YouTube sure is great for finding lost memories. Anybody else remember this theme song?

Loved it as a kid, but can't even watch it as an adult. They were supposed to be on a 50-year journey to Alpha Centauri in the pilot (in suspended animation, no less), but after that damn Dr. Smith sabotaged the Jupiter II they couldn't stay in space for more than 20 minutes without crash-landing on a planet with a habitable atmosphere & (often incredibly comical) aliens to boot. Can't decide to this day whether they should have hung Smith or given him the Nobel Prize in physics for about ten years in a row...

Musically... I liked the original theme better

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hOJ4NI4dKo...ted&search=

(The new theme sounded too much like "The Time Tunnel"... another Irwin Allen sci-fi farse fest.

Yeah, I can agree with that. That later version really ramped up my adrenalin level at the age of 6 or so, though; I naturally associated it with the Gemini & Apollo countdowns. (Hey...how the hell did I get so old? )

I will point out that *both* "Lost in Space" themes (first season and second-third season) and the "Time Tunnel" theme (plus many, many other TV show themes) were written by a prolific but under-appreciated composer of the time.

Guy by the name of Johnny Williams.

About a decade later, he changed the "Johnny" to "John," wrote the score to "Star Wars," and embarked on a career that has netted him more Oscars than most men have pairs of underwear...

-the other Doug

Yes, I watched Lost in Space, too. But even at 10, I thought a lot of the large papier mache alien heads just a bit too much to take seriously. Then, on the opening of the first episode of the last season, I did have a brief interest again: That's when they first dropped the "Pod" out of the J2... and it looked like a little stylized copy of the Apollo Lunar Module.

When I was 6, this is what got me hooked on spaceflight (though I could have done without the Lazoon):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-1AMrSzN40

(All right...RedSky might actually be older than me! ) Very cool, man; thanks!

Noticed that Gerry Anderson was the producer...wow. This guy exerted a truly seminal influence; he surely deserves a good-sized crater on the Moon or Mars as well as an asteroid named after him at the very least.

Bit before my time, the LOST IN SPACE TV series, but I didn't think the movie was that bad... (ducks quickly!)

I recently treated myself to the box dvd set of the incredibly under-rated 90s series SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND. Don't care about the science, which was frequently bad; it had Shane (sigh...) Vansen blowing Chigs away in one of the coolest space fighters ever built.

Kristen Cloke...

Yeah, looks like I have a few years on you.

You're right about Gerry Anderson; I'm sure he inspired a lot of kids to get interested in spaceflight and science... from Supercar (1960), XL5 (1962)... the Thunderbirds.... to Space 1999 in the 70s.

I loved the XL5 closing theme. I remember it even getting a bit of radio play in the US back then. I just found the "real" full version. I'm glad they didn't use the bittersweet last verse on XL5; I think it would have demoralized me as a little kid. But now I can appreciate it as a realistic grounding truth for the long past hopes and ambitions of a child, but fulfilled today by web sites like this one.

http://sfwriter.com/fireball.mp3

Special delivery for Mr. Stu...

I freely admit that I love to bust on Lost In Space's hoky take on science. The episode with the talking P.O'd giant mutant veggies from the hydroponic garden seemed (how to put this delicately?) incredibly stupid even at the age of six. However, they did hit some interesting ideas, albeit rarely.

There was one late season episode in which Will (and that damn Smith, of course) somehow get minaturized & end up inside the robot. In there they're harrassed by the robot's tiny little laser-equipped internal maintenance sub-bots; in fact, IIRC, the robot explained that they were his analog of white blood cells. Bearing in mind that this was the '60s, you have to wonder if this episode might have inspired some of today's nanotechnologists who are trying to develop medical applications.

This might prove one thing: the worst science fiction show is of infinitely more value to civilization than the best celebrity gossip program!

Wow... I actually think I remember that! Wasn't that the one with some guy in a carrot suit going around shouting "Moisture! Moisture!" and Smith would have to hose him down.

I liked it (from a spaceflight point of view) when they finally started flying again in the 2nd season. (Had to get the AstroGator working). I forgot what that fuel was they were always drilling for. (No, not dilithium) Then, I really liked when they finally sprung for a full sized mock-up of the J2 with lower deck, landing legs extended and all. It was the episode where they thought they landed on earth (Smith was estatic) but turned out to be a planet of crazy robots. Still, the full scale J2 was neat.

Yeah...the J2 was cool, and I especially liked the pod (which seemed to mature as the Apollo LM became more publicly familiar at the time). The show really did seem to have a hefty production budget (in fact, IIRC, Lost In Space outspent the original Star Trek per episode); pity they didn't use some of it on better scripts...

