Friday Five – Moments From Space

Welcome to the Friday Five! Each week I help you get to know me a little better with the help of a top 5 list! This week in honor of the Mars Rover Curiosity, me topic is: Moments From Space

So on Monday NASA landed the most well equipped robotic laboratory ever safely on the surface of Mars. It’s kind of a big deal and all kinds of crazy technical and totally awesome from a scientific standpoint. That got me to thinking about all the other things that have happened in space. OK, so not a lot has actually happened in space, but it is the setting for all kinds of awesome stuff across a variety of media.

• Apollo 11 – Even though the later J-missions were far more impressive (they lasted nearly 3 times longer, did far more scientific research, they even had a car. . . ON THE MOON!), this was the one that paved the way and will always be remembered for that.

 

• Trip Tucker’s transfer by tether between two ships travelling at warp – Star Trek: Enterprise – “Divergence” – Can I just say all of Star Trek, is that a option? Rather than just a list of Star Trek things, I only picked one. It was a tough choice between this and the Battle of Cardassia from the DS9 finale, but you only get to see bits and pieces of that, this was a full act of non stop action. Short version – Enterprise is sabotaged by the Klingons so that if it slows down, it will blow up (so basically it becomes the bus from Speed). Also, if it maintains its maximum speed for too long it blows up. Catch 22. The only way to fix the problem is to restart the engines. But that involves shutting them down in flight, which would be like hitting a brick wall at 200 times the speed of light when they slip out of warp and back into normal space uncontrolled. If however, they were inside another ship’s warp field they could shut down the engines safely and maintain warp speed until the engines restart. But the only person who can possibly do that is Trip Tucker, and he’s on the Columbia, not the Enterprise, and the transporters won’t work at warp. Solution: Fly the Enterprise and Columbia in formation less than 50 meters apart, and have Trip repel down a tether strung between the two shuttlebays. He then has only two minutes to complete a cold manual restart that generally takes 15 minutes and has never been done in flight before the Columbia’s warp field collapses, as it wasn’t designed to maintain a field large enough for two ships. Of course Trip finishes the procedure with just seconds to spare because he is just that damn good (and if he doesn’t it’s the end of the series, even though there were only six episodes after this one before the show ended anyway)

 

• Every fight ever on Voltron – Activate interlock! Dynotherms connected! Intracells up! Mega thrusters are go! LET’S GO VOLTRON FORCE! Form feet and legs! Form arms and body! And, I’ll form the head!

 

• Pigs in Space – The Muppet Show – There are a lot of things that are literally named (Something) in Space, like Leprechaun 4: In Space, Lost in Space, Power Rangers in Space, Jason X (or Jason in Space), Space: Above and Beyond, Homeboys in (Outer) Space, Partridge Family 2200 AD (or The Partridge Family In (Outer) Space), Where in Space is Carmen Sandiego?, etc. This one is my favorite, if just for the way they say the title everytime it’s on the show. In fact, there was even an episode with Luke Skywalker, C3PO and R2D2.

 

• Manned Martian landing – While it hasn’t happened for real yet, it will someday, and I for one hope to be around to see it. We just landed a car there, it can’t be much harder to send along the driver. And as I’ve discussed before, it may be sooner than you think.

JohnScott is the proud owner of a life size replica Captain Kirk Chair. He is a hoarder of Comic Books, Transformers, and Star Trek action figures. He attended Space Camp as an adult. He has taken vacations to the closing of the Star Trek Experience and the final night Shuttle launch. He has been known to yell at his television when the kids can't put together the damn statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. When not writing for InsufficientScotty, he is a Software Engineer for a major healthcare communications company. You can Email or follow on Twitter @NotEnoughScotty or Facebook