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Crewed Spaceflight SpaceX Dragon

SpaceX Crew Dragon DM-2

NASA SpaceX Demo-2 launchThree days after weather caused a scrub of their initial launch attempt, astronauts Douglas Hurley and Bob Behnken lift off into orbit aboard SpaceX Dragon DM-2, the second demo mission of the Crew Dragon vehicle, and the first to carry humans to space. (A previous mission, DM-1, was an uncrewed test of the Crew Dragon.) They are the first American astronauts to lift off from American soil and reach orbit since the final crew of the space shuttle lifted off in 2011. (The launch takes place six years and one day after the Crew Dragon was first unveiled.)

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theLogBook.com Podcasts

Retrogram #7348: Saturday Morning Spectacular

RetrogramtheLogBook.com releases the 17th episode of the Retrogram podcast, hosted by Earl Green, covering the following shows from the week of November 25, 1973:

  • Robert’s Robots: A Spanner In The Works
  • Super Friends: The Mysterious Moles
  • The Starlost: The Astro-Medics
  • Star Trek: The Animated Series: The Ambergris Element
  • Orson Welles’ Great Mysteries: For Sale – Silence

More about the Retrogram podcast here

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Franchises Television Twilight Zone

Twilight Zone: Season 2

The Twilight ZoneThe second season of Jordan Peele’s revival of Rod Serling’s science fiction anthology series The Twilight Zone streams on CBS All Access. Unusually for CBS All Access, which normally rolls out one episode per week of its original series, all ten episodes of the season are made available simultaneously, more in line with Netflix’s distribution model.

This series is not yet fully chronicled in the LogBook. You could help change that.

Categories
Deaths Matters of Life & Death Movies Music

Ennio Morricone, composer, dies

Ennio MorriconeLegendary Italian film composer Ennio Morricone dies at the age of 91. With over 500 film and TV credits to his name, he was one of the most prolific composers by either Hollywood or European standards, and his early partnership with director and college classmate Sergio Leone led to his first international success, the score from the 1966 spaghetti western The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly. That brought Morricone to Hollywood’s attention, and he went on to score such films as Once Upon A Time In The West, Two Mules For Sister Sara, Guns For San Sebastian, Duck You Sucker, Exorcist II, La Cage aux Folles, Orca, The Thing, Once Upon A Time In America, Red Sonja, The Untouchables, Bugsy, In The Line Of Fire, Mission To Mars, The Hateful Eight, and many others.

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Deaths Franchises Matters of Life & Death Star Trek

Grant Imahara, actor, dies

Grant Imahara as Sulu in Star Trek ContinuesGrant Imahara, who played Lt. Sulu in the fan-made series Star Trek Continues but is probably better known for his part in the popular TV series Mythbusters, dies from a ruptured brain aneurysm at the age of 49. As a member of Mythbusters’ “Build Team”, he used his background in electrical engineering and robotic design to help create real-world proofs of the sometimes outlandish ideas being tested in the show. Prior to that, Imahara worked at Industrial Light & Magic, and had built and operated droids (including R2-D2) for the Star Wars prequel trilogy, as well as doing similar work for movies such as Galaxy Quest, AI, Terminator 3, and the Matrix trilogy. He had roles in Sharknado 3 and episodes of Eureka.

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Hope (Emirates Mars Mission) Uncrewed Spaceflight

Emirates Mars Mission sends Hope to Mars

Hope launchThe United Arab Emirates launch their first uncrewed interplanetary mission, the Emirates Mars Mission, from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center atop a Japanese H-IIA rocket. Expected to arrive at Mars in February 2021, the Hope orbiter will study Martian weather from orbit, not only serving as a true weather satellite for the red planet, but also gathering data on the factors leading to Martian atmosphere loss. The project, initiated in 2014, is intended not only to study Mars, but to attempt to gather a base of talent that could eventually build an Arab space industry.