Of course, this probably would have involved pitching Smith out the airlock sans suit at some point, which would have pleased my dad immensely. Sometimes Smith would piss him off so much that he'd get up & turn off the TV, mumbling curses under his breath!

There is an original version of the Lost in Space pilot that does not include the Smith character at all. Many portions of it were used in the pilot that eventually aired, but in the original, the Jupiter 2 simply encountered an asteroid field while the crew was in stasis, went out of control, and the Robot (IIRC) awoke the Robinsons. That pilot went on through the crash-landing and the trek ahead of the storms that ended up being used in the third or fourth episode, as aired. The original pilot had an *awful* lot of narration in it that wasn't in the aired version, either.

OK, so I have *way* too much minutae packed into this tiny little brain of mine...

-the other Doug

Glad you got it, DV...thanks!

Didn't know that; looks like it was originally intended to be a serious SF series, but that damn Smith (TDS henceforth) & the kid kind of hijacked the plot threads.

Oh, well; it is what it is, and I'd be lying if I said that this series wasn't a big early influence on my life in a very positive sense. We only had one TV channel in southwest Montana at that time, so Lost In Space was my default window on what could be...truly a gift, and I am grateful.

Irwin Allen really never had a clue... clueless and unclueable... about the difference between Science Fiction and SciFi/Skiffy. Very few people in Hollywood ever have, though the situation has improved SOMEWHAT in the last 10, maybe 20 years.

Given that, he tried repeatedly with some success to produce televesion Science Fiction series for TV in the 60's with greater success than anybody other than Roddenberry. (Anthology series like Twilight Zone and Outer Limits are different). Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was lame, but watchable and Time Tunnel was even better. Land of the Giants was just dumb, and Lost in Space made me cringe as a young teen. The Idea had so much potential, the Reality was stupidified to death.

My nomination for the all time worst science fiction series, defined by the lowest achievement-to-promise ratio ever, is the STARLOST. It was created by Harlan Ellison and originally planned to be a big budget BBC/20'th Century Fox collaberation, building an extended story-arc like Babylon 5 did a full generation plus later. It devolved into a shoestring budget video series, filmed in Toronto Canada by a local soap-opera company, with some of the later scripts (after Harlan's introductory few scripts) literally written by Canadian high school students (to provide legally required Canadian content), as there were no Canadian scriptwriters able/available/whatever to do the job.

Harlan was so (expletives deleted.. about 20 meg of them) that he forced them to use his "going down in flames" screenwriters pseudonym "Cordwainer Bird" as the created-by and/or script-by Bylined. Flipping them the "bird"

I watched it and I wept.

Ben Bova novelized the debacle with the title "The StarCrossed", with names and details to protect the innocent from the lawsuits of the guilty.

I never saw any of the "STARLOST" series, but I did read the novelization and enjoyed it. The premise was good. In the end, I wanted to read the sequel which of course never came to being.

edited

Oddly enough, the Gold Key Lost In Space comic books were freakin' great!!! Utterly different from the series, no link at all (100% Smith & Will-free!!!), and the plots of the comic books were much more scientifically plausible & entertaining.

Wish I had a few to share, but the few I bought for US $0.12 each in the '60s are long gone...probably collector's items by now made of 99% unobtainium. Neat as all get out, though, and well worth the read if you can find them...

Just out of curiosity, anybody else ever heard of a Gold Key comic called Magnus-Robot Fighter, 4000 AD? Megacool exp^lazy eight!!!!

No, but for Megacool, there is Judge Dredd in Megacity-1 in 2000 AD.

Getting way, way OT here. Quick to put back some space if not UMSF related content before Judge Doug draws his Lawgiver. In the Judge Dredd series, Titan was a penal colony.

And crossing over from another thread here, Judge Dredd did have some memorable egregious science bloopers almost as bad as mentioning astrology with astronomy. In some stories, Titan was a moon of Saturn; in others, it was a moon of Jupiter!

Apparently Starlost episodes were available on VHS. I have never seen them since they first aired, recieved directly across lake Ontario from Toronto. (I watched them build the CN tower from my driveway W of Lockport NY on the Niaragra Escarpment, some 45/50? miles away.) Watching the first episoded penned by "Cordwainer Bird", you could see the epic story arc with room for multiple independent episodes that he was aiming at and weep in frustration.

That comic book ran under the title "Space Family Robinson" until 1965, when "Lost In Space" premiered on CBS. At that point, to take advantage of the free advertising, they changed the name of the comic to match that of the TV show.

