timespace coordinates: 2020 – ’21. Texas / first manned mission to Mars / the Cydonia region / Earth-orbiting World Space Station / Mars II rescue mission / REMO (“Resupply Module”) orbiting Mars
Jim McConnell (Gary Sinise, left), Terri Fisher (Connie Nielsen, center) and Mars One Commander Luke Graham (Don Cheadle, right) watch an extraordinary living diorama of planetary history in Touchstone Pictures” adventure/drama, “Mission To Mars.” Photo credit: ILM Touchstone Pictures
All the ships were based on actual NASA aircraft and used materials from real aerospace companies. The filmmakers received NASA’s most up-to-date plans for a Mars mission when making the movie. Effects supervisor Hoyt Yeatman says this is a “hardware film.” Almost every location in the movie had to be created from scratch because it didn’t exist in the real world. The crew used over 14,000 gallons of paint to spray the soil “Mars red.” That dust is blown by 10 massive 350-horsepower wind machines. The crew reflected copper light onto the actors to mimic the orange atmosphere of the Martian sky.
The appearance of the “Face on Mars”, as well as the alien hologram, were modeled after the work of the famous Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncusi, especially his “Sleeping Muse”(1910).
The film stars Clooney, and follows a scientist who must venture through the Arctic Circle with a young girl to warn off a returning spaceship following a global catastrophe. (wiki)
“Within the interior of the space traveler, queer creatures of metal labored at the controls of the space flyer which juggernauted on its way towards the far-off solar luminary. Rapidly it crossed the orbits of Neptune and Uranus and headed sunward. The bodies of these queer creatures were square blocks of a metal closely resembling steel, while for appendages, the metal cube was upheld by four jointed legs capable of movement. A set of six tentacles, all metal, like the rest of the body, curved outward from the upper half of the cubic body. Surmounting it was a queer-shaped head rising to a peak in the center and equipped with a circle of eyes all the way around the head. The creatures, with their mechanical eyes equipped with metal shutters, could see in all directions. A single eye pointed directly upward, being situated in the space of the peaked head, resting in a slight depression of the cranium.” (“The Jameson Satellite” by Neil R. Jones)
World Without Darkness a novelette by Neil R. Jones
Doomsday on Ajiat a Professor Jameson novelette by Neil R. Jones
Neil Ronald Jones (29 May 1909 – 15 February 1988) was an American author who worked for the state of New York. Not prolific, and little remembered today, Jones was ground–breaking in science fiction. His first story, “The Death’s Head Meteor”, was published in Air Wonder Stories in 1930, recording the first use of “astronaut”. He also pioneered cyborg and robotic characters, and is credited with inspiring the modern idea of Cryonics. Most of his stories fit into a “future history” like that of Robert A. Heinlein or Cordwainer Smith, well before either of them used this convention in their fiction.
Rating not even a cover mention, the first installment of Jones’ most popular creation, “The Jameson Satellite”, appeared in the July 1931 issue of Amazing Stories. The hero was Professor Jameson, the last Earthman, who became immortal through the science of the Zoromes. Jameson was obsessed with the idea of perfectly preserving his body after death and succeeded by having it launched into space in a small capsule. Jameson’s body survived for 40,000,000 years, where it was found orbiting a dead planet Earth by a passing Zorome exploration ship. The Zoromes, or machine men as they sometimes called themselves, were cyborgs. They came from a race of biological beings who had achieved immortality by transferring their brains to machine bodies. They occasionally assisted members of other races with this transition (i.e. the Tri-Peds and the Mumes), allowing others to become Zoromes and join them on their expeditions, which sometimes lasted hundreds of years. So, much like the Borg of the Star Trek series, a Zorome crew could be made up of assimilated members of many different biological species. The Zoromes discovered that Jameson’s body had been so well preserved that they were able to repair his brain, incorporate it into a Zorome machine body and restart it. The professor joined their crew and, over the course of the series, participated in many adventures, even visiting Zor, the Zorome homeworld, where he met biological Zoromes. The professor eventually rose to command his own crew of machine men on a new Zorome exploration ship. “The Jameson Satellite” proved so popular with readers that later installments in Amazing Stories got not only cover mentions but the cover artwork.
