Event!

When: THIS Saturday, at noon
Where: Sylva, NC, at City Lights Bookstore
What: A super fun panel with me, Carrie Ryan, and Megan Shepherd! Come out to meet us, hear us talk about YA lit, and get your books signed!
MORE INFO: Click here!

NASA Month: Why it's Important

All this month, I'm NASA! This means every weekday in March will feature a new post about NASA, and I'm hosting a giant giveaway in order to encourage people to spread the NASA love. For more information on the giveaway, check out this post.

Today's post was inspired by fellow League member and author Meagan Spooner.

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The Importance of Space Exploration

I've never seen The West Wing, but I was delighted to watch this clip courtesy of Meagan Spooner about the effect of exploring space. I dare you to watch it and not get goosebumps.

And in case you'd like to hear the song they're talking about, listen below:

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This post is a part of the month-long celebration of NASA I'm hosting on my blog. In order to encourage people to celebrate NASA, I'm also hosting a giveaway!

One grand prize winner will receive all the books in the recent Breathless Reads tour, as well as ARCs of two anthologies and a signed Breathless Reads poster:

As well as swag from NASA, courtesy of Kate @ Ex Libris:

To celebrate NASA creatively: you could blog about why you like NASA, you could reach out to an astronaut for an interview, you could make space fan art, you could sing a song about NASA, you do a vlog, you make a list of all the ways NASA rocks...any of this counts! Just celebrate NASA in some awesome way, post it online, and include the link in the Rafflecopter. I even set that part of the entry open for multiple entries, so you could blog and vlog and Facebook and tumblr and Pinterest about NASA and they all count. The only requirements: post a link back to this contest, and put the full URL of the site in the Rafflecopter. Full details here.

To enter: be sure to read the full rules and terms of the contest here. Then fill out the Rafflecopter below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

NASA Month: Beyond the Stars

All this month, I'm NASA! This means every weekday in March will feature a new post about NASA, and I'm hosting a giant giveaway in order to encourage people to spread the NASA love. For more information on the giveaway, check out this post.

Today, I'm interviewing Karen Burnham, who is currently employed at NASA, working on power systems on the space station, electrical analysis for the pyrotechnic group, and is a subject matter expert for the electromagnetic compatibility group.

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NASA: Beyond the Stars

When most people think of NASA, they think of astronauts and giant telescopes. What are some of the other functions of NASA--what else does it do, and how do people who work with NASA do more than just look at the stars? 

My work at NASA has been focused on manned spacecraft, since I work at Johnson Space Center, which is where astronauts are trained. However, I rarely actually meet astronauts! Instead I work with other engineers, trying to design very complex systems where all the sub-systems play nice together. For me, that involves making sure that the pyrotechnic systems are as safe as possible. (There are explosives used in almost every space vehicle, they can be a very precise and powerful tool for many different applications.) This means making sure that firing lines are shielded from interference, protected from lightning strikes, and cannot be set-off by build-ups of static electric charge (like the shock you get from doorknobs on dry days). Pyrotechnic explosives are unforgiving: when they need to work, you need them to work perfectly. When you need them to not work, you need them to be as safe as possible. Luckily, when it comes to explosives on manned vehicles, NASA has a perfect safety record, and I'm proud to be part of that.

Looking farther afield, I think one of the most important functions of NASA now is supporting the space-based environmental research of Earth's climate. All the weather satellites that help predict the weather, and all the observations satellites that tell us about how wind patterns, temperature signatures, and ice cover are changing; those are generally planned and launched with NASA's support. They have been critical for us to learn how our world is rapidly changing. 

Can you describe a particularly fascinating aspect of your career? 

I really can't express how proud and psyched I've been to work with the pyrotechnic systems at NASA. I have a BS in Physics and an MS in Electrical Engineering, which has set me up perfectly to study how electromagnetic waves affect electronic systems, and how to protect those systems from unwanted interference. I still have a lifetime of learning ahead of me, since every project is unique and there is a vast universe out there of things I need to know. But the upside is that I get to do things like conduct tests on explosives to determine their sensitivity to different kinds of radio frequency energy.

NASA has been using the same design of pyrotechnic initiator since the Apollo missions. We call them NASA Standard Initiators (NSIs), and they are incredibly useful--about 150 of them were present on every Space Shuttle mission. We had information from testing in the 1960's and 1980's about how the communication frequencies used during Apollo and the Space Shuttle affected the NSIs. I got the job of doing the testing to update our knowledge for the frequencies used by the Space Station and the new Orion missions. 

This was a tricky proposition, because very specialized equipment is needed to handle the NSIs safely and effectively. I had to design special adaptors that were manufactured here on site. A whole lot of people helped me track down all the equipment needed, and both the pyrotechnic engineers and the electromagnetic engineers all spent some time helping out with solving different problems as they arose. But in the end, we were able to expand our knoweledge about the NSIs, their behavior, and their vulnerabilities. Probably one of my best days at NASA was when we finally got all the right pieces put in place, and were able to set off an NSI in the lab using S-Band radiation (roughly the same frequecy used by an off-the-shelf wifi router). 

