On April 4 of this year the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., took ownership of 2 unique 70mm IMAX® cameras that had completed a total of 20 space shuttle missions from 1984 to 1998. The IMAX team turned 99 astronauts into moviemakers who captured stunning never-before-seen views of our planet, breath-taking spacewalks, and space exploration milestones such as the release of the Hubble Space Telescope and the first-ever view of the shuttle against the backdrop of Earth.

This phenomenal success led to 46 more astronauts and cosmonauts being trained to use IMAX®3D cameras to make Space Station3D and Hubble3D. Producer/Director/Writer/Editor Toni Myers, a lead member of the production team, will take us on a journey that begins with the first rock videos in London and continues to the present day where more than 100 million people have traveled to space with IMAX.

Event Date: 10/23/2012

Spaceflight operations present a unique range of challenges unlike those found on earth. Time, distance, and the remote environment provide a unique opportunity to assess the planning, training, and operations of the integrated crew ground team.

Leadership, trust, values, and teamwork provide the foundation for the compelling story of early space missions concluding with the rescue of the Apollo 13 crew after an oxygen tank exploded with the spacecraft 200,000 miles from earth. The story concludes with a summary of the technical cause of the explosion. Like an aircraft accident, the Apollo 13 tank explosion required a series of apparently unrelated events none of which by itself would have caused the failure.

Event Date: 9/12/2012

In his lecture, Dr. Valentine will seek to open up both sets of assumptions. He will show that the short-term profit horizons of finance capitalism are actually incompatible with the long-term visions and goals of NewSpace entrepreneurs. But he will also argue against the critical assessment that NewSpace visions should be dismissed as mere fantasies. Drawing on anthropological theories that see narratives as material and consequential, Dr. Valentine will show that we should take seriously the idea that human settlement of space is not only a possibility, but that from it may develop radically different forms of economic, social, and political life than those that have emerged, so far, on Earth.