[X] My Assistant

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

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.