49 Minutes of Out-of-this-World Entertainment

By at 1:40 pm Wednesday, Apr 29

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

So the best way I've found to bribe myself into exercising regularly is to use the time on the elliptical machine for watching TV shows I otherwise don't have time to catch. Like Nova. For the last couple of days, I've been getting in some sweaty installments of a really fabulous episode called Astrospies---about a U.S. outer-space military spying program so secret, not even the guys recruited for it knew what the hell was going on during their training.

Not only does this show feature some great spy-vs-spy back and forth---as Russia and the U.S. vie to be the first country to put secret astronauts on a secret space station, taking secret photos of other countries, secretly---but the story also has some smaller details that are equally (if not more) fascinating than the usual Cold War stuff.

For instance, in order for the program, code-named MOL (for Manned Orbiting Laboratory), to take detailed pictures of Russian military installations, the research team had to develop a telescoping camera technology so ahead-of-its-time, that the same basic set-up is still used in modern equipment, including the Hubble Space Telescope.

Also amazing: The MOL program was responsible for recruiting Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr., the man who would have been America's first African-American astronaut. Instead, his tragic death ended up marking the beginning of the end for the program.

I highly recommend watching this if you get a chance.

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Maggie Koerth-Baker

I do the Twitter, the Google+, and (to a much lesser extent) the Facebook.

Books
• Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.

Upcoming Appearances
• February 20 at British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association — Vancouver. 7:00 pm
• February 29 at University of Minnesota: Frontiers in the Environment seminar
• March 1 at Huge Theater, Minneapolis: The Theater of Public Policy
• March 12 at University of Illinois — Urbana-Champaign
• March 27 at Penn State Institutes on Energy and the Environment
• March 29-31 at York College of Pennsylvania: Writer in residence
• April 2 at MIT: The New GeekSpeak: Science Journalists' New Toolbox, with Eli Kintisch and John Bohannon — Maseeh Hall, 4:00 pm
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs
• April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins — 4:00 pm
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum

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