What's the best way for a teenager who'd like to be a part of NASA to join the program? 

There are a lot of programs out there that aim to encourage student participation at NASA. Probably the most important is the intern and co-op programs, where late high school and college students can take semester-long jobs at NASA, get paid for their time, and learn about out engineering tasks from the inside. You can find more information about the JSC program here: http://pathways.jsc.nasa.gov/index.html

Also, lots of student have benefitted from the different Space Camp programs run in Huntsville, Alabama (around Marshall Space Flight Center) and Florida (Kennedy Space Center): http://www.spacecamp.com/

Also, please check out Women@NASA: http://women.nasa.gov/ There are mentorship programs there that can connect young men and women interested in science directly to mentors working every day in the science and engineering fields. 

Is there any part of working that NASA that feels as if you're living in a science fiction novel? 

Aside from setting off explosives using radio waves? (I still love that part.) I do remember taking my parents on the JSC public tour. We were leaving mission control, but the tram couldn't leave because the wheelchair lift had gotten stuck. The astronaut who had just been guiding the tour inside wandered out, looked it over, quickly fixed the problem, gave us a wave, and then wandered back inside. It was great to remember that while astronauts are often pilots, many of them are also scientists and engineers and very, very useful people to have around. 

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Karen Burnham is an electromagnetic compatibility engineer working at NASA's Johnson Space Center. She completed a BS in Physics in 2001, worked as a radar engineer for Northtrop Grumman until 2008, and then completed an MS in Electrical Engineering in 2010. She has been working at NASA since 2009. In her spare time she is a reviewer of science fiction literature, writing for venues such as Locus Magazine, Strange Horizons, and SFSignal.com. She lives in Houston with her husband and young son. You can find her blog here: http://spiralgalaxyreviews.blogspot.com/

______________________________________

This post is a part of the month-long celebration of NASA I'm hosting on my blog. In order to encourage people to celebrate NASA, I'm also hosting a giveaway!

One grand prize winner will receive all the books in the recent Breathless Reads tour, as well as ARCs of two anthologies and a signed Breathless Reads poster:

As well as swag from NASA, courtesy of Kate @ Ex Libris:

To celebrate NASA creatively: you could blog about why you like NASA, you could reach out to an astronaut for an interview, you could make space fan art, you could sing a song about NASA, you do a vlog, you make a list of all the ways NASA rocks...any of this counts! Just celebrate NASA in some awesome way, post it online, and include the link in the Rafflecopter. I even set that part of the entry open for multiple entries, so you could blog and vlog and Facebook and tumblr and Pinterest about NASA and they all count. The only requirements: post a link back to this contest, and put the full URL of the site in the Rafflecopter. Full details here.

To enter: be sure to read the full rules and terms of the contest here. Then fill out the Rafflecopter below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

NASA Month: NASA in the Classroom

All this month, I'm NASA! This means every weekday in March will feature a new post about NASA, and I'm hosting a giant giveaway in order to encourage people to spread the NASA love. For more information on the giveaway, check out this post.

Today we have a special guest post by author and fellow League member Peggy Eddleman! She's posting about NASA in film.

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NASA in the Classroom

by Peggy Eddleman

NASA was hugely important to me growing up. Watching lift-offs on our classroom TVs, and hearing my teachers talk excitedly about space and everything NASA was accomplishing gave me a sense of wonder that still means a lot to me. It made me dream and imagine and have a thirst to discover that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I would hate to be without it.

But somehow when my kids were younger, they were without it. That sense of wonder that came from NASA was missing, and it made me so sad. Space shuttle lift-offs weren’t broadcasted in their classrooms, and their teachers didn’t talk about it with the same kind of excitement. But I loved that they went to the school they did, because it is home to the Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center where kids and teenagers come from all around to not only learn about space, but to watch planetarium shows and run spaceship simulators. I knew that by the time they were in fourth grade and for many years after, its director would instill in them that sense of wonder and the love of NASA.

I asked the director, Victor Williamson, why it’s so important to have a love of space and of science fiction.

My interest in space didn’t begin in the classroom, nor from watching the Apollo missions to the moon. My interest in space sprang from the original Star Trek series I watched religiously as a child. Every week, I journeyed into the depths of space with the brave crew of the Enterprise. I was there when they fought heroic battles of survival. I was there when they encountered strange new alien life forms. I was with them when they ventured where no man had gone before.

This prophetic series was the catalyst for an emotional reaction that motivated me to learn more. These emotions caused me to look for answers to the age old philosophical questions of who we are, where did we come from and where are we going. I was on a quest to learn about and explore space on my own through books, magazines and every space television show I could find on PBS.

Science Fiction caused me ask the right questions. Science has helped me look for the answers. That is why I teach space science within a framework of science fiction. This curriculum mind meld of fantasy and reality creates an emotional wonder in children. It opens their young minds to the endless possibilities of what lies out there. It reminds them that the universe is everywhere, and perhaps one reason we are here is to help the universe understand itself.

