Categories
Video Games

Lunar Lander

Lunar LanderSome ten years after the real thing put men on the moon, Atari invites arcade space pilots to try their own luck at the controls of the Lunar Lander. A tricky, brainy game based on real physics, requiring players to cancel out unwanted motion in two axes without running out of fuel, the results are perhaps a little too real: quite a few vector-graphic Eagles fail to land in one piece, and quite a few disgruntled pilots don’t come back to try again.

More about Lunar Lander in Phosphor Dot Fossils

Categories
Music

The Black Hole soundtrack

Soundtrack specialty label Intrada releases one of the most-requested “holy grails” in the history of the hobby of soundtrack collecting, an official CD release of John Barry’s soundtrack from the 1979 Disney science fiction movie The Black Hole. Presented in its entirety for the first time, the release is the product of years of work to recover and copy the original session tapes, which were originally recorded on a now-obscure digital tape format.

More about Soundtracks in Music Reviews
Hear about it on the Sci-Fi 5 podcast

Categories
Chandrayaan Uncrewed Spaceflight

Chandrayaan-3 lands on the moon

Chandrayaan-3Launched by ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) in July, the Chandrayaan-3 uncrewed lunar lander successfully touches down on the surface of the moon near the lunar south pole, the first human-made spacecraft to successfully land in that region. Pictures from the surface are transmitted back to Earth, though the lander’s mission is to look for signs of subsurface water believed to be common in the shaded south pole region, a potentially vital resource for long-term human habitation of the moon. (This was the mission intended for the earlier, unsuccessful Chandrayaan-2 mission in 2018.) In accomplishing this feat, India becomes the fourth country to soft-land a payload on the lunar surface.