Being cryopreserved and revived is an idea that would recur in SF, such as in Gene Roddenberry’s Genesis II. One young science fiction fan who read The Jameson Satellite and drew inspiration from the idea of cryonics was Robert Ettinger, who became known as the father of cryonics. The Zoromes are also credited by Isaac Asimov as one of the inspirations behind the robots of his Robot series.
Masamune Shirow paid homage to Jones in his cyborg-populated Ghost in the Shell saga by including a no-frills brain-in-a-box design, even naming them Jameson-type cyborgs.
Jameson (or 21MM392, as he was known to his fellow metal beings) was the subject of twenty-one stories between 1931 and 1951, when Jones stopped writing, with nine stories still unpublished. In the late 1960s, Ace Books editor Donald A. Wollheim compiled five collections, comprising sixteen of these, including two previously unpublished. In all there were thirty Jameson stories written (twenty four eventually saw publication, six remain unpublished), and twenty-two unrelated pieces.
The Age of Pioneers (Russian: Время первых, romanized: Vremya Pervykh, lit. “Time of the first ones”), also known as Spacewalk or The Spacewalker, is a Russian historical drama film about cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first human to perform a spacewalk (and pilot Pavel Belyayev). Leonov himself served as a consultant for the film. The Age of Pioneers was directed by Dmitriy Kiselev and co-produced by Timur Bekmambetov and Yevgeny Mironov, the latter also starred in the leading role. (wiki)
“This is a real-life story of extreme bravery against all odds, with wonderful cinematography and special effects that take us back to the Cold War battle for supremacy in space.” (Nigel WatsonStarburst)
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Sovfoto/Universal Images Group/Shutterstock (3828858a) Voskhod 2 mission, soviet cosmonaut alexei leonov during world’s first space walk (eva) in 1965. VARIOUS
Salyut 7 (Russian: Салют 7) is a 2017 Russian disaster film directed by Klim Shipenko and written by Aleksey Samolyotov, the film stars Vladimir Vdovichenkov and Pavel Derevyanko. The story is based on the Soyuz T-13 mission in 1985, part of the Soviet Salyut programme; it was the first time in history that a ‘dead’ space station was docked with, and brought back into service. (wiki)
The Deadly Tower of Monsters is a science fiction top-down shooter video game developed by ACE Team (based in Santiago) and published by Atlus USA, which released for Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 4 on 19 January 2016.
The game’s framing device is that of an early 1970s B-movie The Deadly Tower of Monsters recently released on DVD, with the director’s commentary of its in-universe director Dan Smith serving as a combination of tutorial and meta-commentary on the game. The film itself is a space opera in which astronaut Dick Starspeed (played in-universe by actor Jonathan Digby) has been shot down on an alien planet full of innocent ape-creatures, ruled by a tyrannical emperor. (wiki)
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (MINIMUM): OS: Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10 / Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz or AMD Athlon X2 4800+ / Memory: 2 GB RAM / Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTS 1024MB or ATI Radeon HD 5750/6670 1024MB / DirectX: Version 9.0c / Storage: 4 GB available space
Sputnik (Russian: Спутник) is a 2020 Russian science-fiction thriller film directed by Egor Abramenko in his feature directorial debut. It stars Oksana Akinshina as a young doctor who is recruited by the military to assess a cosmonaut who survived a mysterious space accident and returned to Earth with a dangerous organism living inside him. Alongside Akinshina, the film’s cast includes Pyotr Fyodorov and Fyodor Bondarchuk. (wiki)
‘Sputnik’ is a word associated with space exploration, as it was the name of the first artificial satellites put in orbit around the earth. It is also the Russian word for ‘companion’ or ‘fellow traveler’, alluding to the companion the commander brings along.
Sputnik (Russian: 
TimeSpace Warps 