There are few subjects that cause students to pause and wonder like space. Watching their eyes and mouths open wide when they comprehend the vast distances to the stars, or the power of a black hole, or the physics of gravity, or the fusion of heavy elements in a star’s furnace, is an extra paycheck for a teacher. It is in those “Ah Ha!” moments. I see in my student’s faces a desire to embark on their own personal voyage of discovery in search of something incredible, just waiting to be known.

Victor Williamson The Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center

I love that he teaches space science within the framework of science fiction. NASA and science fiction will forever be linked. And because of that, it opens readers’ minds to the endless possibilities that are out there.

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Peggy Eddleman’s debut, SKY JUMPERS (Random House Children’s Books), comes out in September 2013, with book two releasing in September 2014. You can find Peggy online onFacebook, Twitter, and on her personal blog. Besides writing, she enjoys playing laser tag with her family, doing cartwheels in long hallways, trying new restaurants, and occasionally painting murals on walls. She lives at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains in Utah with her husband and their three children.




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This post is a part of the month-long celebration of NASA I'm hosting on my blog. In order to encourage people to celebrate NASA, I'm also hosting a giveaway!

One grand prize winner will receive all the books in the recent Breathless Reads tour, as well as ARCs of two anthologies and a signed Breathless Reads poster:

As well as swag from NASA, courtesy of Kate @ Ex Libris:

To celebrate NASA creatively: you could blog about why you like NASA, you could reach out to an astronaut for an interview, you could make space fan art, you could sing a song about NASA, you do a vlog, you make a list of all the ways NASA rocks...any of this counts! Just celebrate NASA in some awesome way, post it online, and include the link in the Rafflecopter. I even set that part of the entry open for multiple entries, so you could blog and vlog and Facebook and tumblr and Pinterest about NASA and they all count. The only requirements: post a link back to this contest, and put the full URL of the site in the Rafflecopter. Full details here.

To enter: be sure to read the full rules and terms of the contest here. Then fill out the Rafflecopter below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

POISON Blog Tour

We interrupt NASA month with a very important post--a blog tour stop in honor of Bridget Zinn's debut, POISON.

As many of you know, Bridget very sadly passed away before the publication of her first novel. Which is tragic for many reasons--not only did the world lose this beautiful and caring person, but we also lost the chance to have more delightful novels like POISON.

While I didn't have the chance to know Bridget personally, I did know her story. She tells the story of her path to publication here. We both got our book deals at around the same time, and I remember reading of her deal and thinking how wonderful the book sounded. POISON is a funny fantasy--something the world needs more of--and by all accounts, Bridget was equally funny and charming.

Around the same time Bridget got the very good news of her book deal, she also got the very bad news of cancer. And while she fought hard, she sadly lost the battle against the disease before the release of her novel, in May of 2011.

And that's why it's so important for us, the ones that remain, to spread the word about POISON. Because it's not just a novel about a kick-butt teen girl fighting to save her kingdom with the aid of potions and a piglet, alongside a very funny and charming young man (who's named for Fred Weasley). This novel is Bridget's dream. A book is hugely personal thing to release into the world, and publication is the very real and visceral product of that dream. Bridget's not around any more to celebrate--but we are, and we can lift her dream as high as we can.

POISON is a treat of a novel--it has a clever plot, funny, whip-smart characters, and a charming voice. It's exactly the sort of book I would have treasured as a teen. Here's the full synopsis:

Sixteen-year-old Kyra, a highly-skilled potions master, is the only one who knows her kingdom is on the verge of destruction—which means she’s the only one who can save it. Faced with no other choice, Kyra decides to do what she does best: poison the kingdom’s future ruler, who also happens to be her former best friend.

But, for the first time ever, her poisoned dart . . . misses.

Now a fugitive instead of a hero, Kyra is caught in a game of hide-and-seek with the king’s army and her potioner ex-boyfriend, Hal. At least she’s not alone. She’s armed with her vital potions, a too-cute pig, and Fred, the charming adventurer she can’t stop thinking about. Kyra is determined to get herself a second chance (at murder), but will she be able to find and defeat the princess before Hal and the army find her?

Kyra is not your typical murderer, and she’s certainly no damsel-in-distress—she’s the lovable and quick-witted hero of this romantic novel that has all the right ingredients to make teen girls swoon.

"'Can she save the kingdom with a piglet?' reads the cover tagline of Poison, the YA debut from the late Bridget Zinn. Ridiculous? Yes. Still, there's something refreshing about its silliness amidst the interchangeable do-or-die taglines that seem to have become a staple for YA books these days." 

—Entertainment Weekly's Shelf Life

You can find this book in retailers nationwide, online, and anywhere else books are sold. I really encourage you to check it out--I recently finished, and I can guarantee there will be laughs, gasps of surprise, and pure joy while reading. And after you've read it--or before--help spread the word about this novel and author!

This post is a part of the month-long blog tour celebration in honor of Bridget Zinn's POISON, organized by Inara Scott. You can find out more about the tour here, or you can check out the rest of today's stops by clicking the links below. 

