Paul Krassner : My Brother's Keeper

The mad scientist as a young man. (Not George Krassner but, hey, it could have been.) Image from Beveled.

Rocket science:
My brother's keeper

"At age 29, as head of the Astro-Electronics Division, I had the civilian rank equal to a colonel, but I looked like a young kid. It was embarrassing to take them to lunch and be carded by the waiter." -- George Krassner

By Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / August 28, 2013

When my brother George and I were kids, I could recite the alphabet backwards, whereas he read the entire dictionary. We both played the violin, and when he was nine and I was six, we performed at Carnegie Hall. (I was the youngest concert artist in any field to perform there.)

Our younger sister Marge took piano lessons and became a legendary figure at Boys & Girls High School in Brooklyn, teaching music and running the chorus. Now retired, she and two women -- one plays the cello, the other a flute -- have been booked to perform at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, playing music connected to various phases of Dali’s life.

Marge was the only one who stuck with classical music. Although I was considered a child prodigy, I merely had a technique for playing the violin, but I had a real passion for making people laugh. I put my violin in the closet when I was 12, and several years later I used it essentially as a prop when I began performing stand-up comedy.

George went to the High School of Music & Art, and was offered a four-year scholarship at the Juilliard School’s renowned Music Division, but he really preferred Math and Science. He surprised our family, announcing his decision to be an electrical engineer.

He turned down the scholarship and instead attended CCNY. “Because,” he says, “I thought then that the violin was good for my avocation, not my vocation. With so many brilliant musicians then, you really had to know somebody to get anywhere in that world. It’s not like YouTube today.”

While at CCNY, he played with a square dance group and became Official Fiddler for the New York/New Jersey Square Dance Callers Association. He learned that a caller earned twice as much as he did, so he put down his fiddle and took up calling square dances. He was also captain of the varsity boxing team.

George went to the University of Michigan for his Master’s Degree. Our mother insisted -- and to please her -- he mailed his laundry home in a light aluminum case she had purchased for that specific purpose. To pay for his tuition, basement apartment and other expenses, he got a teaching fellowship, was a research assistant, sold programs at football games, and bussed tables at a local restaurant, which he quit when the table he cleared was occupied by fellow students.

He won the all-campus boxing championship, but had to fight in a heavier weight class since no one else weighed as little as he did.

“Being a violinist, I was worried about my hands. But my opponent in the semifinal match was an oboe player with a concert scheduled for the next day, and he asked me to take it easy on his mouth.”


In October 1957, Russia sent Sputnik into space. It was the first orbiting satellite, circling the earth in 96 minutes, and making 1,440 orbits in three months. This astounding technical feat was totally unanticipated by the United States and ignited the era of the space race.

At the time, George was working as a civilian scientist for the Army Signal Corps in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, in charge of the radio relay program. He had been recruited by their senior executive of Research & Development, an alumnus of the University of Michigan.

A week after Sputnik, George sent a proposal to the Commanding General, urging a space communication program. The response:Do it! “So,” George recalls, “I created the first Space Electronics organization in the country. It was very strange making presentations to generals and top government officials. At age 29, as head of the Astro-Electronics Division, I had the civilian rank equal to a colonel, but I looked like a young kid. It was embarrassing to take them to lunch and be carded by the waiter.”

That wasn’t his only embarrassment: “At the Signal Corps, I accidentally flushed my top secret badge down the toilet. It took a lot of official paperwork and the notation "irretrievably lost" to finally get a new badge. Also, in 1954, the McCarthy paranoia was paramount. I, and fellow civilians -- and military personnel, I assume -- had to empty our lunchboxes and briefcases for inspection every time we entered the building.”

Five months after he had begun as a civilian scientist, George was drafted. In the army, he was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. He was a “leg,” though. Instead of jumping out of an airplane, his job was to maintain all radios, phones, and electrical equipment. He also started the U.S. Helicopter Square Dance Team to demonstrate the mobility of helicopters. When assigned KP (Kitchen Police), rather than peel potatoes, he scheduled helicopter square dance practice.

Eight months after Sputnik, his team began working on the design of the world’s first communication satellite, SCORE (Signal Communications Orbit Relay Equipment). “There were no reference books, precedents, or Google for information. We were the pioneers. It’s interesting that the first known reference to communication satellites was in a 1945 science-fiction story by the British author, Arthur C. Clarke.” It took the team only six months to design and build the satellite, which was launched in December 1958 by an Atlas rocket that weighed 9,000 pounds.

