****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…
Tag: NASA
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…