• Becca “I’m Lost in Books”
• Brook Gideon “Dead Gideons”
• Natalie J. Damschroder, for Everybody Needs a Little Romance
• Damaris “Good Choice Reading”

NASA Month: Twilight Zone

All this month, I'm NASA! This means every weekday in March will feature a new post about NASA, and I'm hosting a giant giveaway in order to encourage people to spread the NASA love. For more information on the giveaway, check out this post.

Today we have a special guest post by author and fellow League member E.C. Myers! She's posting about NASA in film.

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NASA & The Twilight Zone

by E.C. Myers

Television is one of the best reflections of the time in which it’s made. Case in point: the original Star Trek series was set in the far future, but its episodes often dealt with topics that concerned Americans in the late 1960s, when it was broadcast, such as war and racism. By exploring serious issues in a science fictional setting, the producers and writers could disguise moral messages as mere entertainment, allowing them to sneak controversial stories past network censors and conservative television stations.

The program that defined the way science fiction would be used for provocative social commentary in television was The Twilight Zone. It’s one of my favorite series and a formative one for me, and it remains a classic today. War and prejudice were also common themes on the show, but it also often featured astronauts and spaceships, with stories about trips to other worlds and alien visitors, which interrogated our ideas of what it truly means to be human. It’s no wonder that the writers were so preoccupied with speculating about the effects of space travel and the possibility of extraterrestrial contact: The Twilight Zone (TZ) debuted on October 2, 1959, only a little more than a year after NASA was formed on July 29, 1958. Space was on everyone’s minds.

In fact, the first episode of TZ raised the very question of whether we were ready to be among the stars. (Warning: Spoilers follow. Even though twist endings are a staple of TZ, the show was broadcast more than 55 years ago, so…) In the striking debut, “Where is Everybody?”, a man wanders a seemingly abandoned town. As he slowly suffers a mental breakdown, it’s revealed that it’s actually all in his mind; the man is an astronaut in an isolation chamber undergoing an experiment that simulates the loneliness of space travel—and he isn’t handling it very well at all.

There are many terrific episodes focused on astronauts and a space program that is strangely similar to NASA. Here are just a few of my favorites, and I’ll hope you check them out and the rest of the series if you haven’t seen it before. Episodes are streaming free on Hulu and Netflix, and most of them really do hold up well five decades letter.

“And When the Sky Was Opened” by Rod Serling, based on a short story by Richard Matheson: A spaceship disappears on its first space flight then reappears. When it crash lands on Earth, one of its three astronauts, Harrington, feels strangely out of place and discovers that his parents don’t remember him—just before he disappears. His co-astronaut Forbes is the only one who realizes he’s missing, or has ever even existed, and even the newspaper now refers to only two astronauts. He tries to convince the third astronaut, Gart, that one of them is gone, but Gart doesn’t believe him—until Forbes disappears too! Gart, reportedly the only astronaut to return to Earth, who is beginning to freak out, soon disappears too, along with the ship. Eerie!

“Third from the Sun” by Rod Serling, also based on a short story by Richard Matheson: Faced with the threat of a nuclear attack that will destroy the planet, a scientist plans to escape with his family aboard a spacecraft. Their destination: a planet 11 million miles away, third from the sun. A place called Earth. (No way!)

“I Shot an Arrow into the Air” by Rod Serling, based on a story by Madelon Champion: Four astronauts crash on what they believe to be a barren asteroid. With limited supplies, one of them kills the others to survive. He sets out on his own and eventually encounters evidence of civilization: telephone poles and a sign for a place called “Reno.” It turns out they had never left Earth at all! Oops! (See also: Planet of the Apes.)

“People Are Alike All Over” by Rod Serling, based on a short story by Paul Fairman: Two astronauts crash on Mars and one of them ends up as the new exhibit in a zoo! (Sounds like people were really worried about spaceships crashing, huh?)

“The Little People” by Rod Serling: Two astronauts land on a planet to make some repairs to their ship and discover a race of tiny people, which one of them, Craig, terrorizes and forces to worship him as a god. His companion leaves him there and soon another ship lands. It bears two astronauts who are giants, one of which accidentally kills Craig, to the delight of the tiny beings he abused.

“The Parallel” by Rod Serling: Gaines blacks out in his space capsule and wakes up on Earth to find things are not exactly the way he left them. He has a different rank, Major instead of Colonel; his wife is practically a stranger to him; and his daughter insists that he isn’t her father. He becomes convinced that he has somehow slipped into a parallel universe and attempts to return to the world he remembers. Gaines blacks out and finds himself back in his orbiting space capsule, which he safely returns to Earth. Just as he begins to think he imagined the whole thing, they receive a transmission… from Colonel Gaines.

“The Long Morrow” by Rod Serling: An astronaut falls in love with a woman before departing on a mission that will keep him away from Earth for 40 years. Wanting to stay the same age as his beloved, he voluntarily opts out of the suspended animation that would keep him young. But when he returns to Earth, now an old man, he learns that the woman had placed herself in suspended animation until he came back to her. Alas, he is now too old for her! (If only they had talked to each other before he left! This episode also has the distinction of being referenced on another of my favorite shows, Gilmore Girls, when Logan gives Rory a toy rocket in a romantic gesture that baffles and upsets her because she didn’t remember watching this episode with him.)

