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FTV: Columbia

Astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen stared out the aft window of the Space Shuttle Columbia as Crippen opened the two 60-foot-long payload doors.  This was a necessary step designed to expose the aluminum honeycomb radiator panels that would help regulate the spacecraft’s temperature. Beyond the open doors they could see some dark areas on […]

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FTV: New Year, New Tech

      If you are of a certain age, you probably remember when they used to predict what life would be like in the year 2000.  The list of ‘gee whiz’ things would invariably include flying cars, personal jetpacks, or both. Nobody was predicting wristwatch communication devices (that was a little too Dick Tracey for most […]

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FTV: Badfinger

    The band that could be the next Beatles.  This was never a good way for the press to introduce a band to the world.  It has happened many times over, but it has never quite worked out that way.  The pop band The Cyrcle were introduced on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand as “the band that […]

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FTV: Apollo 8 – Part 2

      In Part 1, we used Robert Kurson’s book ROCKET MEN (Random House 2018) as a reference to examine how NASA stepped away from their normally cautious process of training crews for space missions over an 18 month period.  The idea was to keep ahead of the Russians in the Space Race when intelligence reports […]

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