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Posted by: DonPMitchell May 29 2006, 01:45 AM

I'm sure someone has said this before, but I think the best series about planetary space science is still The Planets, produced by the BBC. High quality, good interviews with some real scientists like Bazilevsky, and a rare evenhandedness in including both Soviet and American results.

I've been horribly disappointed by recent NOVAs, pretty much all the programs with Neil Tyson seem to be pretty sloppy. I assume that is not Tyson's fault, I think he's just hired to narrate, but I'm not sure.

In terms of "semi-fiction", I like Voyage to the Planets and Beyond, (called Space Odyssey in Britain). Also produced by the BBC, its portrays a 5-man mission to explore the planets. OK, its not "unmanned", but still. It gave a somewhat dark spin to manned space exploration, which I guess is partly accurate and partly just Labour-Party screenwriters who don't like the space program. My biggest technical nit-picking was the section on Venus, which had a lot of historical and scientific errors.

Alien Planet was a pretty good DVD about a robotic mission to a nearby star. It speculates about how artificial intelligence would be tuned (one probe was curious and another probe was cautious), and there are frequency interviews with scientists (and sort-of scientists) discussing some of the speculations.

I've just been watching Cosmos by Carl Sagan. It's a little dated, and yes he is kind of narcissistic, but it is still a good series to watch. It's noteable in having been produced by a real scientists, and not just by random television writers.

Posted by: Bob Shaw May 29 2006, 03:45 AM

Don:

Nothing beats Robinson Crusoe on Mars - 'This, you call Mars - we call Wewekatanga!' and even Martian War Machines!

Bob Shaw

Posted by: dvandorn May 29 2006, 06:02 AM

The Discovery Science Channel has been running The Planets on Tuesday evenings for the past several weeks. I may be mistaken, but these may be updated versions. The episode on outer planet exploration, for example, included results from Galileo and a description of her death plunge into Jupiter. It still placed Cassini's arrival at Saturn in the future, though.

The Science Channel has also recently run an updated version of Sagan's Cosmos. Nice additional touches of MGS, Odyssey and MEX images, as well as a few Pathfinder and MER images. And some Galileo and Cassini images. But re-edited in such a way that the narration still made sense. Very nicely done.

As for Robinson Crusoe on Mars, yeah, it's a true classic. I guess I will always have a soft spot in my heart for a Mars with enough air pressure for liquid water at the surface, and enough oxygen for abundant plant life... *sigh*...

-the other Doug

Posted by: PhilCo126 May 29 2006, 12:50 PM

Don,
Another good DVD-set on the planets os ' Complete Cosmos ' distributed by Belgian VDM productions ( good 10 minute films about each planet, its moons etc... ) I have found a link here:
http://www.yorkfilms.com/videodvd/cosmosdvd/

Another good set is Stephen Hawking's Universe ( in fact cosmology but great to see how unmanned spacecraft 'proofed' Einstein theoretic findings )
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0780631315/qid=1148906982/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/103-7877759-5702266?s=dvd&v=glance&n=130

Furthermore I have added some DVDs on the lower right side of my weblog:
http://mars-literature.skynetblogs.be/

Posted by: BruceMoomaw May 29 2006, 12:54 PM

Yep, even with Adam West (in his pre-Batman days) making an appearance, and the entire plot plagiarized. (Can you believe Newsweek reviewed that film when it came out? They didn't think much of it.)

Posted by: DonPMitchell Jun 9 2006, 12:11 PM

I just finished watching Space Race. I bought the DVD from amazon.uk, since I have a region-free player here.

Great fun to watch, but as history, it was aweful. Too may mistakes and tired cliches to even begin to list. The Russian side of the story was very inaccurate. Folks interested in this history should certainly read Asif Siddiqi's books. The BBC needed to hire a few history and science consultants too. It's aways nice to make a documentary that happens to be correct. At the very least, someone could have told them how to pronounce "Korolev"!

[attachment=6162:attachment]

One great thing about the show is all the genuine Soviet footage. I always love it when those old films pan across something. Rick Szeliski's panorama stitcher (in MS Digital Image Suite) is amazing. It will combine frames that are panned, zoomed or tilted relative to each other.

Posted by: Stephen Jun 11 2006, 10:24 AM

Actually, the "liquid water" in question was below ground in a cave, and the only sign of "abundant plant life" in the movie was in that pool of water in that cave. Above ground, the Mars of that movie was entirely barren.

======
Stephen


Where was it plagarized from?

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Stephen

(EDIT: These were two separate posts! Is this an IPV bug?)

Posted by: Stephen Jun 11 2006, 11:10 AM

One of the best documentaries I have seen on space issues is the one the BBC Horizons team made about Voyager 2's visit to Neptune back in 1989 (called simply "Encounter with Neptune", IIRC).

There were no great special effects. The documentary relied on NASA's computer simulation of the encounter, the pictures Voyager sent back, and interviews with the chief scientists, such as Torrence Johnson, Carolyn Porco, and others, who were allowed to give explanations at length, sometimes with the aid of simple experiments. (There was also a shot of an artist's representation of Triton from the surface and a shot of a mockup of "the member of the team nobody ever meets": Voyager 2.)

The BBC team also seem to have been at JPL periodically throughout the encounter, which at times gave the viewer a feeling of being a witness to unfolding events. This was notably the case with Triton where the documentary team was able to record the scientists' initial speculations as to what might be causing the apparent youthfulness of the Tritonian surface, and follow that up with further interviews once the experts realised that Voyager had captured evidence of active geysers in action.

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Stephen

Posted by: hugh Jun 11 2006, 11:14 AM

Did anyone see the PBS series “Spaceflight” in the mid 80’s? It was narrated by Martin Sheen and did a nice job of summarizing the early manned program, especially Gemini and the Apollo 1 accident. Nothing much on unmanned spaceflight and it’s not on DVD yet, but the VHS set is well worth having-it puts most space-related docs on the History channel to shame.

Posted by: Bob Shaw Jun 11 2006, 01:14 PM

Stephen:

If you post multiple times in the same thread your posts get aggregated. Feature or bug? I dunno!

As for Robinson Crusoe on Mars... ...perhaps some element of the plot was lifted from, er, 'Robinson Crusoe'? There's a nice statue of Alexander Selkirk, who was the inspiration for Daniel Defoe, in Selkirk's home village of Lower Largo in the East Neuk of Fife. He seems to be wearing rabbit skins, though - not a spacesuit!

Bob Shaw

Posted by: ljk4-1 Jun 11 2006, 04:35 PM

Images and blueprints from the film, including the spaceship Mars Gravity Probe 1:

http://www.dismalswamptraders.com/space/robinson-crusoe-on-mars/robinson-crusoe-on-mars.html

Not the worst looking SF spaceship I have seen in terms of realism. Too bad the
film had to devolve into aliens running around on Mars, but I suppose they had to do
something in terms of the original DaFoe story line.

Posted by: PhilCo126 Dec 24 2006, 01:35 PM

A Stephen Hawking's fan site I believe
http://stephen-hawkings.com/