A Micro-Genre: The "As Himself" Film

 

Oh, would some Power give us the gift

To see ourselves as others see us!

It would from many a blunder free us,

And foolish notion:

What airs in dress and gait would leave us,

And even devotion!

"To A Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church" 

 -- Robert Burns, 1786 

Over the past century, we've become used to many tropes of filmmaking. One of the most pervasive, if easily overlooked casting habits, is getting celebrities to portray themselves on screen. 

There are three types of "As Himself" films: having a person recreate an event on film that originally made them famous; surprising the audience with a brief cameo; and creating a caricature of the celebrity's public persona. 

The first type is easy enough to recognize: Babe Ruth saying farewell to Lou Gehrig in Pride of the Yankees; Audie Murphy acting out his WWII exploits in To Hell and Back -- these are obvious roles. There are also odd crossover roles, where a celebrity acts as a narrator to explain a plot point. A great example of this is Margot Robbie in The Big Short, where she gives a quick lesson in subprime mortgages to the audience while taking a bubble bath. 

The second category, the celebrity cameo, is probably the most frequently seen "As Himself" outing in films. The cameo is a pop-up surprise for viewers, not expecting a real person playing themselves in a film (typically a comedy). The examples are numerous: Merv Griffin in The Man with Two Brains; Donald Trump in Home Alone 2; Marcel Marceau in Silent Movie; Keanu Reeves in Always be My Maybe; Stan Lee in Mallrats; Elton John in The Spice Girls Movie; Tom Jones in Mars Attacks!; Ed Sheeran in Yesterday - - all these films give the audience pause to say, "wait a minute - what are THEY doing in this movie?"

The third version is the meatiest use of a celebrity appearance in a film: the caricature role. Entire plotlines are structured around a fictional biography of a real person: John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich; Nicolas Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent; Bruce Campbell in My Name is Bruce!; and Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Last Action Hero.

My favorite caricature movie featuring an actor playing himself is W.C. Fields in Universal Pictures' 1941 feature, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. Written by Fields himself (using the pen name Otis Criblecoblis), the story imagines a surreal series of events in the actor's efforts to write and star in a motion picture. 

Fields builds not-too-subtle barbs at Universal Pictures into the screenplay, making fun of a fictional producer, Franklin Pangborn. Pangborn can't stand the script Fields is pitching, which is acted out on-screen as Pangborn complains about the plot holes and ridiculous nature of the story. 

I really don't want to give away too many scenes in this film, as it's best experienced rather than described. Let's just say there are some silent-era car chases and mayhem typical of Fields' sense of humor. The banter between Fields and the curmudgeonly characters he interacts with throughout the film provides most of the comedy. It's a beautiful, rough-and-tumble slapstick script, and arguably one of Fields' most representative films of his comedic genius. 

Do you have a favorite "As Himself" film? Let me know in the comments. 

Restorations vs Extrapolations

 The Library of Congress version of "Rendezvous in Space" has been digitized, and it's raised almost as many questions as it's answered. 

The print was in great shape, generally. I think that it was a silent version kept it from being screened frequently by LoC employees, so the print is relatively unscathed. There are some color fades and several vertical scrapes that can be repaired, but nothing too severe. 

Certainly, the biggest problem with the print is that it has quite a few differences from the original film, and it's missing key sections I had hoped to replace in the production print. The discussion between Danny Thomas and Sid Melton, talking about space stewardesses, isn't present in the LoC copy. 

There's even a complete replacement of the title card from one film to the other. 

Based on the fragmentary scenes in the LoC copy, I think this print was deposited to fulfill minimum copyright requirements, instead of being a posterity record. 

Unless I can find another print, I'm going to have to source from the three existing versions: the David Hammar 1998 VHS copy, the 35mm production print, and the Library of Congress fragments. I think the renovation schedule has just pushed off to the right - - the extreme right. 

I'm also going to have to make decisions about what constitutes a "restoration." I think my baseline is going to be the audio track from the VHS, and then choosing the best frames (even if that means the VHS video) for each element of the movie. 

One sad note is that I have scenes in the LoC copy that have no audio, and no place in the original film. I'm going to trust that they never appeared in the show reel, and omit them from the film. Maybe I'll air them during the credits? More things to ponder as this project progresses. 

Reach for the Stars

 A decade ago, I tracked down many scattered threads of ephemera about the final film of Frank Capra, “Rendezvous in Space,” an industrial short commissioned by Martin‐Marietta Corporation in support of their Titan III missile and X‐24 lifting body sales. Shown at the New York World’s Fair of 1964‐1965 to an estimated audience of seven million visitors, there are only two known remaining prints of the film. One of the prints is at the Library of Congress. The other print, the one shown at the World's Fair and at the NY Hall of Science until 1971 is in my possession, courtesy of the kindness of my late friend David Hammar. 

For years, I worked on understanding whose copyright applied to this film: it was made by Frank Capra, but he was under contract to Martin-Marietta. Martin-Marietta donated the film to the NY Hall of Science, but didn't transfer the copyright to that organization. The NY Hall of Science disposed of the print in a dumpster in 1972, but it was rescued by a trash picker and went through several changes of hands until it wound up with David. 

On YouTube, there's a rough VHS copy of this print, made in extremely low resolution. It's difficult to make out what images are on screen at any given moment. As it stands, nobody's seen a clear version of this film in about a half-century. 

After getting clearance from Lockheed-Martin, I've begun work on restoring as much of this film as I can. The script is cheesy in a Capra-corn sense of the term, but the visuals are striking. Among the artists hired for the animated parts of the film is the cartooning pioneer T. Hee, who was responsible for the Dance of the Hours segment in Disney's Fantasia. There are Titan III missiles taking off, Chinese magicians discovering rocketry, astronauts microwaving steaks in zero gravity, and space stations floating in Earth orbit. 

My goal is to take the best frames from both of the remaining prints, marry them to a synchronized soundtrack, and rebuild the film as it was originally seen. It's going to be a long process - - I'm estimating 18 months for the project - - but I think this film deserves a proper restoration. 

More to come as the rebuild progresses. Watch this space for updates!

2016: A View from the Past

I was listening to a lecture on YouTube by a fellow named Tony Seba, who talks about major disruptions in society, and what happens to the market of what the disruptions displace.