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E.C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and a public library in Yonkers, New York. His young adult science fiction novels, Fair Coin and Quantum Coin, were published by Pyr Books in 2012. You can find him all over the internet, but especially at http://ecmyers.net and on Twitter@ecmyers, as well as blogging about Star Trek athttp://theviewscreen.com.

He currently lives in Philadelphia with his wife, two doofy cats, and a mild-mannered dog.

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This post is a part of the month-long celebration of NASA I'm hosting on my blog. In order to encourage people to celebrate NASA, I'm also hosting a giveaway!

One grand prize winner will receive all the books in the recent Breathless Reads tour, as well as ARCs of two anthologies and a signed Breathless Reads poster:

As well as swag from NASA, courtesy of Kate @ Ex Libris:

To celebrate NASA creatively: you could blog about why you like NASA, you could reach out to an astronaut for an interview, you could make space fan art, you could sing a song about NASA, you do a vlog, you make a list of all the ways NASA rocks...any of this counts! Just celebrate NASA in some awesome way, post it online, and include the link in the Rafflecopter. I even set that part of the entry open for multiple entries, so you could blog and vlog and Facebook and tumblr and Pinterest about NASA and they all count. The only requirements: post a link back to this contest, and put the full URL of the site in the Rafflecopter. Full details here.

To enter: be sure to read the full rules and terms of the contest here. Then fill out the Rafflecopter below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

NASA Month: NASA for Writers

All this month, I'm NASA! This means every weekday in March will feature a new post about NASA, and I'm hosting a giant giveaway in order to encourage people to spread the NASA love. For more information on the giveaway, check out this post.

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NASA for Writers

Today, I want to spread the news about a very cool workshop specifically for writers. The Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop is, according to the official website, "an education/public outreach effort supplementing Mike Brotherton’s space-based astronomical research. Our primary goal is to teach writers, editors, and those with audiences of all types about modern science, specifically astronomy, and in turn reach their audiences."

I've spoken to several authors who've participated in the workshop in the past, and everyone's really loved it. The workshop this year will be in Laramie, Wyoming (imagine the clear night skies for this!) and will feature Christian Ready as the guest lecturer.

If you're a writer--or anyone else who has the ability to reach a wider audience and can spread the information on good sciences further--please consider applying to this excellent program.

And if you need more convincing, check out these author's experiences:

• Alma Alexander's posts about Launch Pad 2008 (very well organized; I highly recommend this one!)
• Rachel Swirsky live-blogged her 2010 experience for Tor.com 
• David Levine did the same for his 2008 experience.
• And Jeff Vandermeer did a series of posts on his experience here.

______________________________________

This post is a part of the month-long celebration of NASA I'm hosting on my blog. In order to encourage people to celebrate NASA, I'm also hosting a giveaway!

One grand prize winner will receive all the books in the recent Breathless Reads tour, as well as ARCs of two anthologies and a signed Breathless Reads poster:

As well as swag from NASA, courtesy of Kate @ Ex Libris:

To celebrate NASA creatively: you could blog about why you like NASA, you could reach out to an astronaut for an interview, you could make space fan art, you could sing a song about NASA, you do a vlog, you make a list of all the ways NASA rocks...any of this counts! Just celebrate NASA in some awesome way, post it online, and include the link in the Rafflecopter. I even set that part of the entry open for multiple entries, so you could blog and vlog and Facebook and tumblr and Pinterest about NASA and they all count. The only requirements: post a link back to this contest, and put the full URL of the site in the Rafflecopter. Full details here.

To enter: be sure to read the full rules and terms of the contest here. Then fill out the Rafflecopter below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

NASA Month: NASA & the Movies

All this month, I'm NASA! This means every weekday in March will feature a new post about NASA, and I'm hosting a giant giveaway in order to encourage people to spread the NASA love. For more information on the giveaway, check out this post.

Today we have a special guest post by author and fellow League member Lissa Price! She's posting about NASA in film.

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NASA and the Movies

by Lissa Price

Small wonder that the movies have had a love affair with NASA. But did you know that NASA also has a love/hate affair with the movies? Here are two lists that NASA created in 2011. One is their “best science fiction movies” of all time and the other is their “worst” list.

List 1

1) Gattaca (1997)

2) Contact (1997)

3) Metropolis (1927)

4) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

5) Woman in the Moon (1929) (the first film to use the countdown that NASA later copied)

6) The Thing From Another World (1951)

7) Jurassic Park (1993)

List 2

1) 2012 (2009)

2) The Core (2003)

3) Armageddon (1998)

4) Volcano (1997)

5) Chain Reaction (1996)

6) The 6th Day (2000)

7) What the #$*! Do We Know? (2004)

You probably guessed that List 2 is their “worst” list. In fact, they use Armageddon as part of their training program, quizzing trainees to find all the impossibilities in the film (approx. 168).

