Posts Tagged ‘space’

Godspeed, John Glenn: 50 Years of Americans in Orbit

On February 20, 1962, perched atop an Atlas rocket, John Glenn was blasted into space at 17,500 miles per hour.  He splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean about five hours later, having orbited the Earth three times, the first American to do so.

Our most recent video for Time.com is a tribute to John Glenn, NASA, and 50 years of Americans in orbit. I wrote it, Tara Fredette was cameraman, and Jim Fields edited.

Godspeed, John Glenn…

Link:
http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,1461672138001_2107230,00.html 

My Love Affair with Space

On the eve of the final mission of NASA’s – and the nation’s – 30-year-long space shuttle program, I present to you a video love letter – my newest piece for Time Magazine’s website, wherein Tara and I journey to Florida to witness our first launch.  STS-133, in February, was the last mission of space shuttle Discovery…

Click for bigger version at Time.com

Link:
My Love Affair with Space on Time.com

Videos for Time Magazine

You can easily access all the science videos I’ve made for Time Magazine’s website at this link – the results from a search on my name (Brian Malow) at Time.com.

Vega Next 3 Exits

Oops…  I must’ve taken a wrong turn at Arcturus…

Vega Next 3 Exits

From the Wikipedia entry on Vega:

Vega is the brightest star in the constellation Lyra, the fifth brightest star in the night sky and the second brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, after Arcturus.  It is a relatively nearby star at only 25.3 light-years from Earth, and, together with Arcturus and Sirius, one of the most luminous stars in the Sun‘s neighborhood.

Vega has been extensively studied by astronomers, leading it to be termed, “arguably the next most important star in the sky after the Sun”.[8] Historically, Vega served as the northern pole star at about 12,000 BCE and will do so again at around 14,000 CE. Vega was the first star, other than the Sun, to have its photograph taken and the first to have its spectrum photographed. It was also one of the first stars to have its distance estimated through parallax measurements.

Also:   Vega became the first star to have a car named after it when Chevrolet launched the Vega in 1971.

Odyssey Moon Eyes Lunar X Prize

Odyssey Moon is making a bid for the Google Lunar X Prize:

 

From their website:

Odyssey Moon is the first team to complete registration for the $30M Google Lunar X PRIZE competition. The company made its first public debut on December 6th, 2007, at the Space Investment Summit in San Jose, California, unveiling its plans to make history with the first private robotic mission to the surface of the Moon and win the Google Lunar X PRIZE. The inaugural Odyssey Moon mission will involve a unique small robotic lander designed to deliver scientific, exploration and commercial payloads to the surface of the Moon.

 
Good luck! The more the merrier!

There’s a promo video on their website but a longer version is available on YouTube:

 

And the X PRIZE Foundation’s own video from last year explains their “incentivized competition,” inspired by the $25,000 Orteig Prize which Charles Lindbergh won for the first non-stop flight between New York and Paris:

 

Vega

Oops.  I think I took a wrong turn…

Vega