{"id":2145,"date":"2011-04-27T22:19:22","date_gmt":"2011-04-27T22:19:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=2145"},"modified":"2011-04-27T22:19:22","modified_gmt":"2011-04-27T22:19:22","slug":"an_idea_born_in_unsettled_times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2011\/04\/27\/an_idea_born_in_unsettled_times\/","title":{"rendered":"An Idea Born in Unsettled Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With space shuttle <i>Endeavour<\/i>, the youngest of the fleet, scheduled to blast off on its final mission Friday afternoon, this seems an appropriate time to post the following, a NASA-produced video overview of the shuttle program narrated by none other than Captain James T. Kirk himself. Blow this one up to full-screen size&#8230; there&#8217;re some great clips here, including a time lapse of the crawler carrying <i>Endeavour <\/i>out to the launch pad, archival footage of the lifting bodies that were tested early in the shuttle&#8217;s design phase (think of the opening from <i>The Six Million Dollar Man<\/i>), and film of the mid-70s glide and landing tests using the prototype shuttle <i>Enterprise<\/i>. <\/p>\n<p><iframe src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/rlG7W0gkjjE\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"314\" width=\"500\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>It looks to me like this might be part of a longer documentary, considering it only touches the surface of the shuttle program, completely ignoring the <i>Challenger <\/i>and <i>Columbia <\/i>disasters and equally failing to mention the many, many achievements such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the ISS, and the Buck Rogers-style untethered spacewalks using the Manned Maneuvering Unit. If this does turn out to be a preview of a full-length doc, put me down for a DVD copy&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Incidentally, I found it interesting that <i>Enterprise <\/i>was originally supposed to be called the <i>Constitution<\/i>, considering that <i>Star Trek<\/i>&#8216;s fictional <i>Enterprise <\/i>is &#8212; are you ready for this? &#8212; a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Constitution_class_starship\">Constitution-class starship<\/a>. And yes, I know exactly what a tremendous nerd I am, thank you for mentioning it&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With space shuttle Endeavour, the youngest of the fleet, scheduled to blast off on its final mission Friday afternoon, this seems an appropriate time to post the following, a NASA-produced video overview of the shuttle program narrated by none other than Captain James T. Kirk himself. Blow this one up to full-screen size&#8230; there&#8217;re some [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-final-frontier"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}