“The satellite payload became famous for the tape-recorded message from President Dwight Eisenhower, who insisted that this project remain top secret,” George tells me. “He said the launch would be aborted if any word leaked out, because he didn’t want a chance of failure to tarnish our image. As it turned out, one of the two tape recorders did fail, but his Christmas message to the world was the very first transmitted message from space.”

Eisenhower stated: “This is the president of the United States speaking. Through the marvels of scientific advance, my voice is coming to you via a satellite circling in outer space. My message is a simple one. Through this unique means, I convey to you and all mankind America’s wish for peace on earth and good will toward men everywhere.”

The SCORE satellite carried Ike's Christmas message.

 In 1945, in the wake of World War II, the victors launched Operation Paperclip, recruiting a variety of 600 scientists from Nazi Germany to work in the United States. President Harry Truman ordered the exclusion of any “member of the Nazi Party or an active supporter of Nazi militarism,” but the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency created false employment and political biographies to circumvent Truman’s command.

Those scientists were then granted security clearance and infiltrated into hospitals, universities, and the aerospace industry, further developing their techniques in propaganda, mind control, and behavior modification. Among them was Wernher von Braun, who had been a member of the Nazi Party and an SS officer who could be linked to the deaths of thousands of concentration camp prisoners. (Fun fact: He married his cousin.) He came to America in 1945 and became a citizen in 1955. He was called the “Father of the U.S. space program.”

In June 1958, by the time those German importees had become entrenched in a slew of American niche communities, I published the first issue of my satirical magazine, The Realist, including a cartoon that depicted the U.S. Army Guided Missile Research Center with a sign in the window, Help Wanted. A couple of scientists are standing in front of that building, and one is saying to the other, “They would have hired me only I don't speak German.”

Exactly one year later, Wernher von Braun recruited 13 scientists to work with him on an ultra-top-secret program, Project Horizon, to build a communication station on the moon. Its purpose was a study to determine the feasibility of constructing a scientific/military base. “I was one of the lucky 13,” George remembers. “In fact, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to be a rocket scientist. Von Braun told me that many of his ideas came from science-fiction magazines.

“The project was so secret that the 13 of us could not even tell our bosses -- they didn’t have what was called ‘need to know.’ I would tell [my wife] Judith that I was going to Washington, D.C., and then I would change planes to go to Huntsville, Alabama, where much of the work was done. I made up stories about Washington for her, while I really was in Huntsville, which also was the watercress capital of the world. Unfortunately, when I left the government after nine years (two in the army), I lost my own security rating and need-to-know, so I had no idea if the station was ever built on the moon, and I no longer got cheap watercress.”

According to Wikipedia, “The permanent outpost was predicted to cost $6 billion and become operational in December 1966. A lunar landing-and-return vehicle would have shuttled up to 16 astronauts at a time to the base and back. Horizon never progressed past the feasibility stage in an official capacity.”


“When I was assigned to work on top secret military and satellite work,” George tells me, “the FBI did routine checks. One of our neighbors told Judith that the FBI visited them but were told not to let us know of their inquiries. Apparently, you were on their ‘watch list’ -- based on your ‘radical’ writings, I assume. I learned from my boss at the Signal Corps that my top-secret clearance was in jeopardy. Granting my clearance took about a month longer than normal, but eventually it was granted.”

Meanwhile, I was placed on the FBI’s RI (Round-up Index), though I had broken no law. Who knows, maybe it was because I published a cartoon depicting a man sitting at a desk, speaking on the phone: “I'm very sorry, but we of the FBI are powerless to act in a case of oral-genital intimacy unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.”

When Life magazine ran a favorable profile of me, an FBI agent sent a poison-pen letter to the editor: “To classify Krassner as some sort of ‘social rebel’ is far too cute. He's a nut, a raving, unconfined nut.” But in 1969, the FBI's previous attempt at mere character assassination escalated to a more literal approach. This was not included in my own COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) files but, rather, a separate FBI project calculated to cause rifts between the black and Jewish communities.

The FBI had produced a WANTED poster featuring a large swastika. In the four square spaces of the swastika were photos of Yippie (Youth International Party) founders Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and me, and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) leader Mark Rudd. Underneath the swastika was this headline -- LAMPSHADES! LAMPSHADES! LAMPSHADES! -- and this message:

The only solution to Negro problems in America would be the elimination of the Jews. May we suggest the following order of elimination? (After all, we've been this way before.) *All Jews connected with the Establishment. *All Jews connected with Jews connected with the Establishment. *All Jews connected with those immediately above. *All Jews except those in the Movement. *All Jews in the Movement except those who dye their skins black. *All Jews. Look out, Abbie, Jerry, Paul and Mark!

