The winner this week may be The Space Between Us, about the first person born on Mars. When he returns to visit the Earth, find his father, and meet the first new people in his life, they discover his body can not handle the environment. We also get Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back, the second movie in the Steven Chow series.
Episode 1 of National Geographic’s Why Should We Go To Mars? was world class, and there are more to come! Watch the trailer, and go hunt down the program itself to learn about it. If you need more reasons, China will be heading there in just a few years; do we really want to be left behind, and left out of this amazing exploration?
Today would have been Carl Sagan’s 82nd birthday, a man who was one of my primary inspirations (along with Albert Einstein, Robert A Heinlein, and Nikola Tesla). He brought an appreciation of astronomy and the cosmos to the masses, he co-founded the Planetary Society, and he wrote some amazing books and articles. Want to put the recent political news on Earth in perspective? Watch his famous presentation Pale Blue Dot:
The Smithsonian has an online exhibit you may enjoy: 50 Years of Human Spaceflight. Of course, the first humans were launched into space in 1961, so I am guessing that was originally an exhibit at the brick and mortar Air and Space Museum back in 2011. There is some fascinating information including a lot of details most folks have forgotten these days.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center does not often partner with someone to create a music video, but they did for this one. NASA Goddard video producer David Ladd got together with musicians Javier Colon and Matt Cusson to create a piece about NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that they hoped would ignite the imagination of young potential future engineers and scientists. Besides inspiring the kids, it also needed to engage the parents and educators around them, so they could encourage and support them during the education period they would need to go through to reach that goal. The first lesson to be learned would benefit all of them, whatever they decided to do with their lives: that nothing is beyond their reach if they put the effort into it! That seemed like a pretty positive thing to me, so I had to share it here. This is how we build the future.
The re-imaging of Ghostbusters becomes available this week, starring four very gifted and funny women. Approaching the Unknown is a story about the first mission to Mars, which in this version has a single expedition member. The most recent iteration of The Legend of Tarzan was a solid example of the franchise, but it just didn’t speak to me the way some of the work done in the 40s and 50s did. We also get an animation this time around, Ice Age: Collision Course being every bit as funny as the previous four entries in that series. I loved the visual of the proto-squirrel being carried away in an alien’s flying saucer that was the heart of every trailer I saw.
In Anime, Wish Upon the Pleiades: Complete Collection puts a bunch of magical girls in a spacecraft and sends them into the skies to retrieve pieces of a destroyed alien ship. And Level E: Complete Series is coming out in a S.A.V.E. edition, for those who haven’t picked it up yet.