And yes, the comic book was much more interesting and scientifically plausible.

I thought I was the only one who remembered "Magnus: Robot Fighter"! You're right, it was an extremely well-written and articulate book, for its time. I can particularly remember an issue which dealt with someone sabotaging the worldwide weather control system, and Magnus had to track down the robotic no-goodniks who were responsible...

I had a few other guilty pleasures in 1960s comic books. One of them was "The Metal Men." Another was a short-length occasional feature called "The Atomic Knights." IIRC, both were DC publications. (I liked the DC titles a lot, was a big Superman, Batman and related titles fan, but I also followed the Marvel universe closely. Comic books were a passion for me as a child.)

As you might imagine, I had a huge collection of well-read comic books by the time I was in my teens. A collection that my parents threw away when I went off to college. They were *very* well-read, and likely wouldn't have been worth all that much to collectors. But, for example, I had a first edition Spiderman, a first edition Fantastic Four and a first edition X-Men, to name but a few. (I started buying them with my allowance when I was six or seven, I think -- in 1961 or 1962. My brother started a couple of years before I did, so our shared collection went back to the late '50s.)

I may have come as close to parenticide as I ever would, before or since, when I found out they had thrown away *all* of my and my brother's comics...

-the other Doug

I had, may still have, the first ?9? or so of Magnus, Robot Fighter. I loaned a lot of comics to a friend who proceeded to move out of the area with them, and I lost a large fraction of what I had. I don't recall what I have that survived the "absconding".

I presume they must have changed the music for the color series of the show, because I've never seen those and I don't remember that version .

I was watching the first series of the show on DVD recently and the change from a serious show at the start to the more silly plots later on was quite pronounced: I wonder if that occurred at the point where they ran out of footage from the original pilot. Smith is still one of my favorite TV characters though, I don't think it would have worked without him.

Certainly I don't think it was much worse than the Gerry Anderson shows of the same era.

Dvandorn, here's the cover of the Magnus you mentioned. In fact, the site seems to have them all, and in most of them he's punching out one or more robots. Magnus must've spent all his time off with his hands packed in ice...

Mark, you're right that Smith was pretty good, and in retrospect the show probably had to go the silly route to survive since the science in the scripts was so incredibly bad that suspension of disbelief couldn't possibly be achieved. It's all about the ratings...

I watched the series when it first aired. I have to say that this series had the best premise of any SF television show of the era -- and I would still rate it as one of the top SF premises of all time. It certainly adhered the most closely to literary SF -- as opposed to 'space opera'.

Unfortunately, the execution of the premise was terrible.

Here is what it's main fansite says about the show:



If there were any SF series of the 60s or 70s that I could choose to be redone to modern-day production values, it would be the original Ellison version of STARLOST -- I would much rather have had that than BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, of all shows.

Bill

" don't think it was much worse than the Gerry Anderson shows of the same era"

The Anderson shows from the same era, as little as I can recall them, were worse, but aimed lower. Later, Gerry Anderson really tried, with "pace '1899'" (that was the level of their astonomical expertise). They had some measure of success, but again, the were clueless and unclueable as to the difference between Science Fiction and SciFi or Skiffy. Like BattleStar Galaxative <my term for the original> ... idea with potential, destroyed by execution. A geekish makeover of the science and a Strazinsky level of plot handling and youi could have one hell of a series with a specatular story arc.


"suspension of disbelief couldn't possibly be achieved"

Oh?... mine was suspended... HUNG FROM THE NECK TILL DEAD! ... then drawn and quartered!

"...(Starlost)... I have to say that this series had the best premise of any SF television show of the era -- and I would still rate it as one of the top SF premises of all time. It certainly adhered the most closely to literary SF -- as opposed to 'space opera'. Unfortunately, the execution of the premise was terrible."

Amen! Bova's "The Starcrossed" is still a fun read, but you read it and weep if you were there for the real story. The series, at least the early shows, were issued on VHS and apparently can be found.

Somehow, these shows remind me of the Space Shuttle... Wonderful Idea, fatally flawed realization <sigh!>

Heh, heh, heh...mine too. Even as a kid, couldn't figure out how the hell the 'Space Family Robinson' modified the J2 to transit interstellar space in less than an hour when the original mission took 50 years to reach Alpha Centauri. Still think it was TDS' doing, and we oughta drag that @#$& home to claim his Nobel Prizes, then throw him in the joint...

Oh, Ed, BTW: Ellison used 'Galaxative' in print at some point...I use it liberally when speaking of the show myself. However, some have told me that the new remake is rather good, albeit prone to the extremely convoluted plot lines that seem to be endemic to current "SF" series. Don't want to do research in order to understand an episode, just give me an entertaining & scientifically interesting/stimulating hour!

