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The Internet is a pretty big place, a veritable universe of ideas and images, at once an inventory of just about everything that exists in the natural world and an ever-expanding cosmos in and of itself. Yet as a medium of representation, the 'net borrows much of its source material from real life, and I was duly captivated by this recent short film about the final frontier.
On the 40th anniversary of the famous 'Blue Marble' photograph taken of Earth from space, Planetary Collective presents a short film documenting astronauts' life-changing stories of seeing the Earth from the outside—a perspective-altering experience often described as the Overview Effect.
Although I found the first half of the film to be absolutely riveting, I felt that it dragged a bit in the middle; nevertheless, the remarkable footage is poignant throughout. If the takeaway message of "Overview" rings clear and true, even the less universal aspects of orbit bear further consideration. Commander Sunita "Sunny" Williams' 25-minute tour of the International Space Station makes for a felicitous companion piece to the Planetary Collective short, something like a home video... in space (Kottke calls it the "nerdiest episode of MTV Cribs").
Similarly, the Smithsonian's Air & Space Magazine has just posted a detailed account of the final mission from July 2011, a worthy document of the end of an era. Between Felix Baumgartner's world record freefall, last year's successful Martian reconnaissance mission and more recent news of habitable planets, our species' abiding obsession with space travel not only as a symbolic endeavor but also a commercially viable enterprise... if not an altogether necessary one.
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