Space Voyages

Gr 4–6—Celebrating NASA's first 50 years of sending people off-planet, these five 46-minute episodes use a combination of stock footage, digital animation, and sound bites from astronauts and current and former NASA employees, both to highlight past milestones and to forecast future developments in space. The first episode, "Into the Unknown," covers the space program's early years. "The Moon and Beyond" focuses on Orion (a successor to the space shuttle, scheduled for a first test launch in late 2014). "Open for Business" draws clear lines between NASA's achievements and current commercial initiatives, such as Elon Musk's SpaceX rocket and the sleek, if still pie-in-the-sky Skylon vehicle. "Surviving the Void" takes a look at the challenges faced and, at least partially, solved in order to work and live in space or on other celestial bodies. A fifth episode, "Shuttle Discovery's Last Mission"—already available free on the Smithsonian Channel website, but still a nice addition to the DVD—recaps that decidedly battered looking vehicle's record of 39 missions and tracks its transport from the Kennedy Space Center to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Though hardly a complete picture as, for instance, the achievements of non-US space programs rate barely a glance, and the racism and sexism that pervaded NASA's early astronaut selection process go unmentioned, these visual collages still capture that exciting sense of history that characterized, and still exemplifies, our ventures into the last frontier.—John Peters, Children's Literature Consultant, New York City