Re: tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of the first human spaceflight

At 4 this morning I woke up and unable to get back to sleep, turned on the Science Channel, which had a two- hour program on the Mercury & Gemini programs. I can't recall the title right now, but it took me back to all that went on then. I was 7 when Shepard went up and followed every flight intently.

-Fr. Ron

Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 12, 2011, at 11:25 AM, "Peter T. Chattaway" <petert-LOVM4QxV+tDq6eQxt3vRmLDks+cytr/[email protected]> wrote:

> On Tue, 12 Apr 2011, Mike Findlay wrote:
>> Interesting stuff.  I know we have significant budget issues but I wish we were doing more space exploration, including a mission to Mars.
> 
> Yeah.
> 
> The last week or two, I watched (via Netflix) a BBC series from about a decade ago called The Planets, and it brought a lot of stuff back to memory that I had forgotten, but which I now remember talking about with my friends and teachers in elementary school.  And it's always good to be reminded of just how *new* our whole space-exploration thing is.  The famous "earthrise" pictures taken by Apollo 8 are only two years older than I am, so I grew up with them and it's kind of unfathomable to me that virtually no one prior to my lifetime had ever seen a photo of the earth from space before.  (So when Stanley Kubrick and other filmmakers showed people orbiting the earth and going to the moon in movies made prior to that, they had no real-world imagery to emulate; they were working purely on
  imagination and best guesses.)  I also remember a lot of talk about the Voyager missions when I was in Grade 3 or 4 or 5 ... and of course those missions came up in the pop culture of the time, whether explicitly (the "villain" in 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture turns out to be a Voyager probe that gained sentience) or implicitly (the depiction of Jupiter and its moons in 1984's 2010: The Year We Make Contact was hugely influenced by the images sent back by the Voyager probes).  But I was still so young at the time that it's a little difficult to imagine that there was, in fact, a time -- even within my own lifetime -- when no one had seen these things.  And of course, in addition to the newness of it all, there is also the amazing thought that something made by us, here on this pl
 anet, has broken free of our orbit and is now hurtling through the vast emptiness of space all on its own, still sending signals to us when it can but, of course, those signals will eventually get very faint.  And the fact that it takes so *long* to travel through space is also kind of awe-inspring; I mean, really, to think that a probe built in the 1970s would finally reach the outer limits of the solar system in the 1990s, or that people today would be using the best in current technology to communicate with a machine built using something comparatively primitive because that's the best and only representation of us out that far ... and then there's the question of how many people who *built* the probe in the 1970s were even still *alive* when it sent back its "pale blue dot" image of 
 the earth in the 1990s (and of course, Carl Sagan, the man who I believe coined that term, was one of the people who was still alive in the early 1990s, but he is no longer with us now).  Anyway, great stuff.
> 
> My one and only complaint about the series is that Netflix didn't have any subtitles for the Russian interviews.  Some DVDs "burn" the subtitles into the image, while others use a subtitle track for just the foreign bits (as opposed to a subtitle track that includes *all* the speech), and I'm guessing The Planets was released to DVD in the latter format, and that Netflix got its video image (and *only* the video image -- no text tracks or alternate audio tracks) from one of those DVDs.  Sigh.
> 
> -- 
> dadl-ot mailing list
> http://mail.thehood.us/mailman/listinfo/dadl-ot_thehood.us
> http://news.gmane.org/gmane.music.dadl.ot

-- 
dadl-ot mailing list
http://mail.thehood.us/mailman/listinfo/dadl-ot_thehood.us
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.music.dadl.ot