Common Themes

Photos and quoted material courtesy of TechVantage Consulting, L.L.C..

I never saw this 1984 pinball machine, but my husband remembers it being in his local pizza joint when he was a kid — here’s two restoration stories, both with lots of pictures! I love how the Space Shuttle is named Defender (as if the shuttle could defend… anything?) Ed points out that the playing field has an image of the Hubble Space Telescope, six years before launch; very cool in hindsight! Between these two sites, I’ve no doubt that if you stumbled upon a Space Shuttle pinball machine in need of repair, you’d have abundant resources to fix it up and ship it to me. You know you want to. At least, *I* want you to!

Space Shuttle was manufactured by Williams in 1984. A total of 7,620 games were produced. The game was designed by Barry Oursler. Space Shuttle was one of only three System 9 games released by Williams, the other two being Comet and Sorcerer. Fun fact: Space Shuttle was the first Williams game to feature a “toy” on the playfield.

One thing that makes this restoration unique is that the owner was directly involved with the Hubble Space Telescope, and obtained quite a few autographs on his playfield from astronauts and NASA greats. I’m sure every restoration is unique, but this one takes the cake!

These stamps were issued in 2001 by Udmurtia, a republic of Russia. Mostly the stamps feature various space station endeavors, with probes/satellites and launch vehicles thrown in for good measure. Edit, 12-16-2008: these stamps are not legitimate postage, as noted here.

Let me just state up front that I found the “stars” of American Chopper completely and utterly OBNOXIOUS… but they did happen to do a really spectacular tribute bike themed around Space Shuttle Discovery’s Return to Flight mission in 2005, STS-114.

Orange County Choppers‘ site is all Flash-based, so I can’t give a direct link to the photo album of this bike, but it’s on the third page of “On-Air Theme Bikes”, under the Choppers section on the main page. I’ve taken screencaps to show here.

The bike’s episodes are #58 & #59, which aired October 3 & 10, 2005. Minus the stars’ antics, fights and general… drama… the bike is a thing of beauty, and if these guys have one thing right, it’s an eye for minute detail. The gas tank is shuttle-shaped, the exhaust pipes (shown below, my favorite detail) are tipped with a replica of the Space Shuttle Main Engines, and the airbrush work and detailed painting throughout is just… spectacular. I particularly like the miniature orbiting shuttle “spinners” on the wheels, front and back. The gallery is definitely worth a look!

A 2006 issue from the Democratic Republic of the Congo celebrating the conquest of space. Stamp features the X-33 VentureStar, a prototype Space Shuttle replacement; the project was cancelled in 2001.

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.