<GRIN>
Harlan (The mouth that walks like a man) Ellison also used (as book titles, no less) (and probably came up with...) the term "The Glass Teat" for the boob-tube.

I'm a Harlan fan, though I have issues with his big fight with ?Fantagraphics? over copyright and permissions and stuff. But unless youi're a personal friend of Harlan (and he makes a VERY good friend, I'm told), being around Harlan is like being on a golf course during a thunderstorm... shall we say "electrifying"?

There are fools. There are people (like most of us) who do not tolerate fools gladly. And there are people like Harlan, who do not tolerate fools. At all. Pyrotechnically!.

And Harlan is a fool magnet. He attracts them (the way a candle flame attracts moths) to immolate themselves in his fury. I get the impression he's been tired of it for decades, but...

Me too... . I've read most of Harlan's stuff, in fact all he wrote prior to 1980 or so. He's gettin' up there in years, haven't heard much about him lately.

Can you imagine what kind of script he could have done for Lost In Space? That would have been the episode where Guy Williams finally throws Smith out the airlock wearing nothing but his long-johns... Of course, Judy might've been pregnant by Don, June Lockhart would probably have some sort of substance abuse problem, and Will & the robot would finally snap for a variety of reasons. (Penny would have continued to look worried all the time). The chief of CBS standards & practices would have had a stroke on the spot at the time...

(Working title: "I Have No Smith, So I Can Stop Screaming... )

Didn't think I'd ever participate in a discussion that included Fireball XL5, Supercar, Magnus Robot Fighter, Lost in Space (the comic), and The Metalmen. All we're missing is Solar, Man of the Atom.

Sigh. The 60's were a good time to be a kid. :-)

Also, getting back to UMSF for a bit, my elementary school would routinely stop class and turn on the TV so we could watch space launches -- even unmanned ones. I remember watching at least one Ranger launch that way.

One less-than-ideal thing that I remember was seeing Saturn through a telescope for the first time. This was a 20-inch telescope at the local (to Chattanooga) observatory, so not too bad, except for the fact that it didn't have any rings! Just a straight line across it. When they told me it'd take years to see the rings properly, I was just crushed. Hard to believe it's been all the way around almost one and a half times since then . . .

--Greg

Yes, they were. Unbridled optimism regarding the future of spaceflight & technology in general...wish we could recapture that today...

Well, to be fair, it was a lot easier to find new and surprising things back then. Pioneer 10 was pretty crude, but it told us amazing things about Jupiter and it's moons, since up until then we knew almost nothing. Heck, Mariner 2 flew past Venus with just two instruments (if I remember correctly) and yet it told us that Venus didn't have an ocean -- that it was burning hot. Amazing results from pretty primitive tools.

Today we can still get amazing results, but it needs much more preparation, much more sophisticated tools, and much more sophisticated analysis of the data that comes back. Even the cool results (not counting pictures) aren't as accessible to ordinary people.

On the bright side, with the Internet, it's much easier for "educated laypeople" to be involved today -- witness UMSF itself. Also, some of the new technology does make it easier to make the more-sophisticated probes and to do the more-sophisticated analysis.

The real thing that's missing is the lack of any serious economic or military incentive to go into space. Comm satellites and weather satellites are great, but that only goes so far. (Ditto spy satellites -- I think.) :-) Space manufacturing seems to be a complete bust, and Space Tourism is still, ah, a bit too pricy. Without anything like that, progress happens at a snail's pace, and what does happen is effectively thanks to pure charity.

At this point, it's hard to see that changing in the next 50 years, although who knows? I still remember how hard we laughed at the idea that anyone would consider e-mail valuable. :-)

--Greg

To paraphrase Fredric Brown in his obscure but brilliant novel The Lights In The Sky Are Stars: why stop climbing a flight of stairs once you find a few handfuls of treasure? Very hard to translate this principle into the (badly needed) near-term economic returns that small businesses require--esp. if the 'handfuls' are elusive--but the ultimate goal is potentially beyond all our wildest dreams. We are talking about the rest of everything there is beyond the Earth, after all....

"...Fredric Brown in his obscure but brilliant novel The Lights In The Sky Are Stars:..."

Another -- then unimaginable -- story of an abandoned space program and the obsessive dreamers who forced our way back to space is Dean McLaughlain's "The Man Who Wanted Stars", from 1965.