He showed a picture of Easter Sunday, 1900 on Fifth Avenue in New York City. There are dozens, even hundreds of horse-drawn carriages parading up and down the street -- and in the middle of all these equine-powered vehicles, there's a solitary gasoline fueled automobile.

NYC-Easter Sunday 1900

Fast-forward a dozen or so years. Same street, another Easter Sunday, but now it's 1913. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of gasoline-powered automobiles fill the street. There is exactly one horse in this photo.

NYC - Easter Sunday 1913

It's likely that none of the people in the 1900 picture would guess what the ratio of horses to cars would be in the following decade, but I think it would be safe to assume they'd never think horses would become rarities.

Yes, there are still horses more than a century later in Manhattan, but they're remanded to pulling a few tourist carts through Central Park. They're novelties, not relied-upon forms of transportation.

Here in the 21st Century, we're at another disruption point: the end of the internal combustion engine. From the vantage point of when the essay you're reading was written (late fall of 2016), mostly it seems impossible. Right now there are 253 million cars on the road in the United States. Less than a half million are electric vehicles, and most of them cost in excess of $60,000.

All that's about to change in 2017  with the arrival of two major fleets: the Chevy Bolt, and the Tesla Model 3. Within the first year of production, nearly one million new electric vehicles are expected to wind up in the garages of the non-rich and non-famous. This surge of new cars not powered by gasoline is the first wave of what will be a fundamental overthrow of the reign of internal combustion.

If you've not experienced driving an electric vehicle, this disruption may seem impossible. There's an entire culture of internal combustion, firmly established in gas stations, Jiffy Lubes, service centers, and transmission shops. All these businesses will soon be as outmoded as typewriter repair stores and Blockbuster video rental centers. The change will be so elemental that it's difficult to picture what the new landscape of transportation will look like.

Imagine never needing to visit a gas station again. The "gas station" is now your own home, where you'll plug your car in at night pretty much the same way you plug in your smartphone to its charger. There will be no more oil changes, spark plug tune-ups, broken alternators, radiator flushes, muffler shops, replacement fuel pumps, blown head gaskets, or worries about what kind of octane gas to use. You won't have to pay for emissions testing because your car won't emit anything. Every morning, your car will have a "full tank" thanks to an overnight charge.

Moore's Law, the computer marketing concept that the density of memory storage increases while the price of memory decreases will have a codicil in battery power. We are currently capable of a 100 kWh battery, but that density will increase to 130 kWh within a year's time. As battery density increases, batteries to cover the same distance will decrease in size, allowing for weight savings in a car and further increasing range. The idea of having a 400-mile single charge car battery by 2020 isn't a fantasy - - it's a conservative estimate of the future.

This may sound unlikely, but I believe electric vehicles will comprise more than 90% of the country's active vehicle fleet by 2023. As adoption of electric cars becomes a standard, the pace of replacement will become as rapid as the replacement of CRTs with flat screen TVs was just a decade ago. Over 98% of electric production is produced from domestic sources, and the demand for gasoline will fade as suddenly as the demand for cassette tapes did 20 years ago. We will look back on 2016 as the end of a strange era, when people carted tanks of flammable fluid around in their vehicles just to propel themselves on the highways. Babies born this year will look at pictures from 2016 and think how strange the whole concept of running gas engines on wheels directly in front of the passenger compartment was. Since I've test driven an electric car, I can grasp that idea clearly - - it's like seeing pictures of steam engines chuffing into train stations half a century ago.

My advice? Don't buy a new car with an internal combustion engine. You'll regret it within the next 1000 days. I'm serious. Gasoline engines are going the way of DOS, floppy disks, ditto machines, and slide rules.

A Cardboard World

Sorry for the pause of more than a dozen months. Overtaken by events, and all that.


I got back from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. It's an annual ComicCon of whiz-bang equipment being hawked to the credulous masses every January. Thanks to a good friend, I became a temporary "Exhibitor" and wandered the merchandise tables for several days.

UHDTV seems to have reached the tipping point for home purchases. With 50" screens selling for under $500, I think this is the year they'll start appearing on people's living room walls. In about three years, this little essay will seem quaintly naive, but 4K television is quite an amazing advance for the movie-watching public. Sony has a 4K projector about the size of an old cassette tape that can beam an eight-foot-wide screen onto a wall. I think hardware TVs may be replaced by these little doodads, as it's much easier to ship and hang a fist-sized box on the ceiling than it is to mount a picture window-sized monitor on the wall.

My favorite two bits of hardware from the show, though, were involved with building Virtual Reality (VR) spaces.

Ricoh Theta S

One item was the Ricoh Theta, a slim plastic stick about as tall as an iPhone with two fisheye lens at opposing sides of the stick. The device records 360° still and video images and broadcasts same to nearby Bluetooth devices. The clarity is astounding. The accompanying software allows for editing and timelapse photography. Its ability to capture an entire sphere of any location in high-definition makes the Theta a game changer for tourist imagery. As it's a mere $346 list price, I think it's going to be a big seller in the coming year.

Way down the price pyramid, but just as much the game changer is the Google Cardboard viewer. Vendors were handing out version of the viewer for free as tschotskes, and the supported base of media available for the device is expanding exponentially by the day.

Briefly, Google Cardboard is a View-Master like device to see 3D images through a stereoscopic pair of lenses. The reason it's called "Cardboard" is that the viewer is typically a carefully folded cardboard box, with appropriate slots and pieces of Velcro used to hold the thing together. By dropping an iPhone or Android into one side of the box, the viewer can be used as a simple VR device. Google has quite a few example programs on their site, and many YouTube videos support the Google Cardboard VR standard.

Google Cardboard

The Cardboard viewer is ingenious and amazing - - I put one together in about three minutes, slipped my iPhone into the far end of the box, and had the device calibrated and ready to go in less than another minute. The iPhone's accelerometer passed axis changes on to the software, and the video screen updated my views immediately.

In one example tour, I walked by the Eiffel Tower and the canals of Venice. I hovered over a baby gorilla in a jungle, and even stood atop the Spirit rover on the surface of Mars.

The technology isn't quite ready for prime time but it's easy to see how ubiquitous this device and others of its kind will become. I want to learn more about VR technology, so I've ordered a Ricoh Theta to explore the matter in more detail. Expect many experiment posts shortly.

Links:

Ricoh Theta S

Google Cardboard

CES 2016

Clip Show

Most people know John Williams as the film composer - - the fellow who wrote the Star Wars theme and the Jurassic Park and the Harry Potter soundtracks.


