what the hell, it sure was good to find some real Tex-Mex food.Purists could grumble if they wanted to and point out that the frijoles were little more
By Al Reinert and Sherry Kafka
RETURN OF THE OLD PUCKERTHE ASTRODOME HAS REALLY OUTDONE itself. They had the help, though, of Hollywood press agentry and one of the bigger mouths in professional sports, so the Dome can’t take all the credit. Irregardless of culpability, it was an impressive show, that King-Riggs tennis match, and it
By Stephen Harrigan, Al Reinert and Jane Sumner
An Aggie views the closing of the Chicken Ranch. George Washington didn’t sleep there, but many famous and unfamous Texans did.
By Al Reinert
Big-time poker players don't worry about luck; they don't need it.
By Al Reinert
High-speed chases, murder investigations, and window-peeping are all in a day’s work.
By Al Reinert
Take 3 million acres, add politicians, lumber companies and Time, Inc., and what have you got? A very small park, or no park at all.
By Al Reinert
Wandering through the strangest neighborhood east of the Pecos.
By Thorne Dreyer and Al Reinert
One giant step backward for the Moonmen.
By Al Reinert