Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins (played by Patrick Kennedy) looks out at the moon in a dramatization that’s part of “8 Days: To the Moon and Back.” (BBC Studios)
Even after 50 years, it’s still possible to find new angles on one of history’s most widely witnessed events — as this year’s retellings of the Apollo 11 moon saga demonstrate.
But “Chasing the Moon,” a six-hour documentary series that premieres July 8 on PBS, freshens the Apollo story in different ways. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Robert Stone goes back to the roots of the U.S.-Soviet moon race and brings in perspectives that rarely get a share of the spotlight.
Cara Gee, who plays a tough-as-nails spaceship captain on “The Expanse,” takes a seat in a mockup of Blue Origin’s New Shepard crew capsule. “No one asked me to wear this helmet on our tour of the facility,” she tweeted. “But here I am in a real life space chair.” (Cara Gee via Twitter)
Science fiction met space fact this week in the Seattle area when the cast of “The Expanse,” the science-fiction jewel in Amazon’s streaming-video crown, got a look at Blue Origin’s spaceship.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is the common denominator in the meetup: He personally engineered the sci-fi series’ shift from SyFy to Prime Video, and announced it onstage at a space conference last May while I was sitting beside him. Bezos is also the founder of Blue Origin, the space venture that is testing its New Shepard suborbital spaceship and gearing up to build its orbital-class New Glenn rocket.
“Project Blue Book” turns some of the best-known UFO tales into a TV series, starring Aidan Gillen as investigator J. Allen Hynek. (History Channel Illustration)
“Project Blue Book,” the History Channel TV series making its debut tonight, takes its inspiration from classic UFO cases of the 1940s and 1950s — but for UFO fans who gathered to watch a Seattle preview of the first episode, the show hints at the shape of things to come as well.
“You won’t believe how many productions are coming down the pike right now to basically red-pill the public,” Michael W. Hall, the founder of a Seattle-area group called UFOiTeam, said at the screening. “The truth is out there, and guess what? We’re going to have to ‘fess up to it right away.”
“Project Blue Book” fictionalizes the real-life X-files of pioneer UFO investigator J. Allen Hynek. So it was natural for.Hall — an attorney based in Edmonds, Wash., who styles himself as the “Paranormal Lawyer” — to put out the word to the more than two dozen UFOiTeam members to attend November’s movie-theater preview.
Apollo 8’s astronauts were the first to witness Earthrise from lunar orbit, on Christmas Eve in 1968. (NASA Photo / Bill Anders)
It’s been 50 years to the day since Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders’ “Earthrise” photo changed our world forever, but that mission to the moon and back wouldn’t have happened the way it did if it weren’t for a giant leap in technology.
That comes through loud and clear in “Apollo’s Daring Mission,” a NOVA documentary making its debut on public television on Wednesday.
“NASA usually went step-by-step. In this case, they jumped three or four steps,” the 85-year-old Anders, who now lives in Anacortes, Wash., says during the show.
The Apollo 8 story usually spotlights the impact of Anders’ photos, which show our planet hanging over the moon’s surface, and the magic of the crew’s Christmas Eve reading from Genesis. Those moments get their due in “Apollo’s Daring Mission.” But the show focuses primarily on the engineering magic that opened the way for history to be made in 1968.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk watches February’s ascent of the Falcon Heavy rocket in a scene from National Geographic’s “Mars: Inside SpaceX.” (National Geographic / RadicalMedia via YouTube)
Science fiction blends with fact in tonight’s double dose of Mars from National Geographic’s TV channel.
Truth to tell, there’s more fact than fiction: The first show in the double feature is “Mars: Inside SpaceX,” which wraps a tale of past and future space exploration around an inside look at SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy launch in February.
Then there’s the season premiere of “Mars,” the semi-scripted, semi-documentary series that’s serving up a second set of six episodes.
Ryan Gosling plays the role of NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong in “First Man.” (Universal Pictures Photo)
Two big-name dramatic productions — “First Man” in theaters, and “The First” on Hulu — are putting the glorious past and potentially glorious future of space exploration on big and small screens.
But if you’re expecting the Ryan Gosling movie about Neil Armstrong, or the Sean Penn streaming-video series about the first mission to Mars, to tell a geeky off-world tale like “The Martian” … expect to be surprised.
