Year: 2020

Categories
Crewed Spaceflight International Space Station SpaceX Dragon

SpaceX Crew-1

  • November 15, 2020

SpaceX Crew-1 docked at ISSFollowing the first crewed test flight earlier in the year, SpaceX launches the first operational Crew Dragon flight to the International Space Station, with astronauts Michael S. Hopkins, Victor J. Glover, Sôichi Noguchi, and Shannon Walker aboard. This is also the first long-duration mission for the Crew Dragon, which will see the spacecraft remain docked to the station for several months before returning to Earth.

Categories
Astronomy Science & Technology

Arecibo Observatory slated for demolition

  • November 19, 2020

Arecibo ObservatoryAfter being in operation for most of the past 57 years, the fate of the Arecibo Radio Telescope facility is sealed by the failure of two major tension cables suspending the 900-ton equipment platform over the dish carved into the Puerto Rican countryside. Engineering safety assessments reveal that other cables are on the verge of failure, which could lead to an “uncontrolled collapse” putting the lives of nearby researchers and engineers at risk. As a result, the Arecibo facility – originally a project of Cornell University but now managed by the University of Central Florida – is slated for demolition as soon as is safely possible, provided its aging superstructure doesn’t collapse under its own weight first. The observatory’s physical superstructure had been under close observation since suffering major damage from Hurricane Maria, which caused widespread destruction in Puerto Rico in 2017. The closure of the Arecibo facility marks the end of a significant era of radio astronomy.

Categories
Deaths Franchises Matters of Life & Death Star Trek Television

Herbert F. Solow, producer, dies

  • November 19, 2020

Herbert F. SolowHired by Lucille Ball to help turn around the fortunes of Desilu Studios in the 1960s following her divorce from studio co-founder Desi Arnaz, producer and production executive Herbert F. Solow became known as “the man who sold Star Trek” – namely, he pitched the series to the networks, and finally made a sale to NBC, getting the storied science fiction series on the air at last. Solow also sold CBS on the spy-fi series Mission: Impossible at the same time, and later scored another major sale to CBS in the form of the detective series Mannix. He adapted (from a novel) and produced the early 1970s TV movie adaptation Killdozer, and co-created the late ’70s sci-fi series Man From Atlantis. He also went on to add “movie producer” to his resume; in later years, he looked back fondly upon his role in starting the Star Trek franchise with such biographical books as “Inside Star Trek: The Real Story“. Herb Solow died at the age of 89.

More about Star Trek in the LogBook

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Doctor Who Franchises Television

Daleks!: Planet Of The Mechanoids

  • November 26, 2020

Daleks!The BBC releases the third episode of Daleks!, an animated Doctor Who spinoff centered around that franchise’s most enduring villains, on YouTube, featuring the voices of Anjli Mohindra (The Sarah Jane Adventures), Ayesha Antoine, and Nicholas Briggs. This is part of the “Time Lord Victorious” alternate-timeline multimedia event, and marks the first on-screen appearance of the Mechanoids since their debut in a 1966 Doctor Who episode.

More about Daleks! in the LogBook

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Deaths Franchises Matters of Life & Death Star Wars

David Prowse, actor, dies

  • November 29, 2020

David ProwseBritish-born actor and bodybuilder David Prowse, a towering figure who gained fame primarily as the physical embodiment of Darth Vader in the first three Star Wars films, dies after a brief illness at the age of 85. Sought after for movie roles – often non-speaking, and frequently in monster suits of one kind or another – Prowse had also played a Minotaur in Doctor Who (The Time Monster, 1972), a space creature in Space: 1999 (The Beta Cloud, 1976), and even after his sudden rise to fame via Star Wars, appeared in such roles as Hotblack Desiato’s bodyguard in the fifth episode of the BBC’s TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy in 1981, which offered him a rare speaking part. A favorite on the convention and autograph circuit, Prowse had only retired from a busy schedule of convention appearances a couple of years prior to his death. He was sought by George Lucas to play either Vader or Chewbacca after Lucas saw his brief appearance as a muscular bodyguard in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Prowse had also appeared as a superhero in a series of public safety announcements and films in the UK, which won him much acclaim over the years.

Categories
Astronomy Science & Technology

Arecibo Radio Telescope collapses

  • December 1, 2020

Arecibo Radio TelescopeThe 57-year-old Arecibo Radio Telescope is destroyed when its 900-ton equipment platform, suspended over the massive dish built into a geographic feature near Arecibo, Puerto Rico, falls into the dish, causing catastrophic damage to both. The platform had been suspended by miles of steel cables from three towers over the dish, through a recent assessment of the ability of both cables and towers to bear the platform’s load had raised doubts that the facility could remain operational. As the decision had already been made to decommission and dismantle the Arecibo telescope, the facility had already been evacuated prior to the collapse. The towers holding the platform over the dish also suffer severe damage, rendering them structurally unsafe as well. Locals compared the sound of the event to that of an avalanche or an earthquake.

Hear about it on the Sci-Fi 5 podcast

Categories
Hayabusa Uncrewed Spaceflight

Hayabusa-2’s samples return to Earth

  • December 5, 2020

Hayabusa-2 Samples RetrievedThe Japanese space agency, JAXA, successfully recovers the Hayabusa-2 space probe’s sample return container after its return to Earth in Austrailia. The container’s precious cargo is 100 milligrams of surface and subsurface material retrieved by Hayabusa-2 from the surface of asteroid 162173 Ryugu during a series of touch-and-go maneuvers performed between February and July of 2019. Though it drops its samples off during a close flyby of Earth, Hayabusa-2 remains in space, where JAXA hopes to redirect it to study further asteroids, though the probe will no longer have the ability to gather or return samples.

Categories
Television

The Expanse: Season 5 premiere

  • December 16, 2020

The ExpanseEpisodes 47-49 of the science fiction series The Expanse, based on the series of novels by James S.A. Corey (a pseudonym for writers Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham), premiere on streaming service Amazon Prime. Though the first three season five episodes – Exodus, Churn, and Mother – drop simultaneously, Amazon will release the remainder of the fifth season one episode per week. This season is an adaptation of the novel Nemesis Games.

The Expanse now streaming on Amazon Prime

Categories
Deaths Franchises Matters of Life & Death Star Wars

Jeremy Bulloch, actor, dies

  • December 17, 2020

Jeremy BullochBritish actor Jeremy Bulloch, best known internationally for playing the role of Boba Fett in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return Of The Jedi (1983), dies at the age of 75. A child actor who went professional at a young age, Bulloch made two Doctor Who appearances (The Space Museum, 1965 and The Time Warrior, 1973), and made guest appearances in Strange Report, Chocky, and Robin of Sherwood. His initial appearance as Boba Fett was considered a very minor role for him as he was, at the time, starring in the popular UK sitcom Agony, broadcast on London Weekend Television, and his combined appearances in both Star Wars films added up to less than two minutes of screen time. After making a fleeting appearance as an unrelated character in 2005‘s Star Wars Episode III, Bulloch became a regular in the 2009 sci-fi comedy Starhyke, co-starring as the ship’s doctor. Like many of his other masked Star Wars castmates, his helmet afforded him little anonymity and he was a favorite on the sci-fi convention circuit.