For me the ultimate parable about a civilisation turning it's back on the universe is Arthur C. Clarke's "The City and the Stars". There's still a movie opportunity there, I feel.

http://www.adherents.com/lit/bk_Clarke_CityStars.html

The theme of abandoning the stars is more common than you might think. A character in Asimov's "The End of Eternity" mentions humanity colonizing and abandoning Mars and Venus repeatedly over a (roughly) million-year period.

I like to think there's something valuable on the Moon that would make the huge cost of building the infrastructure worthwhile. For example, suppose you could fabricate Titanium there on a large scale. With a Lunar space elevator (MUCH easier than one on Earth) you could lift the stuff to the L1 point, then with very little thrust, send it on one of those long "IPS" trajectories and finally use aerobraking to drop it on Earth.

Question is, could this possibly ever be cheap enough to compete with metals refined on Earth? At least there are no enviromental concerns, but the low gravity hurts (we depend on it to separate molten metals), the lack of water hurts two ways (harder to refine without it, and less likely to have metal deposits in the first place without it), etc. It doubtless has unique advantages too (e.g. running a nuclear plant with minimal concerns, since there's no water table and no atmosphere to spread any contamination), but learning them would take time.

Anyway, a comprehensive plan -- to my way of thinking -- would include developing that infrastructure -- probably at government expense -- with an eye towards enabling private industry to exploit the natural resources of the Moon. Once that starts happening, access to the rest of space seems to follow naturally. (At least, it's not so great a leap.) But it really seems like it needs that one big step before it can get going, and it's hard to see how we get there from here.

Anyway, setting up proper lunar bases -- much as we have Antarctic bases -- seems like an indispensible first step, and something I really wish we'd done long ago.

--Greg

"Mining" resources in any gravity well in order to get them to another one always struck me as totally nuts and almost all of the materials that might be available there are already plentiful here and will always be cheaper to mine here than there if you want to use them here. (For any of the typical values of here and there like "The Earth" and "The Moon" or "The Asteroid Belt"). Delta-V is an expense that you are better off avoiding at all costs.

Let's just work through the energies involved in moving a ton of mined something from the surface of the Moon to the Surface of the Earth.

Moon to Earth Escape Velocity is around 2.27km/sec. That means we have to imaprt about ~ 2.5 GJ / ton to accelerate our goods up from the surface of the moon - assuming we have some hyper efficient rail gun type launch mechanism etc etc. That's not so bad as its only about ~ 10% of the energy cost of refining a ton of steel, 2-3% that of aluminium and <1% of a ton of Titanium. So far so good.

Now we're falling in to Earth on a purely ballistic trajectory and building up some serious kinetic energy on the way in that we'll have to burn off somehow or other. Give or take some loose change that will be about the same as the kinetic energy we would need to add to an object to bring it to earth escape velocity (11.1km/sec). For a ton of inbound material that's around 60GJoules. If you are going to use aerobraking to land your payload on earth then you might want to consider the environmental effects of dissipating that ~60GJ of energy per ton of landed payload. Just to get the ball rolling that's about 10 times the amount of energy required to atomize a ton of iron by the way so I really can't see that scaling that approach up to industrially useful volumes for common materials. As it happens you could actually land quite a lot of iron this way since much of the heat is bled off making plasma out of the air as well as the iron but that all combines to make a serious mess in the atmosphere on the way in and there would almost certainly be a big hole in the ground at the end.

Or at least that's how it seems to me. I may have completely mis understood something in this though so if I have made a glaring mistake then feel free to point it out. If not then the above numbers mean that it is insane to try and mine almost anything "up there". Apart from the antimatter mines off the solar poles that is.

I agree with Helvick about the difficulty of moving bulk mined metals down to Earth, but I'd like to offer antoher downside: liability.

If an ore truck tips over on a highway, it's makes a mess on the road.

But if a retro/parachute fails on re-entry, the inbound slag will take out a subdivision. The lawyers would have a field day.

No company dealing in commodities would ever be able to afford that level of insurance to cover a "re-entry issue".

I think you've completely misunderstood something. :-) First off, note that the Apollo Command Module weighed a ton and a half, yet it had no reentry troubles. Obviously there is some way around the problem you describe.

I found this illuminating: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_shield#E..._considerations

Among other gems, the Galileo probe disipated 380G joules, losing just 1/4 of its weight in the process.

As for the liability issue, I don't think it survives serious examination. First, you wouldn't bother with a parachute; you'd just drop the things in the desert. Second, the odds of hitting anything else are awfully low. Finally, it's just a ton of metal at terminal velocity; no worse than the occasional plane crash -- and without the jet fuel.

--Greg