NASA's Movie Trailer Parodies Reach New Heights of Awkwardness
Posted by Alex_Pasternack on Friday, Oct 15, 2010
It’s got great material to work with, but NASA Television is not known for giving it the sleek, awesome treatment that it deserves. Rather than the Kubrick, Fincher or, heck, Bruckheimer touch, footage of incredible missions and amazing experiments, it often gets the public access treatment, turning the cutting edge into something almost painfully dull.
But across the Internet, and presumably within NASA, voices are calling for change. To wit, NASA TV recently produced six movie-trailer parodies about current projects for a “themed exhibit at an international conference.”
The results – along the lines of NASA’s movie-themed mission posters – are interesting as documents of NASA’s eagerness to excite young audiences about their science programs , especially as the cinematic grandeur of the Space Shuttle approaches retirement and NASA astronauts prepare for Russian rides to the space station.
But for the most part, the attempt remains pretty corny, far, far away from the imaginative, inspiring work of space artists like Bruce McCall. You know we love you NASA; we just want the best for you, and want you to remember what inspires people here on Earth.
Here are all six of the new videos:
Robonaut 2 will become the first humanoid robot in space when it arrives at the International Space Station aboard shuttle Discovery on STS-133. (www.robonaut.jsc.nasa.gov)
Set to launch in 2014, NASA’s “Ultimate Time Machine,” the James Webb Space Telescope is the last of NASA’s Great Observatories, and will take us farther back in time than even the Hubble Space Telescope. (www.jwst.nasa.gov)
The research and development by NASA Aeronautics of next-gen “green” technologies and systems. (www.aeronautics.nasa.gov)
NASA and the European Space Agency have announced three new joint science missions to Mars, including one that will return to Earth with a sample taken from the Martian surface. (www.nasa.gov/mars)
Juno, an upcoming NASA mission to unlock the cloud-hidden mysteries of Jupiter is to launch in August 2011 and arrive at Jupiter in July 2016. (www.nasa.gov/juno)
To celebrate NASA, check out the birthday card we recently made for it. And see our documentary on the final launch of Space Shuttle Endeavor.
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Email: alexp at motherboard dot tv. @pasternack,
