These videos were recently screened at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Yes, they look fake. Yes, they look like special effects. They aren't. Damn, it must've been a lonely feeling being aboard one of the Apollo missions forty years ago, watching Earth dip out of view for the first time. (via The Planetary Society)

Moon:

Remember Moon, the movie directed by David Bowie's son Duncan Jones, and starring Sam Rockwell (Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind)? Now that it's in post-production, a few more details have leaked out. The reason Rockwell is stranded alone on the Moon for three years: he's mining a gas that Earth needs to solve its energy crisis. And while he's stuck up there, he has an encounter that will change the course of human history. Even though Rockwell is alone on the Moon, he has costars in the movie: Matt Berry (The IT Crowd) and Kaya Scodelario (Skins). Are they playing aliens he meets, or other people who turn up? Or the people waiting for him back on Earth? [Slice Of Scifi]

The Dark Knight:

In the new Batman movie, part of what drives Harvey Dent over the edge into becoming Two-Face is that his fiancee is killed. This is presumably Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal). This will also give Batman something else to angst over, since she's his old flame and his "hope for a normal life." [Comic By Comic]

Battlestar Galactica:

Someone posted a ton of spoilers for episode 9 of Battlestar Galactica season four, "The Hub," which airs June 6. Roslin and Baltar are in the hands of the rebel Cylons (the Leobens, the Sharons, the Sixes) who are planning an attack on the "Resurrection Hub," without which no Cylon can resurrect anywhere, even with a resurrection ship. The humans have an uneasy alliance with these rebel Cylons. And some human pilots help with the attack, including Helo, Seelix and "Gonzo" Pike. The humans also decide to help the rebels to retrieve D'Anna (Lucy Lawless) so they can learn the identity of the Final Five within the fleet. D'Anna is un-boxed and immediately starts being manipulative and playing mind games again. The battle to destroy the Hub is "insane."

Helo feels very threatened when he realizes that when "his" Sharon died and was resurrected over the algae planet, her memories became available to all the other Sharons.

Baltar does the one thing that could surprise me at this point: he confesses his role in the destruction of humanity to Roslin — leaving her with a tough moral quandary. We see Roslin's death in a flash-forward, and the "L-word" is finally spoken between her and Adama. Elosha puts in an appearance as Roslin's spiritual adviser. [Battlestar Blog]

Star Wars: Clone Wars:

Here's our first look at Asajj Ventress, one of the main villains of the Star Wars: Clone Wars movie (coming this August) and TV show (coming this fall). As with previous versions, she's bald and venomous-looking. [USA Today]

And more story details about the movie have come out. Jabba the Hutt's son has been kidnapped, and the Jedi agree to rescue him in exchange for access to shipping routes, but this may be a plot to divert the Jedi to the remote planet of Teth. Anakin, his student Ahsoka, and a Clone squadron, travel to the B'omarr monastery on Teth to find Hutt Jr., but they find themselves surrounded by General Grievous' battle droids and hunted by Asajj Ventress. R2D2 helps them find a way out, and Obi-Wan brings much-needed reinforcements. [Jedi News]

Lost:

Lost's Sonya Walger (Penny) was spotted in Hawaii. Does that mean Penny's coming to the island? Or just that she's going to appear in an upcoming episode? Also, there are hints another one of our "favorite castaways" will die in an upcoming episode. [Spoilers Lost]

Smallville:

Here are some pics from the Smallville season finale, where Lex finally gets into the Fortress of Solitude. [The TV Addict]

And this week's episode, "Quest," follows Lex to Zurich, where he keeps trying to learn about the "Veritas" mythology. Lex gets attacked by a monastic-robed stranger with Kryptonian symbols carved into his chest, which seem to be a message for Clark. Meanwhile, Jimmy takes an interest in the symbols carved in the Kawatche caves, and Clark thinks about their symbolism. Clark and Chloe team up to investigate and learn that a member of the Veritas clan has survived and is hiding out in a church. Clark and Lex race to be the first to find this Veritas member, who holds the key to Clark's survival. [Buddy TV]

Doctor Who:

Here's a possibly spurious summary of the last two episodes of the current Doctor Who season. Former Prime Minister Harriet Jones is consumed with hatred for the Doctor, especially after she finds out her successor as prime minster was a member of the Doctor's own species. She managed to get aboard the Valiant and witnessed the entire year of Harold Saxon's reign of terror which "never happened." It was Harriet who stole the Master's ring from his funeral pyre, and uses it to help an army of Daleks, led by Davros, to escape from beyond reality.

This causes Rose's alternate universe to unravel. As head of her universe's Torchwood London, Rose knows what's going on, but doesn't know how to stop it. She desperately tries to reach the Doctor. Meanwhile, Donna has read her own life story in that future library (the one from the Steven Moffat two-parter) and knows she'll be killed by the Racnoss, the spider-creature that ruined her wedding day.

Donna is left alone inside the TARDIS, hurtling out of control, and doesn't know what to do. Then Rose appears on the screen, having managed to get a signal through a fracture in reality — after the Doctor has already completely vanished from our universe. Donna and Rose try to use the TARDIS to bring the Doctor back. They keep colliding with alternate realities, including their own lives if they'd never met the Doctor. Finally, they manage to bring the Doctor back. He's confronted Davros and Harriet, who's now the Red Dalek.