(Shades of Wernher von Braun.)

It was approved by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's top two aides: “Authority is granted to prepare and distribute on an anonymous basis to selected individuals and organizations in the New Left the leaflet submitted. Assure that all necessary precautions are taken to protect the Bureau as the source of these leaflets. This leaflet suggests facetiously the elimination of these leaders.”

And, of course, if a black militant obtained that flyer and eliminated one of those “New Left leaders who are Jewish,” the FBI's bureaucratic ass would be covered: “We said it was a facetious suggestion, didn't we?”

On top of that, my name was on a list of 65 “radical” campus speakers, released by the House Internal Security Committee. The blacklist was published in The New York Times, and picked up by newspapers across the country. It might have been a coincidence, but my campus speaking engagements stopped abruptly.

When I wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times, I titled it “I Was a Comedian for the FBI” because I had recognized a pair of FBI agents taking notes while I was performing at the Community Church in New York. (My FBI files later stated that I “purported to be humorous about the government.”)

The banner headline on the cover of the L.A. Times Sunday Calendar section blared out: Paul Krassner -- “I Was a Communist for the FBI!” In the San Francisco Chronicle, columnist Herb Caen wrote, “Fearing Krassner would sue, the Times recalled and destroyed some 300,000 copies at a cost of about $100,000. Krassner would have laughed, not sued.” Or maybe I would've sued and laughed my ass off.

Dad ate Gordon Cooper's cookie.

By 1963, George had risen to Chief Scientist, Astro-Electronics Division at the Signal Corps, and McGraw-Hill contacted him, asking if he would write a book. And indeed, he began working on Introduction to Space Communication, which became the world’s first book on that subject.

“The problem was the incredible pace of technology,” he says. “While I was writing Chapter 5, the nuggets of wisdom in Chapter 2 were becoming obsolete. The last chapter was called ‘Ad Astra’ (Latin for ‘to the stars’), where I tried to forecast future technology. When the book was published in 1964, most of my future projections were already obsolete. Darwin had no idea about the speed of evolution when applied to technology. By the way, more copies of the book were sold in Russia than in the United States.”

On George’s last active project, he worked with the original seven astronauts. He was program manager at Simmonds Precision, responsible for the design of the fuel gauging system on the command module where the astronauts were housed.

In 1972, Apollo 17, the 11th manned mission, was the sixth and final lunar landing in the Apollo program. “We were on an extremely tight schedule, and my team worked nearly 80 hours with virtually no sleep to finish on time. We received a rare commendation and bonus from NASA for superior performance ahead of schedule and below budget.”

Gordon Cooper -- one of those seven original astronauts -- had piloted the longest and final Mercury space flight in 1963, becoming the first American to sleep in orbit. “He gave me a rare souvenir,” George now reminds me, “a dehydrated oatmeal cookie the size of a large dice that he had on a space mission.

During a family dinner, I passed around the cookie for everyone to see. Dad was hard of hearing and didn’t hear the story, so he popped the space cookie into his mouth, and it was gone before I could get any words out of my mouth. It was pure grief when it happened, but funny now.”

This article was first published at AlterNet and was cross-posted to The Rag Blog by the author.

[Paul Krassner edited The Realist, America's premier satirical rag and was an original Yippie. Krassner’s latest book is an expanded and updated edition of his autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture, available at paulkrassner.com. Read more articles by Paul Krassner on The Rag Blog.]

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Ray Reece : A Luddite's Prayer to Gaia

"Space Junk" by Todd M. Bacastow / academics.uww.edu.
Stop the (lunar) madness:
A Luddite's prayer to Gaia

By Ray Reece / The Rag Blog / February 16, 2010

In the New York Times Online of 11 February, columnist Ross Douthat writes disapprovingly in his blog of his suspicion that Barack Obama is hellbent on terminating the U.S. "manned spaceflight" program administered by NASA. He quotes a chap named Christopher Caldwell to the effect that the "decision to abandon moon exploration has 'decline' written all over it." Meaning the decline of the American empire.

Douthat bitterly adds that "the decision in question belongs to all of us, and not just to Barack Obama. The administration wouldn’t be cutting the manned spaceflight program if Americans were still enthusiastic about going to the stars -- if space exploration still occupied a privileged place in our imagination, if our jocks still wanted to be astronauts and our nerds still wanted to build rockets. Obama is simply bowing to our culture’s priorities."

