The world is a dumpster fire at the moment. Fuel prices are continually rising due to increasing global instability. Climate change is clearly and undeniably manifesting, as a sweeping far-right movement in key countries is stripping civil liberties from its citizens. Meanwhile, an unstable US president has alienated key allies as he engages Iran in…
Tag: NASA
25 years later, Disney’s “Mission to Mars” still fails to achieve escape velocity…
******PHOBOS-SIZED SPOILERS!****** 25 years ago, my wife and I went out for dinner and a movie with two married friends of ours to see “Mission to Mars” (2000); a Disney (nee: Touchstone) space opus directed by esteemed director Brian De Palma (“Carrie,” “Scarface,” “The Untouchables”), a screenplay cowritten by Graham Yost (“Speed”) with music by…
“The Moon” (2023) is Korea’s well-crafted fictional answer to “Apollo 13”…
*****SPACE-SURVIVAL SPOILERS!***** Space survival dramas are hardly new, of course. Even as a kid, I remember my eyeballs nearly pressed against the glass screen of the family Zenith while watching 1964’s “Robinson Crusoe on Mars.” However, the post-“Star Wars”/“Jurassic Park” revolutions in filmmaking made later space survival sagas a lot more realistic. And with a…
Astronaut-artist Ed Dwight Jr., 90, finally gets his space shot, 63 years later…
The Right Stuff Denied Last weekend, something truly amazing happened. An event which did get some press, but not enough. Granted, in an age when when devastating wars, an intense US election season cycle, and other ongoing issues are dominating the news, a 90-year old African-American man taking a suborbital tourist spaceflight seems like a nice…
“Capricorn One” (1978) takes an all-star cast down a conspiratorial rabbit hole…
*****ROCKET-SIZED SPOILERS!***** I feel the need to preface this review/analysis of 1978’s “Capricorn One” with a bit of personal opinion, since we live in an age where easily verifiable and demonstrable facts are currently called into question (i.e, the rise of Flat Earth and anti-vaccination movements). I am not, nor have I ever been someone…
“Woman in Motion” (2019) opens a hailing frequency to a remarkable lady…
****SPOILERS AHEAD!!**** To those, like myself, who’ve ever met Nichelle Nichols at a sci-fi convention, you get a feeling of being in the presence of royalty; she is both charming and regal, yet disarming with her earthly candor (and her laugh). Director Todd Thompson has assembled a documentary that tells many of the tales I’ve…
Fifty years after the real thing, the movie “Apollo 13” (1995) celebrates its own silver anniversary…
50 Years Ago. It’s been 50 years since the perilous flight of Apollo 13. Apollo 13 was the ‘successful failure’ of the Apollo moon missions which had to abort its planned lunar landing due to an exploding oxygen tank, which crippled the combined spacecraft’s service module. Despite the explosion, which resulted in both a limited…
Celebrating two mighty machines of Mars…
This week it was official; the Mars rover “Opportunity”, the second of two solar-powered rovers that first landed on Mars in early 2004, was declared dead. Engineers at NASA/JPL-Caltech lost contact after a particularly nasty Martian dust storm last year, and contact never resumed. After 15 years on a hostile alien planet, the first rover…
“Hidden Figures” is well-intentioned and long overdue, if a bit simplistic
Saw “Hidden Figures” last weekend; the movie finally delivers the long overdue true story of the human ‘computers’ who helped crunch seriously heavy numbers in the earliest days of the US space program (50 years overdue, in fact). Most of these women were African-American, and many went on to have long careers within NASA…
Godspeed, John Glenn…
One of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, John H. Glenn Jr, the first American to fly into orbit (in February of 1962), the oldest American to go into space (at age 77 in October of 1998) and a multi-term US senator for decades, passed away today at age 95. I’ve heard of John Glenn since…