Science Fiction – Page 20 – Our Awesome Universe

In Case You Missed It/Podcast: Retelling the Story of the Mission to the Moon

Posted on October 21, 2022October 20, 2022 by onespaceman2000

^{Image: Chesley Bonestell art printed in “The Conquest of the Moon” (1953). Mr. Bonestell’s art is mentioned in the Moonrise podcast.}

If you are looking for a good story that you to listen to during your next car trip, you cannot do better than the Washington Post’s Moonrise podcast. It has a bit of everything, including science fiction stories, Nazi war machines, Russian persecution, American post-WWII politics, and a bit of astronomy as well.

Here is how the program sells itself:

Want to uncover the real origin story behind the United States’ decision to go to the moon? In the 50 years since the moon landing, as presidential documents have been declassified and secret programs revealed, a wild story has begun to emerge. “Moonrise,” a Washington Post audio miniseries hosted by Lillian Cunningham, digs into the nuclear arms race of the Cold War, the transformation of American society and politics ⁠— and even the birth of science fiction ⁠— to unearth what really drove us to the moon. Come along with us on a fascinating journey from Earth to the moon.

You can learn how President Kennedy tried to get the Soviet Union to join the Apollo program – twice. You can also hear about the Apollo 11 mission competing with a Soviet spacecraft trying to land on the Moon at the same time. And have you heard about the civil rights protests at the Apollo 11 launch site?

The podcast is a well crafted story trying to weave together many threads in a mostly successful way. It is still astonishing that the early Space Race was really lead by a former Nazi representing the United States and a former political prisoner representing the Soviets. Today the Apollo story is mostly a warm blur from the past, but I believe it is worth your time to listen to the full story. It is the foundation of our space exploration efforts, for better or worse.

First Class Fun from the US Post Office

Posted on October 17, 2022January 24, 2024 by onespaceman2000

While the U.S. currency remains pretty boring, at least U.S. postage stamps continually change and highlight various aspects of American society. Two of those themes are science fiction and space exploration, and you have a few options if you want to show your interest in these areas.

These stamps include:

Star Wars Droids (above);
Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear (below); and
James Webb Space Telescope (below).

I know, you hardly ever write letters and you have a bunch of those boring flag stamps. Well, this is your chance to show a little more color on that birthday or anniversary card. Save the flag stamps for the bills.

Be a kid again, if only for a few moments.

Movie: Rubikon to the Rescue, Maybe

Posted on July 2, 2022 by onespaceman2000

With the fourth of July weekend upon us, we still lack a Hollywood blockbuster space adventure film. However, an Austrian space drama arrived this weekend – Rubikon. Here is the basic plot in the year 2056:

Following a catastrophe on Earth, the planet is covered in a toxic fog. The crew in the space station, must decide whether to risk their lives to get home and search for survivors, or stay safe in the station’s “algae symbiosis system”.

It sounds a lot like another film with George Clooney from 2020. Do you remember The Midnight Sky?:

This post-apocalyptic tale follows Augustine (George Clooney), a lonely scientist in the Arctic, as he races to stop Sully (Felicity Jones) and her fellow astronauts from returning home to Earth, where a mysterious global catastrophe has taken place.

Yes, astronauts are looking down on a dying planet, again. Didn’t Interstellar also having a dying Earth? Makes you kind of miss Star Trek with its hopeful story lines.

So far, Rubikon has 30 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, so don’t get your hopes too high. Some of the reviews are shown below. Yet if you need a space adventure film this weekend, you now have one.

^{Image (Credit): Comments on the film Rubikon. (Rotten Tomatoes)}

Similar Sentiments About Our Place in the Universe

Posted on April 16, 2022December 3, 2023 by onespaceman2000

^{Image (Credit): Book cover of Olaf Staledon’s Star Maker. (Wesleyan University Press)}

I was reading the 1937 science fiction classic Star Maker by British writer Olaf Stapledon when I came across this statement:

I perceived that I was on a little round grain or rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labor and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of stars.

It reminded me of Carl Sagan’s famous statement from his book Pale Blue Dot:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Mr. Stapledon had only his imagination at hand when he pondered the role of humans. His book has been praised by numerous science fiction writers, including H. G. Wells, Stanisław Lem, and Arthur C. Clarke.

Mr. Sagan was fortunate to have an image from Voyager I that clearly made this same point. We need the combined powers of dreamers and scientists as we face this awesome universe.

^{Image (Credit): This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed ‘Pale Blue Dot’, is a part of the first ever ‘portrait’ of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. (NASA JP)}

Extra: For more background on the image above, visit NASA’s site 10 Things You Might Not Know About Voyager’s Famous ‘Pale Blue Dot’ Photo.

A Day In Astronomy: The Launch of the Mars Odyssey

Posted on April 7, 2022 by onespaceman2000

^{Image (Source): The Mars Odyssey orbiter. (NASA)}

On this day in 2001, NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter was launched towards Mars to map and search the Red Planet for water. The mission itself took its name from Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Mars Odyssey successfully discovered Martian water. Project Scientist Jeffrey Plaut of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which leads the Odyssey mission, stated that “Before Odyssey, we didn’t know where this water was stored on the planet…We detected it for the first time from orbit and later confirmed it was there using the Phoenix lander.”

In addition to conducting its own studies, the Mars Odyssey was also used as a space satellite relaying data between Earth and Mars from other scientific missions, such as NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers. The orbiter is part of what is called the Mars Relay Network, currently consisting of five orbiters (see below).

The Mars Odyssey is now the oldest oldest spacecraft still working at the Red Planet. It should be able to continue its work through 2025. You can find more information about the mission from this NASA site.