Monthly Archives: September 2012

Deep Purple "Space Truckin’"

Well we had a lot of luck on Venus
We always have a ball on Mars
We’re meeting all the groovy people
We’ve rocked the Milky way so far
We danced around the Borealice
We’re space trucking round the stars
Twice:
Come on, come on, come on,
Let’s go space trucking
Remember when you did the woonshot
And Ponny Treeper lid the way
We’d move to the Canaveral moonstop
And every night would dance and sway
We got music in our solar system
We’re space trucking round the stars
Twice :
Come on, come on, come on,
Let’s go space trucking
The fireball that we rooled was moving
And now we got the new machine
Yeah yeah yeah yeah the treaks said
Man those cats can really sing
They got music in their solar systems
They’re rocked around the Milky way
They danced around the Borealice
They’re space trucking every day
Many times :
Come on, come on come on
Let’s go space trucking

Wernher von Braun’s Martian Chronicles

From 1952 until 1954, the weekly magazine Collier’s published a series of articles on space exploration spread out across eight issues. Several of the articles were written by Wernher von Braun, the former Third Reich rocket scientist who began working for the U.S. after WWII.  The Collier’s series is said to have inspired countless popular visions of space travel. This impact was in no small part due to the gorgeous, colorful illustrations done by Chesley Bonestell, Fred Freeman and Rolf Klep.

Mark Rober, "Curiosity’s Landing From the Perspective of the 3,000 People Who Built It"

Mark Rober is an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. In that role, Rober spent seven years working on the Curiosity project as NASA made its plans to explore Mars. “That’s nearly my entire professional career,” Rober notes, “and a quarter of my life.”

Rober has produced a video of the landing — a video told from his personal perspective, and from the perspective of the more than 3,000 people who, in some way, contributed to Curiosity’s success. “Appropriately,” Rober says, “there’s been a lot of focus on Curiosity, the rover. But what I think makes JPL really great aren’t its robots. It’s the people who build them.”

He made the video, which focuses on Curiosity’s climactic touchdown, to celebrate those people.