Well, it’s been a few weeks since we launched this website and our first film so I thought I would get you up to date with how things have been going and what’s coming up next. “The Thought Of Floating In Space” is now up to nearly 24000 views in YouTube which, although not quite Gangnam-style levels, is still a very pleasing start.
There’s been some great words of encouragement from all kinds of interesting people: the ESA, Yuri’s Night, NASA Astronauts, Hobby Space, as well as some lovely feedback from individual people. I hope we’re starting to build a little group of people who’ve really engaged with “A Quarter Of A Million Miles” and will be coming with us on the journey.
Without doubt, two things have made a real difference so far. The first was the support of Phil Plait aka The Bad Astronomer. Phil writes a daily astronomy blog on The Slate which, quite rightly, has a huge following. He’s an enthusiast and a brilliant writer, so it was a great honour to have a piece written by him about the project. It was published on July 20th to coincide with the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. If you haven’t seen it, you can find it here:
Secondly, and more out of left-field, was a tweet from Chris Hadfield, former ISS Commander and internet musical sensation. I had sent him a message on Twitter with a link to the film, not really expecting him to see it, let alone mention it, so I nearly fell off my chair when I saw that he had tweeted the link to our website. Here’s what he said: “Everyone wakes up somewhere. I watched this while shaving this morning”. Quite an image and thrilling that he had watched the film and listened to the music.
So what’s happening next? We’re planning to release the next piece with accompanying film (How Vainly Men Themselves Amaze, featuring Natasha Marsh and Jack Liebeck) shortly. I’m still hoping to get the first internet play of this film to be up in space on the ISS so will let you know as soon as there is any news about this! The 2nd film has some great clips of ISS astronauts on it and the 3rd film, Galaxies, which uses some wonderful 16mm Apollo footage, is almost completed now. See you soon.