Some films dealing with space exploration or NASA

• Contact 
• Moon 
• Space Cowboys 
• Apollo 13 
• The Right Stuff 
• October Sky 
• Gattaca 
• Space Camp 
• 2001 
• Alien 
• Deep Impact 
• Red Planet 
• Destination Moon 
• Independence Day 
• Solaris 
• Mission to Mars 
• The Astronaut’s Wife 

If you have a favorite film or one that wasn’t listed here, tell us in the comments.
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Lissa Price’s debut novel STARTERS is an international bestseller published in over thirty countries. Dean Koontz calls this YA futuristic thriller “a smart, swift, inventive, altogether gripping story.” STARTERS was chosen by Barnes & Noble and the Chicago and LA Public Libraries as one of their Best Books of the Year for Teens. It won awards in Germany and France where it was one of the top ten books of the year. The sequel, ENDERS, will be published in Europe this Spring.

Lissa loves water sports and travel that involves furry creatures. Visit her at www.lissaprice.com or LissaPriceAuthor on FBt or @Lissa_Price on Twitter.

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This post is a part of the month-long celebration of NASA I'm hosting on my blog. In order to encourage people to celebrate NASA, I'm also hosting a giveaway!

One grand prize winner will receive all the books in the recent Breathless Reads tour, as well as ARCs of two anthologies and a signed Breathless Reads poster:

As well as swag from NASA, courtesy of Kate @ Ex Libris:

To celebrate NASA creatively: you could blog about why you like NASA, you could reach out to an astronaut for an interview, you could make space fan art, you could sing a song about NASA, you do a vlog, you make a list of all the ways NASA rocks...any of this counts! Just celebrate NASA in some awesome way, post it online, and include the link in the Rafflecopter. I even set that part of the entry open for multiple entries, so you could blog and vlog and Facebook and tumblr and Pinterest about NASA and they all count. The only requirements: post a link back to this contest, and put the full URL of the site in the Rafflecopter. Full details here.

To enter: be sure to read the full rules and terms of the contest here. Then fill out the Rafflecopter below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

NASA Month: Interviews & Asteroids

All this month, I'm NASA! This means every weekday in March will feature a new post about NASA, and I'm hosting a giant giveaway in order to encourage people to spread the NASA love. For more information on the giveaway, check out this post.

Today, I have the great honor of interviewing Paul Abell, Lead Scientists for Planetary Small Bodies at NASA Johnson Space Center, and Amy Sisson, Science Fiction Writer and Librarian.  This time, I asked all about asteroids and their impact (haha, get it?) on our Earth. 

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Interviews & Asteroids

Paul Abell, Lead Scientist for Planetary Small Bodies, NASA Johnson Space Center
Amy Sisson, Science Fiction Writer and Librarian
March 2013

1) How likely is it that a large asteroid or meteor--of the kind that wiped out the dinosaurs--will hit Earth again?

The object responsible for the Chicxulub impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago is believed to have been about 10 km (6.2 miles) in diameter. Fortunately, there aren’t too many near-Earth asteroids of this size still flying around out there, and the large asteroids in the asteroid belt are generally in stable orbits and aren’t a threat to us.

A screenshot of the Chelyabinsk asteroid

But an object doesn’t have to be that big to cause massive destruction. The object that exploded over Chelyabinsk in Russia just last month caused an awful lot of damage (but thankfully no deaths), and it was only about 20 meters (65 feet) in diameter. It exploded high up in the atmosphere before it could hit the ground, but even so it injured more than 1,500 people, and produced a shock wave with far more force than the nuclear bombs that were detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. If this had happened at a lower altitude right over a big city like New York or Houston, the casualties would have been a lot worse.

On average, objects the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor will hit the Earth once every 100 years – which may make people think that “OK, we’re safe from that size object for another hundred years.” But the frequency of these impacts is on average. That means that one could hit us today and another one could hit us tomorrow, and then maybe we would go a couple of hundred years without a hit. This means we need to be on alert all the time, because we can’t predict when statistics are going to work in our favor and when they’re not.

2) What kinds of things does NASA have in place to protect Earth from such an event? Is the movie Armageddon a likely scenario or just crazy Hollywood?

Armageddon was crazy Hollywood, placing story and excitement over any resemblance to reality. The size, speed, and physical nature of the asteroid were very unrealistic, as was NASA’s fictional method of dealing with it. For starters, no country currently has a space vehicle that could send astronauts flying after a speeding asteroid that way.

But the movie did get two key factors right. First, they mentioned, and it’s true, that NASA simply does not have the funding to watch every part of the sky at all times. Even with unlimited money, asteroids are small, dark, and moving fast against the backdrop of space, making them difficult to spot. Ideally, NASA would like to build and operate a space-based telescope to help find the potentially dangerous asteroids that travel very close to or near our own orbit. Such a telescope would work 24 hours a day and could effectively look for asteroids coming from the general direction of the sun. This is something ground-based telescopes can’t do, because we can only use them at night.

Armageddon was also correct that if a massive asteroid is speeding towards us, we most likely won’t be able to just blast it with a nuclear bomb. In the movie, Bruce Willis and his team first drilled down into the asteroid so that the nuclear bomb would split it into two halves that would both miss the earth. That was fun for the movie, but it’s not the way NASA would do it. In reality, it would be better to use a nuclear bomb to simply nudge the asteroid off course slightly – but to do that, we would need to know about the asteroid well in advance, so that a little nudge while the asteroid is still far away would make it miss us by a safe margin. That’s where the funding for early detection comes in.

