Via SF Signal, here’s an interesting link to a PDF that lists the books, movies, TV shows, and music stocked on board the International Space Station for the crew’s off-duty entertainment. It’s quite a nice little library that covers a pretty wide range of topics, genres, and quality levels (i.e., “hammock reading” versus Literature-with-a-capital-L).
Titles that caught my eye among the books were The Brothers Karamazov, Darwin’s Origin of Species, the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, The Da Vinci Code (of course — is there anywhere you can’t find a copy of that one?), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and, amusingly enough, several years-old issues of both Analog and Asimov’s Science Fiction. (How weird would it be to read science fiction while floating weightlessly in a tin can that whips around the planet once every 90 minutes? But wait… it gets weirder…)
The movie selection aboard the ISS is no less eclectic, including A Charlie Brown Christmas, Spielberg’s masterful debut film Duel, the martial-arts classic Enter the Dragon, the Indiana Jones trilogy, all six Star Wars flicks (as well as the disc of extras from the original trilogy boxed set), the Lord of the Rings trilogy (it’s unclear whether these are the theatrical or the uber-long editions), The Thomas Crown Affair (the Steve McQueen version or the remake from a few years ago? My money’s on Pierce Brosnan), True Lies, and a number of “dumb” comedies like Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Animal House, European Vacation, Stripes, and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (stoner humor in space? Well, why not… but hopefully no one aboard the station tries to blaze up!). Also, again, there is the mind-bending image of real-life astronauts watching cinematic ones for fun; if action, fantasy, or comedy is doing it for them, they can choose 2010, The Right Stuff, Apollo 13, or Armageddon. Do you suppose the ISS crew critiques these movies for realism (or lack thereof)? And is it just me, or would you really not want to watch the latter two if you were, you know, up there? Seems you wouldn’t find the exploding Mir station in Armageddon exciting so much as worrying in that environment. As for Apollo 13, well… good luck sleeping on a for-real spacecraft after watching that…
One really interesting thought is that I’d imagine this library — the movies and music, anyhow — is probably headed for for the garbage pod before too much longer. When I first found the linked PDF, I was thinking in terms of the “desert island scenario,” i.e., what media would you take with you to an isolated place that’s difficult to resupply, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that paradigm probably doesn’t apply to the ISS any longer, or at least it soon won’t. The station no doubt has a broadband connection to the ground, and with online delivery of movies becoming more and more common, how long before the astronauts just start requesting whatever the want to see instead of just popping in one of those well-used DVDs? The same applies for music; surely the computers up there has iTunes installed? Or maybe not… maybe the connection is entirely hogged by scientific data and there’s no bandwidth for frivolous entertainment files. I wonder…
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