Not too long before he wrote his Jaws soundtrack, Mr. Williams went by the professional name of "Johnny Williams," writer of TV themes. He worked on end credits music for shows like Alcoa Theater and the Bob Hope specials. Much of his work was incidental music, and went uncredited in quite a few series.

One of his most frequent gigs was to write for action/adventure shows produced by Irwin Allen. Although he didn't write the theme to Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, he penned many title tracks for Allen, in shows such as The Time Tunnel, Lost in Space, and Land of the Giants.

Irwin Allen constantly tinkered with shows to maintain his ratings and dazzle his audiences (albeit with a limited budget). An unusual technique that Allen relied on to pep things up was to have Johnny Williams completely rewrite the theme music after a few seasons. One of the most obvious examples is Lost in Space, where Williams had originally crafted an eerie, ominous and echoing theme for the initial two seasons, filled with trumpets, cellos, and piccolos :

By the third season Irwin Allen figured he wanted to stress the action and adventure angle and downplay the alien-ness of outer space. So, he had Johnny dump the old theme and create a more driven,  French horn-stuffed roller coaster of a theme. The new opener threw audiences into the middle of a fast countdown every week, paced by ticking rimshots and  hyped-up trombone arpeggios. It was definitely a new look-and-feel for the established series.

 

Something I didn't realize until recently was that Allen used a similar approach with his 1968-70 series, Land of the Giants. In the show's initial outing, Williams built the theme to underline the ponderous size of the titled Giants on their home world, and the threat they posed to the puny Earth men who had crashed their ship on the Giants' planet.

By the second year of the show, the ratings were dropping, so Allen brought Johnny Williams back to the composing studio to crank out a peppier theme. The new opening would be at a much faster pace, with clashing French horns and bass guitars and syncopated glockenspiels.

The trick worked, and Giants continued for another two years. It's not easy to say that Johnny's new theme "saved" the show, but it certainly didn't hurt the ratings.

Looking back more than four decades at all the work Irwin Allen piled on John(ny) Williams's plate, it's amazing to think about how prolific Williams was beyond his epic movie soundtracks. I can't imagine any current TV theme writers jotting down so many disparate themes and variations for the same shows in the same time frame. Okay, maybe Michael Giacchino - - but is he still doing TV shows after LOST?

And at Last I See the Light

I promised myself that in 2014 I'd write a lot more about less "significant" things and focus more on simple things that flabbergast me. Of course, the flabbergasting began immediately.

Disney movies are eminently rewatchable. The songs, the characters, the settings, and the plot lines are usually compelling, and the animators typically hide details that are often overlooked, even after repeated viewings.

I was watching Disney's Tangled -- the Rapunzel story, last week, and spotted something I've never noticed before this thirty-eighth playback of the film. In the story, baby Princess Rapunzel is kidnapped from her castle by an evil sorceress. The sorceress hides Rapunzel in a tower for eighteen years. Over the ensuing years, Rapunzel's mother and father (the king and queen) hold a memorial service for Rapunzel by lighting floating lanterns in honor of their lost daughter. At age 18, Rapunzel escapes from the sorceress's tower and attends one of these ceremonies by sitting in a boat, watching the subjects of the kingdom launch the floating lanterns into the night sky on her birthday.

The memorial service begins with the King and Queen lifting a single decorated lantern up from the rooftop of their castle.

 

The townspeople follow by launching thousands of their own, undecorated lamps. Soon, the sky is full of the bobbing lanterns. 

Rapunzel sings her song about "seeing the light." While she's singing, her parents' decorated lantern swoops down to the surface of the bay. Rapunzel reaches out and lofts it back up into the sky.

Only the audience (if they're clever enough to spot it) knows Rapunzel touched the very same lantern her parents lit that night.

I swear I've watched this movie several dozen times and never noticed that tidbit until last week. Hopefully I'm not the only clueless member of the audience.

Joy of Man's Desire

I write a lot of stuff about the history of flight and the United States Air Force, but something I never get to write about is the United States Air Force Band and their vocal accompanists, the Singing Sargeants.

Back in the 1970's I used to live near Ridgefield, Connecticut, which had the nickname of "BandTown, USA" Ridgefield had an amazing music program in its school system, and produced an unimaginable number of talented musicians who went on to professional success. One of their most prolific paths into adult musicianship were their Junior ROTC programs. So many alumni headed into the US military bands, the bands themselves came to town and performed on stage at the high school every year. Even Professor Harold Hill would be impressed.

Due to the town's proximity, I had the chance to hear every United States military band in my high school years. My favorite was, and remains, the Air Force Band. Although all the bands are the cream of the nation's band talent, the Air Force Band was the most wide-ranging in its musical presentations. Everything from John Phillip Sousa to the Bee Gees was fair game, and the talent displayed in performances was a complete knockout. Their vocal troupe, the Singing Sargeants (as the name implies, every member is an OR-5 or greater) could do everything from Gregorian chants to a capella bebop tunes. I think if they handed out application forms at the end of performances, they could sign up the entire audience for basic training the next week.

Seeing the Air Force Band in any location is impressive, but seeing them combined with Air Force history is an inspiring match. What better place could they sing but in a place such as, oh, the Milestones of Flight Hall in the National Air & Space Museum in Washington?

So of course, they did just that.

The US Air Force Band is going to be playing at the NASM through much of December. If you're in the DC area, it's an event not to be missed. Check it out - you don't often get to hear an orchestra performing under an X-15.

A JFK Story

My grandfather-in-law, Chris Elson, knew Jack Ruby. Chris was the owner-operator of the Kings Club, the restaurant in Dallas's Adolphus Hotel. As a restauranteur, he knew everyone that served food and hired waitresses in Dallas. Ruby ran the Carousel Club, a burlesque bar across the street from the Adolphus.

On the 20th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, I asked Chris what he thought of Jack Ruby, when he knew him back in the day.

Jack Ruby, who shot Oswald, who shot JFK.

"He was a pimp," said Chris. "He hired a lot of girls who had money problems, drug problems, and pimped them out at his bar." Chris didn't like him at all.