I was so thrilled by this speculation that I fired off a comment on Douthat's post. I saw the next day that my comment was #83 out of 87, and not a single reader had "recommended" it. Thus did I taste oblivion again as a sender of dispatches to America's media paragons. And I asked myself: Is it not for such reasons as this that we freethinkers and malcontents have brave new alternatives like The Rag Blog? I offer herewith my slightly edited comment on Ross Douthat's post that day.

A few months ago, when NASA divulged its intent to resurrect its manned lunar program, indeed to establish a permanent humanoid "colony" on the moon, I gnashed my teeth and rent my clothes. I had the same reaction to photos I saw of a dust plume rising from the spot on the moon where NASA deliberately crashed a toxic rocket, ostensibly in search of ice on the moon, i.e. water, wherewith to quench the thirst of the future colonists.

The prospect of NASA's humanoids setting their leaden feet on Mars is equally repugnant to me. I pray to Gaia, the Greek goddess of the biosphere, that Ross Douthat is correct in his assumption that the U.S. manned spaceflight program is now in its death throes. I pray to Gaia that Russia and China don't scramble to fill the void. I pray to Gaia that the "space tourism" enterprises of ego-maniacs like Richard Branson crash on the rocks of global economic contraction.

The launching of humanoids into space, starting with Sputnik in 1957, has always been above all a manifestation of Homo sapiens' insatiable lust to dominate, intimidate and conquer. Likewise, most of NASA's criminally expensive efforts in space have simply been extensions of the same American imperialist impulse that wiped out the Indians, enslaved the Africans, incinerated the Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killed 2 million Vietnamese a couple decades later, invaded Iraq on the warpath to oil reserves, and led the way in laying waste to so much of planet Earth and its biosphere that the survival of Homo sapiens itself is now in question.

Withal, I pray to Gaia that Barack Obama's attempt to phase out NASA's manned spaceflight program, if that's what he's doing, will be but the first of many steps toward a healthier, saner, more civilized world. Instead of gigantism, like the idiotic "space shuttle," let there be human scale. Instead of arrogance, let there be humility. Instead of bluster and hubris, let there be quiet reverence for all living things. Instead of competition and conquest, let there be fellowship, let there be sharing, let there be love and peace in the universe.

[Ray Reece is affiliated with the World Coalition for Local and Regional Self-Reliance. He is a former columnist for The Budapest Sun and author of The Sun Betrayed: A Report on the Corporate Seizure of U.S. Solar Energy Development, among other published works. His most recent book is Abigail in Gangland, a novel. He is currently based in Cagli, Italy.]

• Also see"Surrealist Group : No War on the Moon!" by The Surrealist Group / The Rag Blog / August 20, 2009.

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Surrealist Group : No War on the Moon!

'Dark Side of the Moon' by Al Magnus / photo.net.

In Defense of the Dark Side of the Moon
By The Surrealist Group / The Rag Blog / August 20, 2009

"But, for myself, the Earth's records had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization."--- Edgar Allan Poe, The Colloquy Of Monos And Una (1850)

Twenty years before a powerful syndicate of military-industrial criminals conspired to plant a U.S. flag on the Moon, a similar clique of fiends plotted to fire a nuclear warhead-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile at the lunar face. Code-named "Project A119," this plan devised by Cold War-era Air Force and weapons manufacturers called for a massive nuclear explosion that would be clearly visible from anywhere on Earth.

Researchers struggled in vain to find any pretext, any shred of legitimate scientific value, to glean from this sickening display of militarist impunity. But the sole objective of Project A119 was to terrorize into submission every human on the planet (especially those who had never heard of Hiroshima or Nagasaki) with a demonstration of how the U.S. ruling class was technologically adept and morally bankrupt enough to commit such an unimaginable poetic atrocity.

And now, once again, there are plans to bomb the Moon. This time the unilateral strike is aimed at the Moon’s South Pole and the payload will be delivered by the LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) spacecraft; the excuse given is that this is an effort to find water deep under lunar surface. The craft was launched in late June and is currently orbiting the Earth until it finds its target; if all goes according to plan, the M-Day bombing will be 8 October 2009.

The plan is this: the LCROSS first shoots off its 2,300-pound spent booster-rocket at the lunar target zone. Four minutes later, in a scheme apparently inspired by fanatical terrorist airline hijackers, the rest of the robotic LCROSS craft slams into the same area. Like crazed kamikaze paparazzi, the craft will snap photos and transmit data on the first strike back to NASA’s mad bombers before immolating itself in a second explosion.

This violent hi-tech sci-fi spectacle will cost anywhere up to $600 million, a price tag that is an outrageous insult to the millions of working people unable to feed, house, or medically treat their families. (As Gil Scott-Heron lamented in 1974: "How come there ain’t no money here? Hmm! Whitey’s on the Moon...")

Of course, there is much more behind this attack than casual scientific curiosity on whether or not there is water on the Moon. First of all, since the long-range accuracy of intercontinental ballistic missiles has never been proven to work, the LCROSS suicide mission serves as a live-fire test exercise for U.S. war strategists with an interest in the precision of orbiting satellite weapons -- in other words, the southern hemisphere of the Moon will be turned into a firing range, making this mission one giant leap for the global reach of space warfare.

Secondly, LCROSS has been promoted as "the vanguard" for the U.S. military-industrial-entertainment complex’s return to the Moon—according to NASA, finding water is a necessary first step for "building a long-term and sustainable human presence" there. Historically, the purpose of exploration has always been the exploitation of resources and the colonization of territory without regard for ecosystems or indigenous peoples, and clearly the Moon is the next territory coveted by imperialists.

Only people with colonized minds believe these things are positive, or that this type of "progress" can be beneficial to anyone beyond a small circle of exploiter-elites. And, as to be expected, there is no end to the number of those who seek to compensate for their own personal impotence by over-identifying with these grotesque displays of obscene state-corporate power. You can hear them chattering on the Internet: "Flying a rocket booster into the Moon at 5,600 mph to trigger a massive explosion is just flat-out cool," says one, while another sneers "Public discussion? Why should there be a ‘public discussion’ about a NASA experiment?"

Such remarks challenge our contempt. There should be a discussion, not only by the public, but also by oceans, weather patterns, plants, and all sorts of other living things -- even the most uninformed know enough about the "butterfly effect" to realize that changing one part of any system is going to have a cascading effect on all those things dependent upon that system.

This so-called "NASA experiment" is a hostile act of aggression and a violent intrusion upon our closest and dearest celestial neighbor. Does any love song or poem or fairy tale worth its salt not mention the Moon? Who can take a walk in the Moonlight with a lover and not feel the romance to your very soul? At night, when the Moon rules, we sleep, and we can visit the Moon in our sleep with ease. The Moon is our night light, our blanket, our grandmother, our mother -- it is woman, child, domestic life, tides, bodies of water, liquids, circulation, comfort, nurturing, paintings by Remedios Varo, stories by Jules Verne, and so much more.

Let us assume that ignorance will rule the day and plans go forward. What can we as surrealists or lunatics or astrologers or naturalists or anarcho-primitivists or Greens or werewolves or pagans or psychics or UFO groupies or other concerned members of the general public do? We must soothe the Moon, we bandage her. We implore other celestial bodies and entities to aid her. We will not let her endure this crime or its grim aftermath alone.

We need to communicate to the Moon. Talk to her in our dreams, trances, or meditations, and prepare her for this shock and wound as best we can. Hold her, send out imaginative protection to her, and put our dream bodies out there in front of the bomb. Collectively, we can sabotage the bombing or by imagining all manner of things going wrong, or encouraging the Moon to increase her own magnetic shields. Sing to her. Give her back just a tiny portion of all that she has done for us. We are all created from Moon dust.

We pledge solidarity with the Moon and promise we will do everything that we can to help heal her and to prevent any further such stupid, short-sighted, self-serving, man-made acts of obscene violence against her.

Surrealist Group in the US: Gale Ahrens, Beth Garon, Paul Garon, Joseph Jablonski, Renay Kerkman, Don Lacoss, David Roediger, Penelope Rosemont, Joel Williams, Kate Khatib, John Duda

Surrealistmovement-usa.org

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'For All Mankind' : Remembering the Apollo Astronauts' Epic Derring-Do

Al Reinert's stunning 'For All Mankind' screens tonight as we observe the 40th Anniversary of man's greatest adventure

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / July 20, 2009

See 'Tumbling Models: Some of "The Right Stuff,"' by Thomas Cleaver, and more about 'For All Mankind,' Below.

On July 20, 1969, exactly forty years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bounded from Apollo 11's lunar module onto the face of the moon, capturing the imagination of the world.

On May 25, 1961, JFK had proclaimed to a joint session of Congress that "this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth," startling those who would be expected to make this, the stuff of sci fi novels, actually happen.

But they came through in, shall we say, flying colors. Twenty four men in spacesuits would circle the moon and twelve would actually walk on its surface in an unprecedented act of cosmic derring-do -- while consumating with a weightless flourish what many consider to be man's greatest technological triumph.

Al Reinert's 1989 classic film For All Mankind, a splendid documentary about the Apollo flights to the moon in the 60's and 70's, is showing tonight (Monday, July 20, 2009) on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) at 7:00 p.m. central time (check your local listings) -- as we all observe the 40th anniversary of a singular event in our history: mankind's first steps on the surface of the moon.

For All Mankind will be followed tonight on TCM by Philip Kauffman's The Right Stuff, the theatrical movie about the Mercury 7 astronauts based on the Tom Wolfe novel. (See Thomas Cleaver's remarks below.)

Reinert was (is!) my friend and colleague and I was involved peripherally (and at times not so peripherally) with the years-long development and production of For All Mankind. And the process was as impressive as the final product.

A screenwriter now living in southern California, Reinert is a Texas native who formerly worked as a reporter for the Houston Chronicle and a senior editor at Texas Monthly and as a widely-published freelance magazine writer.

For All Mankind was constructed from actual NASA footage -- some of the most amazing documentary photography ever taken -- combined with Reinert's interviews with the Apollo astronauts. The photography, culled from a massive inventory of raw 8mm and 16mm footage -- was chronologically reorganized to better tell this epic story.

The sum total was far greater than the parts, transformed by Al Reinert's artistic vision (and ungodly perseverance and attention to detail), with a great assist from Brian Eno's unearthly musical score.

Some of this utilization of NASA photography was pioneered by filmmaker William Michael Hanks in his documentary, The Apollo File, with which Reinert was originally involved.

For All Mankind was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1990, losing out to Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, a film produced during the height of the AIDS epidemic which became a sentimental favorite among Hollywood insiders.

Reinert's film was recently re-released in hi-def Blu-Ray and premiered before a packed and enthusiastic crowd at the Paramount in Austin during the recent South by Southwest (SXSW) music and film festival. A new Special Edition DVD has been released by Criterion and is available from Amazon.com.

Image from Philip Kaufman's 'The Right Stuff.'

Tumbling Models:
Some of 'The Right Stuff'

By Thomas Cleaver / The Rag Blog / July 20, 2009

TCM's showing of For All Mankind tonight, Monday, July 20, in widescreen letterbox, is being followed by a presentation of The Right Stuff. Check your local schedule for times.

The Right Stuff is not as good as it could have been (due to the fact that Phil Kaufman -- the director -- didn't think the Mercury astronauts had "the right stuff"), but it still has its moments, and I always like that the X-1 and X-1A sequences were done the old-fashioned way, with models hanging on wires in a park in San Francisco, shot against the real sky, with CO2 being sprayed by a production assistant to create the "clouds."

Also, the "hypersonic tumble" came when the FX supervisor was so frustrated that they couldn't get it done with motion-capture that he threw the model out the fourth story window of the warehouse where the production offices were. Someone else saw that and said "Brian! It tumbled!" after which they spent three days throwing X-1As off the roof and filming them as they fell. The tumbling F-104 sequence is a series of old Hawk/Testors F104s hanging from balloons, with the film then run in reverse after they were shot rising.

The famous shot of the astronauts walking toward the camera in their space suits came when Phil Kaufman saw all the illegal immigrants who worked in the sweat shop down the hall coming out at the end of shift -- so the astronauts are really walking out of a sweatshop in a warehouse in San Francisco.

(Memories from my first experience of working on a "big movie," where my job was driving Chuck Yeager around and writing press releases for the Unit Publicist).

For All Mankind : 'Visually Stunning'

There is no narrator spouting scientific facts or high tech jargon. Instead, Reinert blends together comments by thirteen of the original astronauts (others are glimpsed and heard in archival footage but no one is identified), sound effects and an appropriately eerie music score by Brian Eno.

There have been numerous books, films and documentaries on NASA's Apollo space program from the bestseller Apollo: The Epic Journey to the Moon by David Reynolds, Wally Schirra & Von Hardesty to Ron Howard's 1995 recreation of the Apollo 13 mission to HBO's documentary mini-series From the Earth to the Moon (1998), but For All Mankind (1989) is easily the most visually stunning and unconventional approach to documenting the nine Apollo missions that occurred between 1968 and 1972.

Instead of taking a chronological approach, complete with talking head interviews in the style of most documentaries, filmmaker Al Reinert painstakingly reviewed six million feet of archival footage from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's holdings along with 80 hours of original interviews he had conducted and fashioned a hypnotic visual and aural experience as seen through the eyes of the astronauts.

There is no narrator spouting scientific facts or high tech jargon. Instead, Reinert blends together comments by thirteen of the original astronauts (others are glimpsed and heard in archival footage but no one is identified), sound effects and an appropriately eerie music score by Brian Eno.

The result is closer to an experimental film but one that is unmistakably a tribute to America's foray into the international space race to the moon that was first set in motion by President John F. Kennedy's September 12th speech in 1962; he vowed that the U.S. would land a spacecraft on the moon and that "it will be done before the end of this decade." NASA accepted the challenge and it became a reality.

The Apollo space program was enormously costly -- an estimation of several billion dollars would not be unlikely -- and extensively documented in terms of the cameras that each mission was equipped with for photographing every aspect of the journey. As a result, For All Mankind could be considered the most expensive movie ever made when you consider what it cost to produce all the footage that NASA ultimately acquired.

Reinert recalled, "I began interviewing the Apollo astronauts in 1976. They were mostly retired astronauts by then, changed men, excerpts from the tapes constitute the major part of the soundtrack of For All Mankind. The movie thus speaks with the intimate voice of personal experience."

He added that "The astronauts went into space carrying movie cameras '16mm data-acquisition cameras' \which they reached for reflexively, like tourists, whenever they saw something surprising or spectacular or merely important. They saw such things almost continually. As a result, they brought back thousands of feet of amazing film, perhaps the most extraordinary footage ever shot by human beings."

-- from the Criterion Collection DVD liner notes for For All Mankind.

For All Mankind:

Oscar-nominated documentary is a bold meditation on discovery, courage and perseverance

By Randy Miller III / July 14, 2009

As a bold meditation on discovery, courage and perseverance, Al Reinert's For All Mankind (1989) truly stands in a class by itself.

This Oscar-nominated documentary chronicles the Apollo space missions of the 1960s and 1970s from a decidedly different perspective: the human one. Replayed reels of grainy stock footage have trained us to assume that the historic 1969 moon landing was distant, desolate and almost difficult to believe -- but within this warm atmosphere, it feels as perfectly natural as a home movie.

Though relatively short at only 80 minutes, For All Mankind was assembled from an enormous surplus of 8mm and 16mm footage held in NASA's archives for nearly two decades. This footage was routinely recorded for posterity, yet the majority of it had yet to be seen by the general public.

For All Mankind's subtle flow tricks us into thinking we're only watching one mission, but its deception shows us the big picture instead: this odyssey was about more than one moment, one journey or one crew; it was about the dedication of all involved, not to mention the overwhelming scope of the space program in general. Such a "discovery," for lack of a better term, helped to define an entire generation -- and like it or not, the accomplishment has yet to be equaled, let alone bettered.

In more ways than one, this broad assortment of material (carefully pieced together by Reinert, with the help of NASA film editors Don Pickard and Chuck Welch) is presented in its most affecting and appropriate form: as a loose but focused narrative, with an abstract beginning and end. Many smaller beginnings and endings were undoubtedly left on the cutting room floor, but it's all for the best; For All Mankind wouldn't be half as effective if it were approached in a less artistic manner.

Told in the words of several Apollo astronauts (including James Lovell, Jack Swigert, Ken Mattingly, Michael Collins and others), For All Mankind relies on monologue almost as much as visuals. Much of the audio we hear was recorded right on location -- and while it's potent enough in its own right, the retrospective comments are even more effective.

These astronauts' enthusiasm is only matched by their humility: they were certainly excited to be part of history, but their respect for the danger involved helped to keep them in check. We can't blame them, however, for skipping happily across the lunar surface or goofing off in zero gravity; after all, it's not like we wouldn't do the same thing. For All Mankind is a sincere and reverent experience, to be sure, but the film's infectious joy is one of its greatest strengths.

Brian Eno's score remains another highlight, whether it blends into the background or boldly steps forward. It's paired perfectly with the film's abstract flow and editing style, creating a natural but dreamlike atmosphere that works wonderfully. Still, the footage itself is the most effective element: the humbling nature of these visuals, especially with the realization that they're 100% genuine, really puts things in perspective. Modern documentaries like Planet Earth have given us a greater understanding of the world around us, but the striking simplicity of a desolate lunar landscape is something else entirely.

For All Mankind may be light from a technical perspective, but that's not the film's intent: this is more of a spiritual experience than a science lesson. Those looking for a more detailed, analytical rundown of the Apollo missions have plenty of other options to choose from -- but for everyone else, For All Mankind remains a definitive document of our first trip to the moon and back.

Originally presented on DVD by Criterion in 2000, For All Mankind wasn't the company's most practical release, especially taking its $40 price tag into account: not only were the film's grainy visuals a tough sell for videophiles, but the short running time and light amount of extras didn't help matters either. Nine years later, they've attempted to create a more attractive package. Boasting a newly-minted transfer, a pair of new featurettes and a lower price tag, this new reissue of For All Mankind is the clear winner from a new buyer's perspective...

[Read the rest of this review, including technical details and info about features on the new DVD release at DVDTalk.com.

The Rag Blog

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SCIENCE : Dark Energy's Fingerprint Found in Distant Galaxies

This image was produced by combining a dozen NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory observations made of a 130 light-year region in the center of the Milky Way. When microwaves created by the Big Bang pass through large galaxies, they appear to pick up energy. The reason, say astronomers, is dark energy. Photo courtesy of NASA.
'May be the clearest detection of dark energy to date'
By Irene Klotz / August 5, 2008

Scientists don't know much about the mysterious phenomenon known as dark energy, but they do have a picture of what it's doing to the universe, namely, driving it apart.

In what may be the clearest detection of dark energy to date, astronomers at the University of Hawaii looked at microwaves left over from the beginning of the universe some 13.7 billion years ago. The scientists grouped the rays depending on whether they had passed through massive clusters of galaxies or bee-lined to Earthly detectors through areas largely lacking galactic real estate.

The premise was that these "background" microwaves would pick up a little energy as they entered the clusters, urged on by the forces of gravity. But if gravity had a monopoly on the game, the rays would lose that snap as they pressed through the other side, rendering the energy gain a transitory phenomenon.

So how to explain that the microwaves passing through super-sized galaxy clusters got to keep a bit of unearned gain?

István Szapudi and colleagues believe it is because dark energy, which sometimes is referred to as anti-gravity or vacuum energy, had spread out the galaxy clusters, as it is doing to all space. By the time the microwaves exited, there was proportionally a bit less mass to deal with, leaving the rays with a slight energy advantage.

"It's kind of like if you have a car on a hill," explained Gary Hinshaw of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "You pick up energy as you're going down, but you give it all back up again when you go up.

"What is happening here," he added, "is that the acceleration of the universe is forcing the gravity wells to be less strong...so over the time it takes for energy to cross the cluster, the strength of the cluster has diminished."

The measurements are difficult to make because tiny variations in the Big Bang remnant waves are larger than the observable effects of intervening galaxy clusters and voids. But by grouping together data from background radiation maps of the 50 largest galaxy clusters and the 50 largest voids, researchers were able to come up with a finding they say has only a one in 200,000 chance of being a statistical fluke.

The data was taken from Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has mapped the distribution of galaxies in about 25 percent of the sky.

Previous dark energy studies have a one in 20 chance of being statistically coincidental, Szapudi said.

Dark energy was discovered about 10 years ago and is considered the leading outstanding puzzle in cosmology today.

"In the last six or seven billion years, the expansion of the universe has switched over from slowing down to speeding up, meaning that dark energy is becoming more dominant in controlling the growth of the universe," Hinshaw said. "As the universe expands, matter gets more and more dilute and dark energy gets more and more dominate."

Szapudi's research will be published in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

Source / Discovery News

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Oil On Saturn Moon : That's the Ticket!

NASA scientists said Wednesday they had found liquid on Saturn's moon Titan, seen here in a 2005 NASA handout taken from the Cassini probe, only the second body in the solar system after Earth to have fluid on its surface.
Titan has liquid ethane on surface, NASA says
July 31, 2008

PASADENA, California -- At least one of many large, lake-like features on Saturn's moon Titan contains liquid hydrocarbons, making it the only body in the solar system besides Earth known to have liquid on its surface, NASA said Wednesday.

Scientists positively identified the presence of ethane, according to a statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which manages the international Cassini spacecraft mission exploring Saturn, its rings and moons.

Cassini has made more than 40 close flybys of Titan, a giant planet-sized satellite of the ringed world.

Scientists had theorized that Titan might have oceans of methane, ethane and other hydrocarbons, but Cassini found hundreds of dark, lake-like features instead, and it wasn't known at first whether they were liquid or dark, solid material, JPL's statement said. iReport.com: Share your images of Saturn

"This is the first observation that really pins down that Titan has a surface lake filled with liquid," Bob Brown, team leader of Cassini's visual and mapping instrument, said in the statement.

The instrument was used during a December flyby to observe a feature dubbed Ontario Lacus, in the south polar region, that is about 7,800 square miles, slightly larger than North America's Lake Ontario.

Cassini reached Saturn in mid-2004 and at the end of that year launched a probe named Huygens that parachuted to the surface of Titan the following January.

The mission is a project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.

Source / CNN

Thanks to Shane O'Neal / The Rag Blog

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