An artist’s conception shows a super-Earth in orbit around HD 26965, which is Mr. Spock’s home star in “Star Trek” lore. (University of Florida Illustration)
Has the planet Vulcan been found? Vulcan’s most famous fictional inhabitant, Mr. Spock of “Star Trek” fame, would certainly raise an eyebrow if he heard that astronomers have detected a potentially habitable super-Earth orbiting the star that’s associated with him.
The world orbits a sunlike star that’s a mere 16 light-years away, known as HD 26965 or 40 Eridani A, according to the team behind the Dharma Planet Survey.
In the current Star Trek canon, 40 Eridani A is the star that harbors Spock’s home planet. Some early references pointed to a different star, known as Epsilon Eridani(which is also thought to host at least one exoplanet). But in a 1991 essay, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and a group of astronomers argued that 40 Eridani A, the brightest star in a triple-star system, was a better fit because its 4 billion years of existence provided a wider window for pointy-eared intelligent life to evolve.
The latest findings suggest Roddenberry made the right choice: The planet found at 40 Eridani A is roughly twice Earth’s size, completes an orbit around its parent star every 42 Earth days, and lies just inside the star’s optimal habitable zone, said University of Florida astronomer Jian Ge.
Amazon is reportedly working on a recording device that would mesh with its Fire TV service.
Amazon is working on a new type of device that can record live TV and stream it on demand, encroaching on technological turf occupied by TiVo, Bloomberg News reported Friday.
Bloomberg quoted an unnamed source as saying that the device, internally code-named “Frank,” would have physical storage and connect to Amazon’s Fire TV boxes. The concept reportedly allows for transmitting the video stream wirelessly to smartphones.
The source said that Amazon hasn’t made a final decision on the project, and that its rollout could be canceled or delayed.
To be sure, the science-fiction saga about our future fractious solar system has been very, very good to Abraham and his co-author for the book series, Ty Franck.
Writing under the pen name of James S.A. Corey, Abraham and Franck are just finishing up the eighth book in the series, “Tiamat’s Wrath,” and getting ready to start the ninth and final volume. (Abraham says he already knows the title, but is bound by Orbit Books to keep it secret for now.)
Then there’s the TV show: The third season of “The Expanse” is wrapping up on the Syfy cable channel, and a month ago, Amazon picked up the show in dramatic fashion for a fourth season.
That announcement was made at a space conference by none other than Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, with the cast of “The Expanse” sitting out in the audience.
Abraham has compared the writing business to a casino, and says that “writers are, among other things, professional gamblers.” If that’s so, he’s hit the jackpot with “The Expanse” alone.
But that’s not his only play: He uses a different pen name, M.L.N. Hanover, for a long-running wizards-and-demons book series known as “The Black Sun’s Daughter.” Under his own name, Abraham writes fantasy novels (and has contributed to the “Wild Cards” graphic novel series).
Abraham, who lives in New Mexico with his wife and daughter, wore yet another hat this week: He served as an instructor for the Clarion West Summer Workshop, which brings a select few writers to Seattle’s University District to sharpen their skills in speculative fiction.
It was in that capacity that he gave a reading at University Book Store, and sat down in the store’s coffee shop before the reading for a Q&A with yours truly. Here’s an edited transcript of the talk, which started out with the revival of “The Expanse” TV series and ended up with a wide-angle look at politics in the Donald Trump era.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos strikes a celebratory pose with two of the stars of “The Expanse,” Cas Anvar and Wes Chatham. (Keith Zacharski / National Space Society / In the Barrel Photo)
The head of Amazon Studios confirms that the plan to announce the rescue of “The Expanse” was cooked up while Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, was sitting at a dinner table just a few feet away from the cast of the fan-favorite science-fiction TV show.
I was right beside Bezos when he made the announcement on May 25, during an awards banquet at the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference. I had tipped off his team while dinner was being served that I planned to ask about the fate of “The Expanse,” but once we got up on stage, Bezos artfully beat me to the punch.
“Ten minutes ago, I just got word that ‘The Expanse’ is saved,” he said, setting off cheers in the banquet hall.
The decision meant that the outer-space opera, which had been canceled by the Syfy channel only days before, would go on to a fourth season as an Amazon Prime Original.
Fans had been pleading with Amazon to pick up the show, and in an interview published today on Deadline Hollywood, Amazon Studios chief Jennifer Salke confirmed that a deal was “pretty much done” by the time Bezos sat down to dinner.
But she also confirmed that she pulled the trigger only after getting Bezos’ dinnertime email.