Chris was interviewed by the Warren Commission about any discussions or sightings of Jack Ruby's roommate, George Senator,  after the JFK assassination. Here's the only thing he mentioned to the Commission:

CHRIS ELSON, owner and operator of the Kings Club and the Burgurdy Room, Adolphus hotel, advised the Burgundy Room located on the lobby floor and the Kings club located on the sixth floor of the Adolphus Hotel are owned and operated by him.  Neither of the clubs opens until noon. ELSON advised that immediately after the assassination of President KENNEDY on November 22, 1963, he contacted the manager of the Adolphus Hotel and found that the Century Room would not open on November 22 and 23, 1963, and he immediately contacted all of his employees who work in the Burgundy Room and Kings Club and advised them that neither would be opened until Monday, November 25, 1963.

ELSON advised that on November 28, 1963, GEORGE SENATOR contacted him personally at the Kings Club and stated he had a complaint to make against the piano player in the Burgundy Room. On the evening of November 28, 1963, the piano player allegedly made a remark about JACK RUBY and ELSON contacted all employees and it was determined  that none of the employees had seen JACK RUBY, RALPH PAUL, GEORGE SENATOR, or EVA GRANT from November 22 to November 28, 1963.
The employees of the Burgundy Room advised they were reading the headlines of a  newspaper regarding JACK RUBY and this was the basis for the complaint by GEORGE SENATOR.

Senator made a claim that he had met with associates of Jack Ruby at the Kings Club on the 23rd of November, but since Chris explained that the restaurant was closed, this meeting couldn't have happened there. Not a big deal, but it's a discrepancy in testimony that conspiracy theorists try to hang things on.

A Story about November 22nd

I asked Chris what he remembered about November 22nd. Did he see the motorcade? "Oh yes," said Chris, "it was right in front of the restaurant." Here's the memory he shared about that day:

"I never really liked Kennedy," he said. "Don't know why, I just didn't like him. We figured lunch would be late that day because everyone downtown would want to see the President, so we decided to hold off the restaurant opening until 12:30."

"Outside the hotel, we had an awning over the sidewalk that wrapped around the whole building. Some of the girls (waitresses) wanted to get a good look at Jackie, so they went upstairs to walk out on top of the awning. They said I should come and see the President, so I went, too."

The Adolphus Hotel today. Note the balcony awning.

"We climbed through the windows on the second floor and stepped out on the awning just as the motorcycles started coming down the street. The President's car was right up front and we saw him and Jackie and all the other people."

"Now, the President would do this thing where he'd point to a group of people on the sidewalk and they'd all wave and he'd wave back at them. And he kept doing this as their car drove down the street. And then he pointed up at the awning with all of us standing there, and we all started waving back at him. I was surprised I was waving, because I didn't really like the guy."

"So, then the cars all passed by and we started climbing back in the windows to go downstairs and open for lunch. So I'm the last one downstairs. As I'm walking down the stairs, I think to myself: why don't I like that guy? He seems like a nice man, he has a pretty wife, they both seem really happy. I could like that guy!"

"As I walk into the bar area, we had a TV on that was showing the parade. All of a sudden, the man on the TV said the President's been shot. And I think to myself: I really just got to like that guy, and now he's dead."

I've been writing articles and essays about the Kennedy assassination since I was twelve years old. There's a whole industry of conspiracy crazies who debate testimony and evidence Oswald acted alone. After decades of reading all the theories and seeing the places where events occurred, the only rational conclusion I think anyone can draw is that Oswald imagined himself to be a revolutionary and had the unfortunate luck of working in a tall building on a day when the President of the United States would be driving by his office. Fifty years of arguments hasn't made a compelling case against Oswald's guilt, and I've decided not to write about the subject any more.

As to the minutiae that people argue about: I think it's all based on the same thing Chris said: we all really just got to know the President, and now he's dead. It's therapy, not revelation.

Edith Keeler Must Die

Don't copy-paste legends

I saw the midnight premiere of Star Trek: Into Darkness early Thursday morning. The initial 2009 reboot of the franchise was an intriguing blend of classic Star Trek motifs through a 21st Century sensibility, so I thought I'd enjoy this continuation of the new films even more than the kickoff  movie.

 As I soon discovered, that idea was a colossal miscalculation.

Yes, it's obvious that the franchise needs to be geared toward a mass audience, and a market of Star Trek aficionados simply can't pay enough in ticket purchases to offset the costs incurred by Paramount every time the studio mounts one of these productions. The movies, therefore, have to follow a strict diet of predictable action, adventure, pretty people, and explodey stuff in order to maintain ticket sales and repeat business.

This is a mandatory, yet completely unessential, three-second scene that fulfilled
Paramount's requirements for "a sexy new Star Trek."

   Yet, there still has to be something of the heart of Star Trek-type stories to consider these films part of the Star Trek universe. Director J.J. Abrams doesn't seem to agree with this idea, as evidenced by the plot of the latest adventure of Captain Kirk & company.

Abrams famously stated he was never a Star Trek fan growing up, and really never watched much of the series until he was hired to direct the first reboot film. It's almost a matter of pride to him that he had no love for Trek as a child, and this lack of affection seems to percolate through the latest film.

Note: before I continue any further, I want to assure you that I do not want to spoil any plot elements for people who haven't seen the movie, so I'm going to talk in general terms about the problems in this film. My criticisms will probably make more sense after you've seen the movie, but I think it's important to view the film without having any plot surprises ruined for you.

The attitude of the script seems to be that it was written by someone who screened several key episodes of Star Trek and watched a few of the films, but had no idea about the personalities of the characters mentioned in the shows. It's as if they had watched "City on the Edge of Forever," and then decided to rewrite Edith Keeler as a Romulan spy. Sure, everyone in the film is saying  the same catchphrases that resonate from earlier episodes and films, but the screenwriter Damon Lindelof doesn't seem to understand why the characters say the things they do. The ignorance of the why part turns the phrases into gibberish, or worse, unintended comedy.

The Squire of Gothos? Cadet Finnegan? Sure, pick a TOS villain and cast Cumberbatch in the role.

You don't have to be a Trekkie to know the basic rules of Star Trek: Kirk makes bold decisions, Spock's favorite word is "logic," guys in red shirts don't live long. But the characters and their interactions were more complex than superficial features. Even the guest stars on the old TV show had backstories that explained their reasons for doing things: Commodore Decker was driven by guilt over the loss of his crew to attack the Planet Killer in a shuttlecraft; Khan Noonian Singh was the pride-drunk leader of a remnant of 20th Century supermen whose weakness was his arrogance; Commander Balok was a master of deception because his diminutive  race had previous run-ins with aggressive species. The aliens and opponents the crew of the Enterprise faced each week had motives and desires that made sense in the context of the plot of every show. 