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Tianwen-1 Uncrewed Spaceflight

China launches Tianwen-1 toward Mars

Tianwen-1 launchChina launches the uncrewed Tianwen-1 space probe atop a Long March 5 rocket from the launch facilities in Wenchang. Intended to achieve orbit around Mars in February 2021, the spacecraft includes an orbiter and a lander/rover; the orbiter will look for suitable landing sites for the lander/rover combo, which is not expected to be dropped off until April 2021. The rover has soil gathering and analysis capabilities, while the orbiter has ground-penetrating radar. Tianwen-1 is intended to take up the unfulfilled mission objectives of the Yinghuo-1 orbiter, which was launched as a payload on Russia’s failed Fobos-Grunt mission in 2011 (which fell back into Earth’s atmosphere).

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Deaths Matters of Life & Death

John Saxon, actor, dies

John Saxon in Planet EarthActor John Saxon, a frequent guest star in American TV and movies from the 1960s through the ’90s (and still actively working well into the 2010s), dies at the age of 83. He began appearing in movies in his late teens in the early 1950s, but became a frequent flyer on the small screen, with guest roles in such genre fare as The Time Tunnel, The Sixth Sense, Night Gallery, The Six Million Dollar Man, Wonder Woman, The Bionic Woman, The Fantastic Journey, Ray Bradbury Theater, and Masters Of Horror, with movie roles in Battle Beyond The Stars and the A Nightmare On Elm Street Series. In the early ’70s, he starred in two iterations of a Gene Roddenberry series pilot, Planet Earth and Strange New World, neither of which went to series.

Categories
Doctor Who Franchises Star Trek Star Wars Television

The year sci-fi took over the Emmys

Emmy nominationsThe nominees for the 72nd annual Emmy Awards are announced, and genre shows are unusually well represented. HBO’s comics adaptation Watchmen raKes in 26 nominations, including Outstanding Limited Series and the best actor, actress, writing, directing, music, costuming, and design awards in the Limited Series category. The Mandalorian is nominated in 15 categories, including Best Drama Series, music, guest actor, voice-over performance, and visual effects; Westworld is nominated in 11 categories, The Handmaid’s Tale is nominated in ten (including Best Drama Series), Stranger Things nets eight nominations (including Best Drama Series), Star Trek: Picard is nominated in five categories, and Space Force is nominated in four. One nomination each goes to Star Trek: Short Treks, Star Wars: Resistance, Cosmos: Possible Worlds, Lost In Space, Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance, Chasing The Moon, The Boys, Black Mirror, and the interactive feature Doctor Who: The Runaway. CNN’s Apollo 11 documentary is nominated in five categories.

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Perseverance Uncrewed Spaceflight

Perseverance Rover launched toward Mars

Perseverance Rover Atlas V launchNASA launches the Perseverance Rover on its way to the planet Mars atop an Atlas V rocket. Though built around an assembly of flight spares left over from the Curosity Rover, Perseverance (known more formally as the Mars 2020 Rover) carries new experiments, including an ability to gather soil samples and seal them for pickup and return to Earth by a later (as yet unannounced) mission, over 20 built-in cameras, and – in a first for planetary exploration – a microphone designed to record the sounds of the Martian environment. Also attached to Perseverance is a drone, Ingenuity, designed for independent flight in the Martian atmosphere. Perseverance is aimed at Jezero Crater, an environment where liquid surface water is believed to have existed in Mars’ distant past, with a February 2021 landing date. The vehicle alarms ground controllers by going into a “safe mode” after launch, but communications and telemetry resume shortly afterward.

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Franchises Star Trek Television

Star Trek: Lower Decks: Second Contact

Star Trek: Lower DecksStreaming service CBS All Access premieres the first episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks, created by Mike McMahan (Rick & Morty) as the first ongoing animated Star Trek series since the early 1970s. Chronicling the voyages of a new set of characters aboard the 24th century U.S.S. Cerritos, Lower Decks stars Tawny Newsome (Space Force), Jack Quaid (The Boys), Noel Wells (Craig Of The Creek), Eugene Cordero (Other Space), Dawnn Lewis (A Different World, Futurama), and Jerry O’Connell (Sliders).

