SPACE ADVENTURES

Saturday Night Live finally returned Saturday night, and opened with the Trump (Alex Baldwin) versus Biden (Jim Carrey) debate.  It was a hoot!

My Monday postings in the past provided reviews of two films I saw over the weekend.  As I've stopped going to movie theaters, here are two productions dealing with the USA versus USSR space race from Prime and Netflix.  First, though, I'll start with a  historical perspective so you can appreciate when these events occurred:

• 
  Salyut (salute or fireworks--changed from Zarya for dawn because China had a program called dawn) program:
• 1971-1986--Salyut 1-7
• Salyut 1 became the first crewed space station, and there were 9 in all
• 71 successes and  10 failures, with 4 cosmonauts lost in space

• 
  Soyuz:  the spacecraft that took the cosmonauts to Salyut
• flew 786 missions, with only 3 failures
• ten variants
• nothing was reusable
• While supposedly a civilian operation, like NASA, much of the earlier Salyut missions were secret with defense missions.  However, after Salyut 5, the military abandoned these flights because spy satellites were cheaper and more efficient

• 
  Salyut 7 was launched on 19 April 1982
• on 12 February 1985 communication with Salyut 7 was lost.
• Soyuz T-13 was created to salvage the operation (this was the movie to come)
• Salyut was replaced by Mir (right, 1986-2001), then by the International Space Station (ISS)

• 

  ISS
• started by the U.S. as Freedom in the 1980's
• joined by Russia and other nations
• first component launched in 1998
• first residents on 2 November 2000, and continuously occupied since then
• expected dissolution in 2024 with Russia moving their components to their future station OPSEK

• 
  ISS is expected to crash probably at the X, the graveyard of space junk, in 2028.  Russia alone has dropped 190 objects there.  While NASA has opened up the ISS to commercial operations, at this point there is no successful company making any profit on that craft.  The total cost so far?  $150 billion.  The Pacific International Ocean Station envisioned as the first experimental platform for the Blue Revolution is expected to cost $150 million, or a thousand times less. The value of Project Apollo today would have been $28 billion.  By May the U.S. Congress had authorized roughly $3 trillion ($3000 billion) for coronavirus relief, with another $1.5 trillion or so being currently negotiated.  You decide what are the priorities for the nation. 

• 
  Space Shuttle program
• 1981 to 2011
• the only major reusable space exploration system ever
• 135 missions, two catastrophes, with loss of 14 astronauts
• cost of $196 billion in 2011 dollars
• first orbiter was Columbia on  12 April 1981, the 20th anniversary of Yuri Gargarin's space flight

• 
  Challenger was delivered in July 1982, Discovery in November 1983 Atlantis in April 1985 and Endeavor in May 1991
• 28 January 1986:  Challenger lost 73 seconds after liftoff (this is the documentary from Netflix)
• 24 April 1990:  Discovery carried the Hubble Space Telescope into space
• 1 February 2003:  Columbia lost approximately 16 minutes before landing, killing seven crew members
• 8 July 2011:  final launch, Atlantis
• To get to the International Space Station, the USA turned to Soyuz

With that background, I watched:

                                                       Rotten Tomatoes

                                                   Reviewers  Audiences

Challenger:  The Final Flight       88%          90%       Netflix

Salyut 7                                       100%          81%       Amazon Prime

Challenger was a documentary in four one-hour segments.  Informative with a lot of details about O-rings, but well done.  Backstories and heartbreaking moments.  The novelty was that a real teacher was added to the crew of six.  I was particularly distressed because one of the astronauts came from Hawaii.

This was the crew that perished:

Salyut 7 was a Russian production where cosmonaut Vladimir Dzhanibedov (Fyodorov in the film) and engineer Victor Savinykh (Alyokhin), fishing buddies, were sent on a very risky mission to bring Salyut 7 back to life.  The film was released in 2017, and, from the beginning I immediately realized that I had seen it back then.  

They used the Ilyushin II076 aircraft ten times to dive in a parabola, creating weightlessness for 26 seconds.  A prime motivation for recovery by the Soviet Union in the plot was the idea that NASA would be sending the Space Shuttle to kidnap Salyut 7 (which just happened to be small enough to fit into the cargo bay).  The reality is that this would have been difficult.

Remember that this was a 100% Rotten Tomatoes-rated film, so it had to be pretty good.  Certainly well-made, but perhaps a bit over-dramatized here and there.  Did they succeed?  Go watch this movie.

This was 1982, so the Cold War was still hot.  In 1983 Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov was in charge of a bunker where their satellite detected a signal that the USA had fired five ICBMs toward the Soviet Union.  The false alarm was caused by the glint of sunlight off clouds near a Montana missile site.  This he did not know, so with alarms blaring, Petrov reasoned that the U.S. would send hundreds of missiles, not five, so he did not alert a higher authority.  We were that close to a nuclear winter.  He is known as the man who saved the world.  A Danish documentary moderated by Kevin Costner, with Matt Damon and Robert De Niro, was released in 2014.  Here is that entire one hour and 45 minute production!

At first I was planning to add the American film, Apollo 13, with Tom Hanks, linking these three space disasters.  However, you can read my review of that film here.  All this occurred much earlier in 1970 as the 13th mission of Apollo.  Apollo 11 in 1969 was the one that sent Neil Armstrong to the Moon.

I'm now into #86, with the following three finalists:

• Running Bear:  Johnny Preston
• El Paso:  Marty Robbins
• Where the Boys Are:  Connie Francis

Preston and Robbins came to the Garden of Allah, where many of us went on Friday nights when I was in college.  It was not easy to get there, as we had to leave Palo Alto and cross one of those bridges to get to the east side of San Francisco Bay to this large barn.  It's not there anymore.

This Connie Francis song was not a particular favorite of mine.  Lipstick on Your Collar was higher up on my initial list.  However,  sometimes it's not the tune but the experience that makes the difference.

When I was a junior, four of us were attracted to two events:  Fort Lauderdale, where students went for Spring Break, as depicted in the film, Where the Boys Are, and we were recruited to join an adventure to Cuba.  It was April in 1961.  At the last moment I chickened out, which incurred some wrath, but no one, thus, went.  Good thing, for that foray turned out to be that disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion.  My reluctance probably saved our lives.  This is why Where the Boys Are deserves this #86 spot.

Someone sent this to me, and I was impressed.  Here was Chinese President Xi Zinping's daughter, Mingze, singing Where the Boys Are:

Mingze (extreme left) did earn a B.A. from Harvard, supposedly singing this song at her graduation ceremony in 2014.  She did go to Harvard, but the singing part turned out to be false.  Note that her name is spelled wrong on that clip.  The real singer is Hiraku Nishida (middle and right photos) of Japan.  That video was released in 2008 under her name.

Well, that disturbance I mentioned yesterday now has a name, Delta, and will strengthen into a hurricane within 24 hours, then make landfall over New Orleans or thereabouts early Friday:

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