May the Force be with you, Frodo. Epic misunderstanding of a franchise.

Star Trek Into Darkness? Not so much. The biggest failure of the film is the outright looting of previous Star Trek characters and situations in order to evoke audience nostalgia for those original TV and film moments. We're given a bad guy named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) who turns out to be a character from the TV show - - except this character doesn't act anything like the original character. When dialog from the original character's appearance is repeated in this film, then, it doesn't quite make sense with what we see on screen. Imagine, for example, having a Klingon suddenly appear on screen without introduction and shout "HARCOURT FENTON MUDD!" at Mr. Spock - - - it's almost at that level of incoherence.

The motivations of the villains are breathtakingly shallow. They are bad guys simply because the script needed bad guys at certain points in the film. New locations crop up only because the Enterprise crew required a new place for fight scenes scheduled at regular intervals in the movie, and the previous venues had been destroyed during earlier fights. Ships are destroyed, crash, and somehow fly again because they're needed for the next battle scene. In one particularly absurd moment, a starship, already blown up by six dozen photon torpedoes, reappears for another barrage of phaser fire.

Don't worry, it's only a scratch.

The biggest problem (and I'm going to be as vague as I can so as not to spoil anything) is the lack of loss in this film. Yes, there are deaths of characters, but the solutions to otherwise fatal situations are telegraphed so early and often in this film that the audience doesn't care when people fall off the roofs of speeding cars, or get shot, or have their ships blown up around them. There is no peril that can't be erased, and without the high stakes of life or death, character mortality is no more of a concern than losing a turn during a Super Mario Bros game.

I could continue with nitpicking the howling continuity errors, the usurption of the laws of physics, and the over-reliance of jam-packing every single scene with floating debris and shuddering camera angles, but those points don't begin to match the immensity of the ineptness of the script. This is a Star Trek film, mostly in the sense that Paramount owns the intellectual property and that the character names are the same as those used in the original Roddenberry series. It is not a Star Trek film, though, in any aspect where it's supposed to match the quality of the original series' story-telling, or show respect for the characters and their motivations. It's an auto-tuned version of Star Trek, replete with mandatory set pieces to please the ticket-buying audiences of the world. I'm not saying it wasn't a fun movie - - it's just not really about Star Trek anymore. If Edith Keeler must die, the reason shouldn't be so that there's a satisfying explosion at the end of the film.

Let's cram some more merchandise onboard, shall we?

Last of the First

MA-9. the final Mercury flight

Last year, my erudite buddy Brian Fies and I were discussing (via blogs) that the next few years were going to be chock-a-bloc with 50th anniversaries of the Space Age. May 15th, 2013 marks yet another golden anniversary - - this time an ending, rather than a beginning.

Mandatory image of all manned Mercury launches

The Mercury 7 astronauts were the trailblazers of the American space program. In just six flights (Deke Slayton was sidelined with a heart murmur), the Mercury astronauts tested their vehicles, their navigation skills, and even their own bodies as lone pilots in space.  Although NASA moved ahead with construction of the Gemini two-man vehicle and the Apollo moonship, the results of the Mercury program's flight data would shape all manned space programs to come.

Alan Shepard rode his Mercury craft in a parabolic suborbital flight lasting just fifteen minutes. John Glenn's first orbital flight lasted just a little over four hours. As the Mercury mission continued, the flight durations lengthened.

By May of 1963, NASA felt ready to attempt a 24-hour flight in space. Preparations for such a long-duration mission required the removal of the ship's periscope to provide room for extra oxygen tanks and batteries to power the instruments.  To offset the weight of the extra batteries, redundant attitude thrusters were removed from the nose of the ship.  NASA engineers decided that since the primary thrusters had proven reliable, backup thrusters were no longer necessary.

Cooper was the first American astronaut to be seen
on video, live from space.

Just after 8:04am on May 15, 2013, astronaut Gordon Cooper's MA-9 spacecraft Faith 7 lifted off from Cape Canaveral. Cooper had a full plate of experiments to run through in this mission: tracking a blinking ball that was jettisoned overboard during the first orbit, examining atmospheric drag effects on a tethered balloon trailing the spaceship, collecting blood and urine samples after trying a variety of foodstuffs to see if there were any problems metabolizing things like powdered roast beef or chocolate brownies. The experiments resulted in varied levels of success: Cooper spotted the blinking ball, the balloon never deployed, Cooper didn't open the brownies out of fear that floating crumbs would damage the instruments.

The astronaut managed to doze off for several orbits as the first day in space drew to a close. With his ship powered down to conserve fuel and electricity, Faith 7 drifted lazily along its prescribed path. On the 30th orbit, the first signs of trouble with the ship popped up - - a small panel light indicated that the ship detected a minute change in the g-forces that would signal the beginning of reentry.

Cooper believed the signal was an instrumentation flaw, and ground controllers confirmed that there had been no change to the orbit. During the next orbit, the situation began to deteriorate rapidly. The main circuit buss for the instrument panel shorted out, knocking all navigation controls offline. Cooper was left with a radio, his wristwatch, and his eyeballs to navigate his 17,500 mph ship.
 

Mission accomplished

Fortunately, NASA had trained Cooper for just such an emergency. In contact with John Glenn at the Mercury Control Center, Cooper twisted manual thrust knobs on the sole attitude control system and aligned his retrorockets using a visual gauge on the ship's porthole aimed at the horizon of the Earth. With his stopwatch, Cooper called out a countdown that matched the calculations Glenn had passed up to him from ground controllers. Cooper opened a manual valve as the countdown reached zero, and his three retrorockets fired. Less than twenty minutes later, Faith 7 was bobbing in the Atlantic Ocean, only 4.4 miles from the recovery ship Kearsarge,  -- the closest landing of any Mecury spacecraft to its intended target.

Gordon Cooper would be the last American to launch into orbit by himself, and, until Dave Scott became Command Module Pilot of Apollo 9 in April of 1969, the last American to pilot his own spacecraft in orbit by himself. Project Mercury ended, and was soon eclipsed by the greater challenges of the Gemini missions. May 15th, 1963, though, was the end of America's first tentative steps into space.

A House in Space

An amazing machine, despite all its difficulties.