So yes, NASA thinks about this stuff all the time. What they don’t have is a space shuttle-like vehicle that can send people to an asteroid at the last minute, or even a rocket that could definitely target an asteroid with a nuclear bomb. They do have many theoretical scenarios in place, but what they will be able to do when the time comes will depend a lot on what funding and what technology is available at the time. Having as much advance notice as possible of an incoming asteroid is the key, and that means funding is required to try and survey all the near-Earth asteroids that are out there. There’s a saying: Asteroids are nature’s way of asking ‘How’s that space program coming along?’”

3) Is it possible in the future for astronauts to visit large asteroids? What might they discover?

It’s very possible for astronauts to visit large asteroids. In fact, in many ways it would be easier to do that than to send astronauts to Mars, or even back to the Moon. NASA has spent a lot of time and effort over the last few years developing the concept of a crewed mission to a near-Earth asteroid. Since asteroids are always moving, we can’t just fly from the Earth straight to an asteroid, so we have to understand their orbits and pick an asteroid that we can get to and from in a reasonable amount of time. NASA will need a space vehicle capable of supporting a four-person crew for a round trip that would last several months, with food, water, fuel, and shielding against solar and cosmic radiation.

What will they discover? To plan the mission correctly, they’ll need to have a good idea in advance whether the asteroid is rocky or metallic in its composition, so they’ll probably first send out a robotic spacecraft to check things out. Finding water (in ice form or trapped in rock) would be a terrific bonus, because water-rich asteroids can eventually be used to supply fuel and drinkable water to astronaut crews on even longer missions, such as to Mars. Learning how to get at and use that water can help NASA figure out ways to use similar resources on Mars’ two moons (Phobos and Deimos, which are both actually captured asteroids), which could help us get astronauts to the surface of Mars and to other destinations in the solar system.

But back to that asteroid… Well, there won’t be much gravity there, and there certainly won’t be razor-sharp shards of metal flying around the asteroid the way it happened in Armageddon. But even so, the first human trip to an asteroid will be equally exciting, and sure to result in scientific discoveries that haven’t even occurred to us yet.

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This post is a part of the month-long celebration of NASA I'm hosting on my blog. In order to encourage people to celebrate NASA, I'm also hosting a giveaway!

One grand prize winner will receive all the books in the recent Breathless Reads tour, as well as ARCs of two anthologies and a signed Breathless Reads poster:

As well as swag from NASA, courtesy of Kate @ Ex Libris:

To celebrate NASA creatively: you could blog about why you like NASA, you could reach out to an astronaut for an interview, you could make space fan art, you could sing a song about NASA, you do a vlog, you make a list of all the ways NASA rocks...any of this counts! Just celebrate NASA in some awesome way, post it online, and include the link in the Rafflecopter. I even set that part of the entry open for multiple entries, so you could blog and vlog and Facebook and tumblr and Pinterest about NASA and they all count. The only requirements: post a link back to this contest, and put the full URL of the site in the Rafflecopter. Full details here.

To enter: be sure to read the full rules and terms of the contest here. Then fill out the Rafflecopter below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

NASA Month: Moondance

All this month, I'm NASA! This means every weekday in March will feature a new post about NASA, and I'm hosting a giant giveaway in order to encourage people to spread the NASA love. For more information on the giveaway, check out this post.

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Moondance

HUGE thanks to Genn Albin for pointing me to this amazing video! Canadian Astronaut Cmdr. Chris Hadfield performed with the Chieftans...from SPACE aboard the ISS! 

This video just gave me goosebumps, and definitely deserves more views. Check it out!

______________________________________

This post is a part of the month-long celebration of NASA I'm hosting on my blog. In order to encourage people to celebrate NASA, I'm also hosting a giveaway!

One grand prize winner will receive all the books in the recent Breathless Reads tour, as well as ARCs of two anthologies and a signed Breathless Reads poster:

As well as swag from NASA, courtesy of Kate @ Ex Libris:

To celebrate NASA creatively: you could blog about why you like NASA, you could reach out to an astronaut for an interview, you could make space fan art, you could sing a song about NASA, you do a vlog, you make a list of all the ways NASA rocks...any of this counts! Just celebrate NASA in some awesome way, post it online, and include the link in the Rafflecopter. I even set that part of the entry open for multiple entries, so you could blog and vlog and Facebook and tumblr and Pinterest about NASA and they all count. The only requirements: post a link back to this contest, and put the full URL of the site in the Rafflecopter. Full details here.

To enter: be sure to read the full rules and terms of the contest here. Then fill out the Rafflecopter below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

NASA Month: Hail Columbia

All this month, I'm NASA! This means every weekday in March will feature a new post about NASA, and I'm hosting a giant giveaway in order to encourage people to spread the NASA love. For more information on the giveaway, check out this post.