More about Star Trek: Lower Decks in the LogBook
Hear about it on the Sci-Fi 5 podcast

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Franchises Star Trek Television

Star Trek: Lower Decks: Envoys

Star Trek: Lower DecksStreaming service CBS All Access premieres the second episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks, created by Mike McMahan (Rick & Morty) and starring Tawny Newsome (Space Force), Jack Quaid (The Boys), Noel Wells (Craig Of The Creek), Eugene Cordero (Other Space), Dawnn Lewis (A Different World, Futurama), and Jerry O’Connell (Sliders). Jess Harnell (Animaniacs) guest stars.

More about Star Trek: Lower Decks in the LogBook

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Franchises Star Trek Television

Star Trek: Lower Decks: Temporal Edict

Star Trek: Lower DecksStreaming service CBS All Access premieres the third episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks, created by Mike McMahan (Rick & Morty) and starring Tawny Newsome (Space Force), Jack Quaid (The Boys), Noel Wells (Craig Of The Creek), Eugene Cordero (Other Space), Dawnn Lewis (A Different World, Futurama), and Jerry O’Connell (Sliders). Neil Casey (Other Space, Avenue 5) guest stars.

More about Star Trek: Lower Decks in the LogBook

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Franchises Star Trek Television

Star Trek: Lower Decks: Moist Vessel

Star Trek: Lower DecksStreaming service CBS All Access releases the fourth episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks, created by Mike McMahan (Rick & Morty) and starring Tawny Newsome (Space Force), Jack Quaid (The Boys), Noel Wells (Craig Of The Creek), Eugene Cordero (Other Space), Dawnn Lewis (A Different World, Futurama), and Jerry O’Connell (Sliders). Haley Joel Osment (The Sixth Sense) guest stars.

More about Star Trek: Lower Decks in the LogBook

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Franchises Star Trek Television

Star Trek: Discovery: You Are That Hope

Star Trek: DiscoveryStreaming service CBS All Access releases the 30th episode of Star Trek: Discovery, opening the series’ third season, which has been delayed for the better part of a year due to the COVID-19 outbreak forcing an unexpected switch to remote post-production. David Ajala (Doctor Who) joins the series’ regular cast for the third season, which takes place in a future centuries beyond what has previously been chronicled in any prior Star Trek series.

More about Star Trek: Discovery in the LogBook and theLogBook.com Store
Star Trek: Discovery now streaming on Paramount Plus

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OSIRIS-REx Uncrewed Spaceflight

OSIRIS-REx Samples Bennu

OSIRIS-REx sample collectionNASA’s OSIRIS-REx robotic spacecraft successfully gathers a generous sample of the surface regolith of asteroid 101955 Bennu on its first attempt, with some of the material estimated to originate from as deep as 49 centimeters beneath Bennu’s surface. (This result indicates that the asteroid’s surface is much softer and more pliable than expected.) The touchdown point was selected in conjunction with volunteer citizen scientists searching for safe places to gather a sample, and ruling out potential touchdown sites that appeared to be too hazardous. Intended to gather a minimum of 60 grams of material from Bennu, OSIRIS-REx is believed to have exceeded that minimum by a wide margin, and approval is given to stow the sample in its return container a week ahead of schedule. OSIRIS-REx will remain in Bennu’s orbit until March 2021, at which time it will fire its engines to begin its journey to return the samples of asteroid matter to Earth in September 2023.

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Deaths Matters of Life & Death Movies

Sean Connery, actor, dies

Sean ConneryScottish actor Sean Connery, forever associated with originating the character of super-spy James Bond on film (in 1962’s Dr. No), dies at the age of 90. He played the role of Bond in six films from 1962 through 1971, relinquishing the role to Roger Moore so he could try to expand his career beyond the Bond character and franchise, though he returned to the role for a one-off 1983 film, Never Say Never Again, which was produced outside of the “official” Bond continuity and dared to acknowledge the character’s (and actor’s) advancing age. In the meantime, he had amassed a number of appearances in movies both well-regarded and otherwise, including the bizarre post-apocalyptic sci-fi film Zardoz (1974) and the sci-fi crime drama Outland (1981). In 1986, his appearance in Highlander saw the beginning of a number of films in which he played the mentor of a given movie’s nominal star, including The Untouchables (1987) and Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade (1989). His experiences in filming his final live-action film appearance, 2003’s League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, convinced him to retire from acting; family members said that he suffered from dementia in his final years.