Forty years ago, I lived about fifty miles north of New York City, in a little town just far away enough from Manhattan for the light pollution to dim and for the Milky Way to shine in the night sky. I didn't know many kids in town as I had just moved there over the previous Christmas, so I spent a lot of time in the evening just enjoying the brilliant stars overhead.

The Moon missions were over. With the cancellation of Apollos 18-20, I didn't think there would be another lunar landing until after I was out of high school. On May 14th, the final Saturn V would launch NASA's Skylab orbital workshop into space. I managed to talk a guidance counselor at my school into letting me watch the launch on a school TV during lunch time. It looked like this:

 

After the Saturn disappeared into the cloud deck, horrible things started to happen. The micrometeroid shield running the length of the converted S-IV-B stage sheared off the side of the lab, yanking one of the extensible solar panels with it.  The remnant cables of the missing solar panel coiled around the ship, knotting over the other solar panel and preventing its deployment. It would take two of the three planned missions to repair the Skylab enough for it to do many of the experiments for which it was designed.

Despite the near-disaster at launch, Skylab proved to be a remarkable workshop. By the end of the program, the United States had gained an 84-day record of continuous habitation in space. Many of the lessons learned would be put to use decades later on both Shuttle missions and in the construction of the International Space Station.

There's lots of minutiae to talk about in the history of Skylab but I just wanted to mention something I experienced with my own eyes. Before the first crew arrived at the station at the end of May, 1973, there was a detailed series of articles in the New York Times about what had gone wrong with the ship, and what the plan for the repairs would be. At the end of the article, there was a list of viewing times in the NY area for spotting both Skylab and the S-II Saturn stage that had pushed the ship into orbit. I remember standing in my front yard in the darkness, waiting to see if anything would be visible in the night sky.

Suddenly a dim bead of light appeared from the southwest, followed by another, much brighter light traveling at about the same speed. The S-II was slightly ahead of Skylab, as it was continuing in a slightly lower (and therefore faster) orbit. I had never seen two objects orbiting the Earth at the same time, and it struck me that this would probably be a common sight when I was older, as the sky filled with many orbiting Shuttles and stations.

I was wrong about the number of ships I'd see, but I was correct that I'd see multiple ships in space at the same time in my old age. By 2009, I was living in Massachusetts, and I remembered the Skylab flyover from so many years ago as I watched the Space Shuttle Discovery maneuver to dock with the International Space Station.

The ISS outshines the accomplishments of Skylab in just about every way, but Skylab's pioneering experiences (both operationally and in its repair) made the later achievements of the ISS possible.

And the stars look very different today

The Internet is agog with the release of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield's video cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" - - a musical interpretation filmed almost entirely onboard the International Space Station.

Hadfield is seen floating in the Tranquility module's cupola, the Japanese Kibo module, and the hatchway to a waiting Soyuz spacecraft. A  unattended, velcro-studded guitar spins languidly through the station, while Hadfield sings lyrics of a space pilot surrounded by technology, viewing a Universe beyond all imaginings.

When people think about the "importance" of manned space flight, it's usually about having someone on hand to repair broken equipment and second-guess computer errors far from home. The true reason people are in space, I believe, is for moments such as this video. We need people in space to interpret and humanize the exploration so that we, as a planet, can share the experience. Folks like Chris Hadfield take the known (a Bowie song, a guitar, a piano) and show us the unknown (looking out the window and seeing a planet) with the reference point of our culture. It's why everyone remembers Alan Shepard's golf shots on the Moon during Apollo 14. It's why we still watch archival footage of Dave Scott and Jim Irwin driving the first lunar rover across the Moon's surface during the Apollo 15 trip. It's even why Ron Howard made the Apollo 13 movie - - when something goes wrong in space, the only time we really care is if there are people onboard.

Hopefully, someday before the centennial of human spaceflight, a human being will make a cover video of David Bowie's "Life on Mars?" -- from the surface of that planet. Certainly another cultural moment everyone on our planet will enjoy.

"Поехали!"

Yuri Alexevich Gagarin
First Man in Space

It was a political act. It had little to do with piloting. It was a dangerous stunt that almost cost a man his life, but it was the moment that began all manned spaceflight that followed. Fifty-two years ago today, Yuri Gagarin was strapped into an eight-foot-wide, aluminum-alloy sphere and launched into Earth orbit.

Gagarin was a tiny fellow, barely 5' 2". He was assigned the mission mostly because he didn't add much to the payload of the automated spacecraft. Sergei Korolev, the Chief Designer of the Soviet space program, said a final command to him before Gagarin climbed into the spacecraft: "Come back."

The ship Gagarin rode into space was called Vostok, which means "East" but also carries the idea of "Dawn" - - the beginning of a new day. The Vostok wasn't originally designed as a crewed spaceship - - Korolev's engineers based its construction on the requirements for a reconnaissance satellite, capable of hoisting several hundred pounds of cameras, lenses, and film into orbit. The ship was supposed to counter the American Corona project, which was already returning miles of photographic intelligence about Soviet air bases back to the CIA. Korolev managed to tack on the manned aspect of Vostok as a selling point to the Soviet politburo, who liked the secondary role for what it was: a great tool for propaganda about "space exploration," while concealing Vostok's primary purpose as a spy ship.

1:4 scale model of Vostok at the Kansas Cosmosphere.
Service Module at left, Descent Sphere at right.

Because Vostok's chief purpose was for unmanned missions, the control and operation of the ship was entirely automatic. A cosmonaut's role as pilot, then, was superfluous. Korolev worried about "interference" by pilots during flight, so the onboard controls were locked down with a password. As a compromise between the designers and the flight controllers, the ship carried a sealed envelope containing the manual override code. Cosmonauts were forbidden to open the envelope without approval from the mission operators back on Earth. I'm not exactly sure how they would stop a cosmonaut from opening the envelope.

Launch Day

On the morning of April 12th, 1961, Yuri Gagarin rode a bus to the base of the R-7 rocket that would launch his Vostok into the sky. He saluted Korolev, shook hands with several ground support personnel, and then climbed a ladder up to the Vostok's hatch. The ground team screwed on the hatch, and then needed to remove and reseat the hatch when they noticed it hadn't quite sealed properly. At 8:07am local Baikonur Time, the twenty engines of the R-7 Semyorka booster ignited, and Gagarin's ship lifted off the pad. He shouted "Поехали!" ("pyoucali!" or "Let's go!") into his microphone as the ship cleared the launch site.

Six minutes after launch, both the boosters and the protective cover around Gagarin's ship separated from Vostok 1. The cosmonaut's first opportunity to view the Earth from space revealed a cloud-covered morning over central Russia. "I can see the Earth. The visibility is good. I can almost see everything. There's a certain amount of space under the cumulus cloud cover," he reported back to Baikonur before flying out of radio range.

Unlike the American network of ships and ground stations spread across the world, the Soviet program had only a small group of ships scattered along Gagarin's intended flightpath. With limited data being returned to the control site, Korolev's people weren't sure if Vostok was in a stable orbit for nearly a half hour after launch.

Things were equally mysterious for Gagarin. Since he had only a few instruments to inform him about his ship's status, Gagarin could only rely on whatever information the ground controllers could radio to him during the brief moments when they were in touch via the relay ships. As he flew within communications range of a radar station in southeastern Siberia, Gagarin asked,  "What can you tell me about the flight? What can you tell me?" The station radioed back that they had nothing to report and that Korolev (code-named "Number Twenty") had no instructions for him. Vostok-1 continued its flight as it headed down the length of the Pacific Ocean.

At the half-way point over the Straits of Magellan, the Vostok attitude control system identified the Sun rising in the eastern sky. The ship aligned itself for retrofire, arming the service module's sole remaining engine. Korolev's mission designers had an unusual backup plan in the event of the rocket's failure during reentry: the selected orbit would decay naturally in 7-10 days, so they loaded Gagarin's crew module with a week's worth of food and oxygen to wait out the "organic" landing mode.



Fortunately, the retrorocket ignited successfully, chopping the orbital parameters to intersect with a ground track down to Siberia. Immediately after retrofire, though, came the mission's greatest failure. The service module containing the navigation and propellant equipment failed to detach from the descent sphere. As the upper atmosphere began to buffet the two modules, the sphere began to whip around the service module at an ever-increasing rate. Gagarin was experiencing more than 8 g's of lateral force, compounded by the deceleration effects of the atmospheric reentry. Ground controllers lost contact with the ship as it passed over Egypt. They wouldn't be able to communicate until the Vostok ship passed through the ionization layer.

Ejection tube of Vostok ship.
Kansas Cosmosphere

The buffeting snapped the connection between the service and descent modules, and Gagarin's ship managed to right itself to deploy the ship's parachute. As the ship approached an altitude of 23,000 feet, the cosmonaut ejected from the descent module, just as cameras and film would be jettisoned on unmanned reconnaissance missions. Gagarin descended separately from his ship because Korolev's spacecraft designers couldn't figure out how to build a parachute capable of landing both payload and ship safely. It was an embarrassing compromise for Korolev, and this aspect of the mission plan was kept from the West for decades.

In the Saratov region of western Siberia, two farm girls saw a pair of parachutes descending overhead. A man suspended by one of the parachutes landed on a nearby hill. Dressed in an orange suit with a large white helmet, the farm girls began to back away as he approached. They had heard about the American pilot Gary Powers and didn't want to be involved with another spy pilot. "Don't be afraid!" yelled Gagarin, lifting his visor. "I'm Russian!" Gagarin's  25,000 mile flight ended on a Siberian farm a little more than an hour and a half after it began.


Fifty two years later, the world celebrates the birth of manned spaceflight with Yuri's Night, a series of parties and star-gazing that anyone is free to join in and participate. Although Americans tend to ignore the achievements of other nations in space, this is truly an international event to appreciate. Gagarin's quick jaunt into space motivated Americans to reach for the Moon, and built the foundation for the world's cooperative program: the International Space Station. Go and enjoy Yuri's Night tonight, and think about the little guy who took that first flight.

Collectibles

Just say Dr. No.

My friend Mark collects astonishing amounts of James Bond memorabilia. He's got Spanish one-sheets of Goldfinger, and first editions of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Autographed pictures of Sean Connery and Roger Moore adorn his office walls, and somewhere in a climate-controlled warehouse in Montana, I'm sure he has a couple of prop guns from You Only Live Twice. It's an expensive hobby, but when people have disposable income, it's human nature to collect things.
Probably one of the most common parlor games is to imagine what you'd do if you had, say, $100 million to spend on a hobby. What would you buy? Where would you go? One man's answer to these questions made the news this week, and it involved a bit of space history. What a perfect excuse to talk way too much about rocket ships from long ago.

ABMA and ARPA

If you'll recall, a while back I talked about Wernher von Braun's missile men and the political obstacles they faced in launching the first American satellite.The Army, Navy, and Air Force were simultaneously developing missile systems, and the expensive research work was becoming redundant. In 1956, Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson ordered the Army to turn over all ICBM development with a range of more than 200 miles to the Air Force.
Here's the problem: von Braun's team at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) would now be limited to regional rockets - - their Jupiter missile was far outside the range of Wilson's 200-mile range limit. ABMA could continue to work on their research, but needed to cripple their performance to be permitted further tests. These restrictions, of course, went out the window when Sputnik launched and the Navy's Vanguard program failed to get an American satellite into orbit. The ABMA team put America's Explorer I satellite into orbit on the last day of January, 1958.

Let's back up a little bit. While all the slicing and dicing of the service branches' rocket labs was going on, the DoD had unofficially created another task force, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), whose mission was to figure out what new technologies would be needed by the Space Age military. Through ARPA, the DoD spotted a need for a heavy-lift vehicle that could put giant communications and reconnaissance satellites into orbit. The launch vehicles would need to be able to haul twenty tons of payload into low Earth orbit, or push six tons of payload into interplanetary space. What exactly the military needed with interplanetary missiles wasn't explained.
While all this was getting sorted out between what the Army would be working on and what the Air Force would control, von Braun noticed a loophole in the DoD orders. Secretary of Defense Wilson's directives only applied to weapons, not space vehicles. If von Braun's Army team concentrated on scientific research and not just short-range rocket bombs, they'd be in the clear for building orbital launch vehicles.

A Technological Dead End

As mentioned in an earlier post, the von Braun Redstone was a direct engineering descendant of the German V-2 rocket. The fuel pumps, the tank plumbing, even the thrust steering vanes built into the exhaust plumes were modifications of the WWII-era rocket bombs. There was no easy way to scale this design into a ship big enough to throw twenty-ton spaceships into orbit.

Heinz-Hermann Koelle, Rocket Guy

Dr. von Braun turned to Heinz-Hermann Koelle, a former Luftwaffe pilot, mechanical engineer and pen pal of von Braun after the war, to examine ways of turning the experience of building Redstone and Jupiter missiles into a sort of "Super Jupiter" that could approach the heavy lift requirements of ARPA. Koelle figured a quick way to build such a vehicle would be to lash eight Redstones around a central Jupiter core and fire up all the engines simultaneously. The only problem with that design was that the thrust of the Redstone engines was limited to 350 kiloNewtons, completely insufficient for doing any heavy lifting.
Koelle considered a new, monster 1,600 kN engine Rocketdyne was working on called the E-1. The E-1 was being designed for the Air Force Titan I missile, but Rocketdyne was having problems getting the E-1's fuel pump to work right. The Air Force changed their mind due to the development delays and went with an Aerojet General engine for the Titan instead.
Although Koelle liked the E-1 design, the delay in engine development didn't work any better for him than it did for the Air Force Titan project. Koelle began looking for other options.
While Koelle was trying to find a solution to the engine question, the Army decided to hand off large rocket development to the newly-formed NASA. ABMA would become NASA's George Marshall Space Flight Center, and the work on the Super Jupiter (now called "Saturn," as the new name meant it was "the next thing after Jupiter") would be a NASA project. All the engines, 'E' and above, would become NASA projects.
Koelle's quest for a quicker replacement for the E-1 on Saturn led him to the Rocketdyne H-1 rocket engine, a smaller (778kN) machine originally designed for the USAF Titan that was close to being tested in development. The ARPA folks told von Braun that ABMA would have to use or lose $10 million in the development budget before the switchover to NASA -- so von Braun and Koelle cobbled together a quick plan to improve the thrust to 890kN, enough for eight engines to match the ARPA requirements for the Saturn I.

Go Big or Go Home

Saturn IB's under construction.
Lots and lots of H-1 engines required.

The configuration of H-1s remained an imperfect solution. Eight engines meant that there were eight fuel pumps, eight lines of propellant, eight lines of oxidizers and eight times the number of opportunities for equipment failure.
Creating anything more powerful in the Saturn series would require larger, fewer engines. There was no point in chasing the E-1: a 1,600kN engine wouldn't be enough for the missions von Braun had in mind. The von Braun team turned to the next development project in the Rocketdyne catalog: the F-1 engine.
The F-1 was mind-boggling in comparison to all previous engine designs. F-1 was planned as generating not 890kN, or even the 1,600kN of the now-scrapped E-1 - - the F-1 was to provide 8,600 kN of thrust. Lashing five of these monsters to the base of a new rocket would generate thirty-four million Newtons, enough to toss 100,000 lbs of payload out of Earth orbit.
The enormous size of the F-1 magnified the development issues with the engine, primarily with resolving combustion instability problems from acoustic oscillations. Being bell-shaped, just about every rocket engine has specific harmonics that form pressure waves when burning propellant. On the F-1, horrific shuddering at 4khz would cause the fuel not to just burn, but to detonate inside the engine bell, destroying the whole mechanism in a sudden explosion. Huntsville engineers took seven years to figure out how to cancel out the oscillations, going so far as to set off bombs of C4 explosive inside the engine bell after ignition to see if their modifications were effective.

"Look at that Rocket Go!"

When the F-1s were finally cleared for flight, they were checked out in an "all-up" test launch of what was now called the Saturn V rocket, launching on the unmanned Apollo 4 mission of November 9, 1967. News media were present and were stationed at the new launch complex 39A, located on Merritt Island.
Walter Cronkite, the veteran quarterback of CBS News coverage in all things space-related, was in a portable trailer three miles from the launch site. He'd seen just about every manned launch at Cape Canaveral, and as a newsworthy event, this ranked as yet another routine unmanned test, though of an unusual size. As the countdown clock clicked to 0:00, Cronkite wondered if the giant beast would make it off the pad.
Watch this video of the launch to hear Walter's first impression of the largest sound made by man that was not an atomic bomb:

The sound was unearthly. The sight of a building thirty-six stories tall rising into the sky and passing through the speed of sound was almost impossible for the mind to grasp. Yet, there it went, and the vehicle to take men to the Moon was ready.

Mandatory illustration of every Saturn V launch.

Twelve Saturn Vs would head off the pad after Apollo 4 for the next six years, tossing 24 men to the Moon. The final launch of a Saturn V would be the liftoff of Skylab, America's first space station, in May of 1973. Although the destinations of the payloads were varied, all the 65 F-1 engines that powered the Saturns ended up in the same place: the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The first stages of the Saturn V rockets weren't reusable, so the F-1s remained in their watery graves for the past 40 years.

A Treasure Hunt

And then, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos decided he wanted to collect a few of the F-1s at the bottom of the Atlantic. Specifically, Bezos wanted to track down the engines that launched Apollo XI into space.

Team Bezos

This would be no easy task: NASA hadn't tracked the impact sites of the Saturn boosters, and apart from knowing the trajectories, nobody had a precise location for the individual stages. All the Saturn first stages (with the exception of Skylab, which launch to the northeast) landed in the ocean about 350 miles east of the launch pad. The overlapping rubble of used rockets would make identification difficult, even if the engines managed to survive a 500 mph impact with the ocean's surface.

Mission Accomplished

None of these difficulties seemed to deter Bezos. He and his extremely expensive crew of submarines scanned the ocean floor for months, finally returning radar images of twisted metal almost three miles underwater. Here's a look at what they found:

A piece of space history.

Smashed, but recognizable, Bezos's team discovered dozens of F-1 parts and chunks on the seabed. The crew hauled several up to the ship and brought them back to dry land for identification and restoration. So far, the team hasn't been able to identify complete serial numbers to tie the engines to a particular flight. Federal law dictates that all spacecraft equipment remains the property of NASA, but an agreement between Bezos and the space agency indicates that his expedition will be able to retain at least one F-1 engine for the Seattle Air & Space Museum, conveniently located in the Amazon HQ's back yard.
I've read online discussions where some believe this expedition was a colossal waste of money. My feeling is: it's Bezos's money to waste, and if his collection inspires the next generation of space explorers, what's not to like?

The author with an F-1 engine. I'm 6' 1".