The festival opens with Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity, an existential sci-fi thriller that features George Clooney and Sandra Bullock as imperilled astronauts aboard a stricken space shuttle.
1954 A fragment of meteorite bursts through the roof of Elizabeth Hodges' home in Alabama and hits her on the hip, briefly hospitalising her – the only confirmed case of a human struck by space rock.
Calamity struck Russian space science several years later, when the Mars 96 spacecraft exploded shortly after launch.
Long before the Chelyabinsk asteroid slammed into the atmosphere over Russia last year, it struck another space rock in a high-intensity mash-up that put it on a collision course with Earth, scientists say.
Here, to a Duke Ellington score, Ailey's sheer professional skill is evident, with changes of idiom, striking stage spacing, marvelously textured coordination of upper and lower body.
Meanwhile, in the process of watching for a nuclear detonation, the detection system's sensors — designed to observe visible light, high-frequency radio waves, X-rays, gamma rays and other data that might point to a nuclear explosion — stream an amazing array of data on powerful lightning strikes, space hazards like meteoroids and man-made debris and severe solar and space weather events.
The alliances struck, the spaces created and the initiatives generated were swept aside as concern for social purpose became overwhelmed by neoliberal ideology.
Yet, even in the digital age, many school students are still taught to strike the space bar twice between sentences when using computers, contributing to confusion regarding sentence spacing in the 21st century.
TR: Okay, so what balance should NASA try to strike between space science and manned exploration?
We must typo and wait for the inexorable, dust-based doom to strike the space bar or the 'E' key — which will then make the typing experience even more miserable (and require a trip to an Apple store to swaddle the misbehaving keys in rubber — leaving us computerless, most probably, in the meanwhile).
