Are you happy with your national TV?, I am... Options

[ustrax]

Sometime one can complain about TVs not giving enough attention to space exploration but here there's a channel (2:) who bets on great documentaries, tonight there's one about Ham, the chimp astronaut from the Mercury project, after this, to let your mind travel a bit, two episodes from the Twilight Zone, only then I'll change to SIC to see a great comedy...

The question here is: What does your national TV do for space exploration?

[dilo]

Dear Ustrax, the national italian television (called RAI), founded with public money, tipically does poor space/astronomy-related information and virtually no documentary about this. Also science fiction is almost censored, apart from some very bad commercial movies; this is true also for the major private network (Mediaset).
The only exception is a national private broadcast called "La7", which daily broadcast StarTrek series in the late afternoon and sometimes space related documentaries, like the one you watched (Ham, the chimp astronaut).
This makes me angry, especially because situation was very different 20/30 years ago: when I was a kid I grew up with UFO, Space1999 and many others great SF TV serials and I watched also many nice scientific documentaries. And, as you can imagine, the strongly conditioned my thinking.
At a certain point, they decided that this is a "niche target" and started to shift SF serials toward impossible hours (they were able to transmit new StarTrek seasons at 3/4 am!); then they stopped it definitively!
I'm not sure, but I cannot persuade myself that this is only a commercial choice based on share data... no, there must be more.
Something deeply subversive live in good Science Fiction and good Scientific journalism, and is probably related to the fact that, when you start to look above your head, you immediately understand how small we are and how insignificant are all the material things we (should) consider so important in our terrestrial life; and, also, you realize how ridicule are most TV shows we should watch. In other words, you become less conditionable and more free and, obviously, this is unacceptable by those who continuosly try to condition your mind and your choices through a mass media!
Maybe I'm becoming a crazy, hold man, but every day I'm more convinced of this. And I'm not the only one, at least in this Forum.
So I watch less and less TV and spend more time on the Internet!

Sad to say, but this is the epoch we live.

[tedstryk]

Do we have national TV?...well, PBS, I guess. I have no idea about its coverage though.

[PDP8E]

Here in Boston MA USA, we have a cable TV system that has 400+ channels.

From a space orientation it has the NASA Select Channel (24x7 Nasa, real-time missions, replays, press conferences, history of space, -etc). We have the Science channel (24x7 science topics and series: Cosmos, Ascent of Man, Space, everything). We have the SCIFI channel (24x7 new and old sci-fi series and movies), The Military Channel (24x7 of military themes and hardware), Discovery Channel (24x7 science themes), Discovery Wings channel (24x7 of aeronautics). We have about 20 Hi-DEF channels, and one carries a daily space update (it looks like they get the material from JPL, Space.com, and others.

None of these are what I call 'national tv' (public funded, state run, etc) They are all commercial enterprises (with the exception of the NASA channel). BUT most of these channels have national reach.

Our Publick TV is called PBS; it is govt-funded, and also has a host of space related themes (though maybe only 5-10%)

The mainstream 'network' channels are dreadful (sitcoms, and nutty dramas)

Am I happy? with 400 channels its is sometimes tough to put the remote down and go read the latest on UMSF (just kidding!)

[dvandorn]

Do we have national TV?...well, PBS, I guess. I have no idea about its coverage though.

PBS does some very good documentaries on space themes. In fact, right at this very moment I am watching a PBS documentary in the "American Experience" series entitled "The Race to the Moon." It's an hour-long piece on the Apollo 8 mission, including a lot of very interesting recent interviews with Susan Borman, Marilyn Lovell and Valerie Anders. It features extremely good and accurate CGI animation of the various maneuvers, a very good preamble setting up the circumstances in which Apollo 8 flew, and some pretty rare footage (including onboard voice recorder tapes, some of the final TV transmission during TEI and snippets of Walter Cronkite's CBS coverage of the flight).

And while it happened coming up on 20 years ago, I remember PBS devoting more than six hours to "Neptune All Night," live coverage of the entire Voyager 2 close encounter with the Neptune system. I was *very* happy with my "national TV system" that night!

-the other Doug

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

I'm happy to be able to see BBC1 + BBC2 + BBC World but would also like the other BBC channels

[dvandorn]

The only version of the Beeb we get here in the States (well, at least the only one I get with my Comcast cable TV system) is what they call BBC-America, or BBCA. I have no real idea what programming from the various "mainline" BBC channels get combined into BBCA, though. I do enjoy listening to the BBC World News at least once a week -- IMHO, it's good to get some news from foreign viewpoints on a regular basis.

-the other Doug

[doctorclu]

And while it happened coming up on 20 years ago, I remember PBS devoting more than six hours to "Neptune All Night," live coverage of the entire Voyager 2 close encounter with the Neptune system. I was *very* happy with my "national TV system" that night!

-the other Doug

Just wanted to say I have ported my beta tapes of Nepture All Night (I got maybe four out of the 6.5 hours that show was aired) and currently putting up segments of the program on YouTube for all to enjoy.

To me Neptune All Night was the moon landing of my time. I wouldn't experience excitement like that till the Titan lander, and I will be at the edge of my seat in 2015 with Pluto!!

[volcanopele]

Very Cool!

I would most like to see the coverage from when the Triton images started coming down. Would be curious to see everyone's initial reaction.

[Ian R]

I have some of that footage Jason (from the 1989 BBC Horizon documentary on the Neptune encounter). Among those visible are Carolyn Porco, Ed Stone, Carl Sagan, Torrence Johnson, Brad Smith and many others too.

Ian.

[volcanopele]

doctorclu, thanks for uploading the other videos. Really interesting to watch. I haven't gotten to the part covering the return of the Triton images, but I am really am looking forward to it.

[volcanopele]

I particularly like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RiHYaIe4DI

This particularly clip has Steve Wall and Larry Soderblom discussing Triton and its surface features shortly before the highest resolution images were returned. Many of the arguments regarding what various surface markings mean sounds an awful lot like the arguments we have with Titan (involving many of the same people...)

[ustrax]

My national TV doesn't make me happy...it makes my laugh histerically...
Check out this precious gems of translation...read the original captions and try to figure out who are the famous scientists that gave their names to that fantastic mission to Titan.



BTW, vacations were just great!

[ugordan]

How in the world did I miss this thread? This is awesome stuff, thanks a lot, doctorclu! At last I can get a feel of what it was like back in 1989 watching the flyby unfold!

[tty]

You're nitpicking Ustrax. If I remember rightly O'Higgins was a chilean liberation leader and Cousin a french philosopher, both in the early nineteenth century surely that is close enough to Cassini and Huygens for the average journalist?