Common Themes

You might wonder, even given my tremendous enthusiasm for spaceflight, why I started this blog in particular. What makes a woman forage through archives, the internet, yard sales and the like, looking for space-themed things to share? What was that one thing that caught her eye and made her go, “hey, I should be blogging this!”

You’re looking at it. This bottle full of sweet-peas was hanging from the fence of a bed and breakfast in my hometown during the Fourth of July festival (along with other colorful bottles.) It being blue, it caught my eye; it having “Apollo” and a crescent moon on it made me want to sneak back and steal it under cover of darkness. (I didn’t. I bought my own on eBay.)

I was thrilled, because it encapsulated the exact sort of thing I was recently wanting to share and expand on; I bought the domain specifically to start this blog. It was a beer with an “artsy” name, but not Apollo the God or “hey, let’s do a space-age angle”; here was a company with a definite vision and purposeful motifs. Unfortunately for me/the world, the Big Bang Brewery (San Francisco, CA) no longer exists. Only vestiges of the company remain: a news article, the copywriter, the glassworks responsible for the lovely cobalt bottles, and images of their logos/cases. Bottlecap photo from here.

Along with the empty (and full!) bottles of Apollo Ale and Lager I purchased on eBay, I got a printed insert with promotional copy text:

Apollo — The Beer That Fell To Earth

Space has captivated great minds since the beginning of Time. A sense of its limitlessness and possibility has drawn mankind to the moon. And beyond. You will find this same spirit imbued, brewed in a bottle of Apollo Beer. You can almost taste the vast, starry reaches of space.

The best beers have always come from other worlds. In earlier centuries, the only way the British could ship beer to their compatriots in India was in oak barrels. It came all the way around the Cape, taking months to arrive, but when it finally did, it was not only drinkable — it tasted better than any in an English pub! Why? Some swore they could taste the toasty, nutty overtones of oak. Perhaps, it was simply that the beer had come from so far away, subtly improving in profound ways, day by day.

Why it’s taken so long for a beer this good to be made again is a mystery. Or is it? Perhaps all that was needed was another age of exploration. One that’s traveled to the moon and to the minutia of the atom could hardly miss the middle ground of a micro-brewed beer.

What’s it like to drink a glass of Apollo Beer? Some connoisseurs we know have likened the experience to walking on the moon. Indeed, it is a giant step.

NASA Images is a great new(er) resource developed last year as a joint project between NASA and Archive.org. If you’ve been looking for a one-stop resource for everything NASA does, you just found it!

NASA Images is a service of Internet Archive ( www.archive.org ), a non-profit library, to offer public access to NASA’s images, videos and audio collections. NASA Images is constantly growing with the addition of current media from NASA as well as newly digitized media from the archives of the NASA Centers.

The goal of NASA Images is to increase our understanding of the earth, our solar system and the universe beyond in order to benefit humanity.

A 2007 issue from Australia, commemorating the Apollo program.

An amusing interesting little post on Slashdot earlier this week:

“Michael Benson is proposing that NASA send the ISS to the moon instead of leaving it low earth orbit. (While we’re at it, we should re-brand it as the ‘International Space Ship.’) He points out that it’s already designed to be moved periodically to higher orbits so instead of just boosting it a few miles, strap on some ion engines and put it in orbit around the moon instead of the earth. That would provide an initial base for the astronauts going to the moon and give the ISS a purpose other than performing yet more studies on the effect of micro gravity on humans. Benson concludes: ‘Let’s begin the process of turning the ISS from an Earth-orbiting caterpillar into an interplanetary butterfly.’”

My favorite part? Among the tags listed on the article: “goodluckwiththat”.

Edit: If anyone’s interested, the orange moon icon used as this site’s favicon, as well as in the above graphic, is available here:

New art in an old style, via Etsy:

John W. Golden’s rendition of Golden Age Sci-fi Rocket Tin Toy box art. This is a reproduction of a digital image created by John W. Golden.

“I didn’t want to reproduce actual artwork or use an actual tin toy robot as the basis, because I wanted the freedom to interpret this my way. The series has been a lot of fun, because I had to come up with a fictional toy company, fictional robots, etc.”

Image is 8″x 12″, unmatted, and is reproduced on Enhanced Matte Paper using Archival inks.

Released last week, the Apollo Surface Panoramas archive gives public access to some remarkable photographic panoramas taken on the lunar surface.

Apollo Surface Panoramas is a digital library of photographic panoramas that the Apollo astronauts took while exploring the Moon’s surface. These images provide a spectacular boots-on-the-ground view of the lunar landscape. The panoramas are stitched together from individual 70mm Hasselblad frames, each of which is also accessible through this new atlas. Lunar surface features captured in the panoramas can be studied using zoom and pan tools. An annotated version of each panorama is also available to assist users with the identification of major geographic features around each Apollo landing site.