Abstract
Television and motion pictures that depict spaceflight have great power to shape public conceptions of travel between the planets and stars, despite audience awareness that the technologies shown are the spurious result of special effects technologies, rather than being representations of reality. A very few films have attempted to be realistic in all senses of the term, but they are greatly outnumbered by others that are fantastic in violating the laws of science while projecting exciting images. In addition, the relative popularities of different kinds of spaceflight films speak volumes about what travel beyond the Earth already means to American audiences. This chapter will organize much of the discussion around the equivalent of questionnaire survey data, the ratings given by tens of thousands of people to 80 spaceflight movies in the Netflix recommender system, augmented by data from the Internet Movie DataBase, and intensive qualitative analysis of specific examples such as the movie Destination Moon and the television series Babylon 5.
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Bainbridge, W.S. (2015). Media. In: The Meaning and Value of Spaceflight. Space and Society. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07878-6_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07878-6_8
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