Current Events > ITT: I list out my favorite space travel movies/shows/books and you judge me.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Interstellar
Eyes Turned Skyward
The Long Mars
The Martian
Sunshine
From the Earth to the Moon
The Right Stuff
Apollo 13
First Man
For All Mankind
Hidden Figures
Europa Report

Mostly in order of promenance in my memory, which also has some corelation with how I rank them. Eyes and The Long Mars are an alternative history and a book respectively, and the latter is the only soft sci-fi of the bunch. Both highly recommended.

The Long Mars is the third book in the Long Earth series, which is premised on the idea of humanity discovering a way to "step" into alternative Earths.

In exploring these new Earths, the main characters start coming across worlds with broken moons, no moons, and eventually a world with no Earth, with the obvious explanation being some sort of cataclysm that destroyed the Moon and Earth in these timelines/universes. This leads to the premise of the Long Mars, where a group of humans wants to use the "Gap" as a means of easy space travel. They do it successfully and naturally, they go to Mars and start stepping there as well. Its really neat and dives into some light speculative astrobiology over the various possibilities of Mars. Really cool book and series as well.

Eyes Turned Skyward is a meticulously detailed alternative history, where the divergence is that instead of the Space Shuttle the US focuses on stations instead, and sees all of the Apollo era technology carrying on into the modern day. Really awesome and realistic timeline that makes for a hell of an entertaining read, even if it helps fuel Shuttle criticisms that I dont think that system deserved.

And on that note, I am still upset we havent really gotten any shows or movies celebrating the Shuttle. Despite its flaws it was one of most impressive machines to ever fly and every single thing it ever did is so tragically underrated that I cant even stand it, and all we have to remember them by in our entertainment is crappy movies like Gravity or Armageddon. Ugh.

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