PBS Nova: Terror in Space (1998)

(pbs.org)

29 points | by opengrass 4 days ago ago

9 comments

  • troutwine 3 hours ago

    There's a roughly contemporary book "Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir" by Bryan Burrough that I recall being somewhat controversial when it came out but also very carefully reported. I do recommend it still.

  • chasil 3 hours ago

    Was Skylab any better?

    "Skylab's orbit eventually decayed and it disintegrated in the atmosphere on July 11, 1979, scattering debris across the Indian Ocean and Western Australia."

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab

    • wat10000 10 minutes ago

      That had nothing to do with Skylab itself. It was caused by NASA’s lack of space flight capability in that time period due to Shuttle delays.

    • xattt an hour ago

      Interesting to note the short time scale between NASA missions: Apollo 17 was in December 1972, and Skylab was first occupied in May 1973.

  • danvk 3 hours ago

    Is the video episode for this up somewhere? It can be hard to find old PBS shows, even from just a few years ago.

  • signorovitch 4 hours ago

    Amazing that this is still up, and that so many of the links still work. Great find!

  • exogeny 3 hours ago

    Simple, functional design. Obviously not...quite the intended use of the HTML table elements, but ah well, that era was fun. Tables and image maps and transparent GIFs!

    • xattt an hour ago

      No, no, no. Having to navigate back to look at the next section of relatively short text (i.e. browsing through the MIR modules) was a painful gimmick. It broke your flow and was generally annoying.

      An image map at the top with paragraphs for each section below, and an in-line text link back to the image map would have sufficed. People were still figuring this stuff out at the time.