Today we have a special guest post by author and fellow League Member, Angie Smibert! Author of the MEMENTO NORA series, Angie also had the awesome job of working with NASA zomg jealous.

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Hail Columbia
by Angie Smibert

It’s been 10 years and a little over a month since I saw her, since anyone has.


I met her the day I interviewed for a job at the Kennedy Space Center. It was a sticky October morning in 1995. After meeting my soon-to-be boss and co-workers, we walked down three flights of stairs to the front of the Headquarters Building, which is about four miles, give or take, from the Shuttle launch pads.

T minus 31 seconds. Go for auto sequence start.

The countdown chatter echoed over the PA system inside the building and out.

T minus 6 seconds. Go for main engine start.

5- 4- 3-2-1-0.

And there she was. Columbia.

She cleared the trees (and swamp) that lay between us and the pad, and the visceral rumble of the engine ignition washed over me. As she hurtled skyward, everyone kept watching silently, almost holding their breath, as the contrails climbed higher and higher in the sky—until two smaller wisps of smoke broke off and started falling back to Earth.

Then, almost every single person at KSC exhaled at that moment—and walked back inside.

“We watch for SRB separation,” someone explained to me. That’s when the two solid rocket boosters have run out of fuel and fall back to Earth.

“Challenger didn’t make it that far,” someone else added, almost in a whisper.

“Oh,” I managed to say. After that, I too watched for the SRBs to fall away after every launch.

Fast forward about eight years—and many, many shuttle launches later. In the intervening years, I’d risen from newbie to boss, been to the top of a Shuttle pad, climbed into the guts of a Mobile Launcher Platform, written numerous online training courses and safety videos, won a Silver Snoopy, and even written a interactive guide to the Space Shuttle, focusing on Columbia in particular.

It was a cool (for Florida) Saturday morning in February, and I was rattling around my townhouse making coffee, letting the dog out (and back in), reading the paper, all with NASA-TV muted in the background. And I was waiting to hear the tell-tale sonic boom that would let me, and all of the Space Coast, know that Columbia was on its way home.

It never came.

Fast forward a couple more heartbreaking days, and everything had changed at KSC.

NASA held a memorial service for the crew (and the orbiter itself) at the Shuttle Landing Facility. An office mate and I wrangled some passes to attend the ceremony. Much of it’s a blur. Each astronaut was honored and lamented. Airmen fainted on the tarmac. John Crippen, the first person to fly Columbia on a mission, the very first Shuttle mission back in 1981, eulogized the orbiter and what it meant to history. I still love what he said about her:


"Columbia was hardly a thing of beauty except to those of us who loved and cared for her. She was often badmouthed for being a little heavy in the rear end. But many of us can relate to that. Many said she was old and past her prime, still she only lived nearly a quarter of her design life. Columbia still had a great many missions ahead of her. She along with the crew had her life snuffed out in her prime. Just as her crew has Columbia has left us quite a legacy....hail Columbia."

At the end, astronauts flew a missing man formation for Columbia. Four T-38 jets, one for each orbiter, roared towards us as we were standing on mile-long tarmac. Just as they were overhead, all of us looking up, the jet representing Columbia peeled off toward the heavens and disappeared into a chink of blue sky that had opened up in the clouds. The clouds swallowed it up, and it was gone. The sight of the jet climbing skyward while its mates kept flying flat and low unexpectedly choked me up.

And, and with a lump in my throat, I said goodbye to Columbia and her crew. Godspeed.


Columbia links:

· NASA Day of Remembrance
· STS-107 Crew Memorial
· STS-107 tribute page: (This was put together by a contractor who was there at the SLF that day.)
· NASA Tribute Video: Sixteen Minutes from Home video
· Tribute to Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon

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Angie is the author of the Memento Nora series, which includes Memento Nora, The Forgetting Curve, and the upcoming Meme Plague (August 13), as well as numerous short stories. Her latest story, "The Jelly Jar," is in the March issue of Cicada. And for ten years, she worked at NASA's Kennedy Space Center where she developed online training, wrote videos, managed a creative team--and fell in love with the whole place. (She was already in love with the awesomeness of space in general.)

______________________________________

This post is a part of the month-long celebration of NASA I'm hosting on my blog. In order to encourage people to celebrate NASA, I'm also hosting a giveaway!

One grand prize winner will receive all the books in the recent Breathless Reads tour, as well as ARCs of two anthologies and a signed Breathless Reads poster:

As well as swag from NASA, courtesy of Kate @ Ex Libris:

To celebrate NASA creatively: you could blog about why you like NASA, you could reach out to an astronaut for an interview, you could make space fan art, you could sing a song about NASA, you do a vlog, you make a list of all the ways NASA rocks...any of this counts! Just celebrate NASA in some awesome way, post it online, and include the link in the Rafflecopter. I even set that part of the entry open for multiple entries, so you could blog and vlog and Facebook and tumblr and Pinterest about NASA and they all count. The only requirements: post a link back to this contest, and put the full URL of the site in the Rafflecopter. Full details here.

To enter: be sure to read the full rules and terms of the contest here. Then fill out the Rafflecopter below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway