Yearly Archives: 2009

star trek

To Boldly Go

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United Federation of Planets (Courtesy Wikipedia and Sallico)

It was tough to tear myself away from watching the amazing spacewalks yesterday to go see the new Star Trek movie yesterday at the IMAX theater, but I’m glad I did. To say it was a good movie experience is an understatement!  The movie is “wow!” on several levels: dramatically, special-effects, and acting.

Now, I wasn’t sure what to expect, so went with pretty much an open mind, especially after reading conflicting viewpoints on the Trek boards and discussion groups I sometimes frequent.  Of course, there are always Trekkies who will not like anything that isn’t just like the series they most like — whether it’s the Original Series (TOS), The Next Generation (TNG), Deep Space 9 (DS9), Voyager (VOY), or Enterprise (ENT).  Or the movie series.  Or the cartoons. Or the books.  But,  many more are ready for more of the trekiverse… and this one delivers more.

I have pretty much watched them all, read many of the books, and haven’t really paid attention to the comics or animations, yet. But, I have to say that I am thoughtfully happy and surprised that the “franchise” continues so well.  There’s something about the Star Trek story that continues to touch people many decades after the first series premiered. It certainly does touch me and I’ve been watching since I was a teenage girl wondering if I could have a career in space somehow.

It’s not just the action sequences on the bridge and in space that are well done (although I still would prefer to see less punch-em-up in the shows — that we still have a bunch of guys baring their fists in space for lengthy periods of the movie tells me that producers still think that we are all 15-year-old boys who think with our fists).  The visuals are beautiful, the story is reasonably well plotted and it’s told well. The actors pretty much nail their characters — a tough thing to live up to for any actor. In particular, Zachary Quinto absolutely rocks as Spock.  So does Leonard Nimoy.

I had a few issues and questions with some of the plot — but I’m still thinking about those and may need to go see it again to resolve those before I talk about them. Besides, it never hurts to see a good movie twice.

Of course as a science geek, I constantly have to close my eyes to the many violations of science precepts that take place in these kinds of movies. There are a few in Star Trek, but remarkably few beyond the usual “flying through the black hole and surviving” and “traveling at warp speed” that we’ve all come to accept as staples of the genre.

But, as this is drama, and I know how difficult it is to do some of these scenes (we create our own animations for astronomy at Loch Ness Productions, so I’m aware some of the technical and dramatic issues involved), so I do let some things slide.  I won’t go into the science issues here — rather, I’ll point you to Phil Plait’s excellent discussion over at Bad Astronomy (warning: there are a few spoilers there). He pretty much covers the same bases I would.  But, the science issues are not movie-killers and as long as you go knowing you’re not there to learn science, but see the Trek universe, it’s a great movie!  Boldly go and see it!

hubble space telescope

Opening the Hood

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To Get Inside

Mission shot 1.
Mission shot 1.

Watching the astronauts try to untighten a bolt on the grounding strap on the WFPC2 camera on the Hubble Space Telescope reminds me of watching a couple of guys work under the hood of a car.  They’ve tried the gentle ways, and now it’s time to get some  more tools and get all torquey on the bolt. It’s interesting to listen to them discuss back and forth what to do, between the two astronauts in the payload bay and the folks on the ground. Now they’ve said, “Give it your best try.”

And that’s the best you can do — same thing you’d do on the ground working on a tough problem. You find work-arounds and ways to get the job done.  Only in this case, they’re on orbit, a few hundred kilometers above Earth’s surface, moving in near-zero gravity.

More from the servicing mission.
More from the servicing mission.

If you’re not watching this mission online, you can get a 24/7 streaming video of it at SpaceVidcast.com — which

I’ve been watching all morning, and more than once I’ve marveled at the fact that I can sit here at my desk and have a space mission unfolding before my eyes on my right screen.  This is the kind of thing that we could only dream about when we got our first computers back in the 1980s. In fact, if anybody had told me all those years ago that in the new century I could simultaneously work on writing a document, while having an image open in an editing program, listen to music, make a phone call (via Skype), and watch astronauts work on my favorite space telescope, all on one computer, I probably would have said they were crazy.

But here we are, doing all those things and more — in the new century, using equipment that was, in many ways large and small, birthed in the space age for missions like the one I’m watching.  Pretty darned amazing.