Realities collide, bringing Jackie and Mickey back to our universe. And then the Daleks kill Donna's mother and grandfather. And then Donna is controlled by the insect on her back, by means of a Racnoss Empress from an alternate reality, which came to our universe through the hole the Daleks have made. The alternate Empress joins forces with Davros and Harriet. The only way to stop Donna's evil back-spider is to kill Donna, which the Doctor refuses to do. Meanwhile, all the universes are threatening to collide, destroying everything. The Doctor reaches the Medusa Cascade, but the only way to close the rift again is to sacrifice a human life. The Doctor falters, unable to sacrifice anyone. But then Donna chooses to sacrifice her own life to save everything.

But after Donna is gone, the Doctor decides to break his most sacred rule for her, and goes back in time 24 hours to change his own past, so the Daleks and Harriet can be stopped without sacrificing Donna's life. Then Captain Jack erases Donna's memory so she has no clue what's happened and won't try to find the Doctor again. She won't remember him at all. This restores everything to the point it was before, with Rose, Mickey and Jackie once again sealed in their alternate universe. [Planet Gallifrey]

Transformers: Animated:

Here are some screencaps from an upcoming episode of Transformers: Animated called "SUV: Society For Ultimate Villainy," which already aired in the Middle East but won't air in the U.S. until June or later. It features a Decepticon called Swindle, and a villain who fires a time-freezing blast, using a pocket watch. The "clockwoman" teams up with Nano and the Angry Archer to build a time-control machine for Swindle. [TFW2005]

Spectacular Spider-Man:

And meanwhile, Spectacular Spider-Man is unaccountably airing its Halloween episode this Saturday. Here's the blurb:

"The Uncertainty Principle"... presents a number of perplexing situations for Peter Parker and Spider-Man as they both try to find clarity amid the masks, mysteries and menace of Halloween. While Colonel John Jameson struggles to land his damaged space shuttle, Spider-Man continues his ongoing battle with Green Goblin, who also threatens Hammerhead and Tombstone. Still, Peter's greatest challenge will be facing the awful truth when he finally learns the Goblin's "true" identity.

Ruth's letter says it all:

Please forward this to the proper channels. I have read Stephen Hawking's latest remarks on space travel and the importance of it to human survival. The problem is, NASA is going about it all the wrong way.

Here is an idea: Send battle-hardened, strong-minded soldiers and marines on the long trips into space. We are conditioned to live with the bare minimal (of) life's necessities and are trained to be prepared for ... the worst conditions that any environment could throw at us.

Hell, me and my men will go, set up a colony somewhere and await colonists to arrive.

Me and most of my men are on our 3rd or 4th deployment into a combat area. We are scouts, reconnaissance specialists. We go before everyone else and spend time living off the land. Sounds just like the type of men needed for a long colonization journey.

Please pass this message on to anyone you know in the space program. (T)here are many men already trained and prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for their country and the human race.

Thank you for you time.

SFC Ruth, 101st Airborne Division. Afghanistan

Source: LiveScience.com

• In Verne's story, the cannon that fires the passengers into space is called the Columbiad. More than 100 years after this book was published, the ship that sent the astronauts to the moon in the Apollo 11 mission was the Columbia.
• There are other correlations to the Apollo mission: in both cases there were three travelers, both ships blasted off (literally, in Vernes' case) from Florida, and the dimensions of the "shell" are very close to those of the Apollo Command/Service module.
• The French adventurer Michel Ardan in the novel was inspired by the French photographer, cartoonist, writer, and balloonist Gaspard-Félix Tournachon. He was the first person to take aerial photographs, and inspired the Verne novel Five Weeks In A Balloon.
• In 1875 the novel was adapted into an opera, "Le voyage dans la lune." Although this was done without Verne's permission, it featured an enormous budget with music by Jacques Offenbach, huge palaces built out of glass, a live camel, and 673 costumes. Verne approached the creators of the show and complained to them that it was similar to his novel, and they apparently settled the matter, because the same team later adapted Verne's short story anthology Doctor Ox into an opera as well.
• Verne did his own rough calculations on what it would take to shoot something into orbit for this novel, and they turned out to be fairly close to the real thing. If Verne had lived in the 1950s and 1960s, who knows what would have happened.
• In the novel, when constructing the cannon, they have to dig a hole 900 feet deep, and 60 feet wide, to house the barrel. That's pretty damn big.
• Although the projectile is actually fired in this novel, the fate of the astronauts aboard is unknown. Verne later wrote a sequel called Around The Moon which details their trip which involves orbiting the moon, and somewhat impractically falling back to the Earth and being rescued.
• This book inspired the first science fiction film ever made: Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon, in 1902. Later adaptations included From The Earth To The Moon in 1958 from RKO Pictures, and a comedy with Burl Ives and Terry Thomas in 1967 called Jules Verne's A Rocket To The Moon.
• In 1961 ballistics engineer Gerald Bull began Project HARP (High Altitude Research Project) which fired very large projectiles into the sky, with the hopes of them one day attaining orbit. This would be much cheaper than using rockets, although the project was ended before they could get anything beyond the Earth's atmosphere.
• Bull kept trying to work on his idea to launch a satellite into space via a gun through the 1970s and 1980s, and produced an enormous gun based on his work called the GC 45. It fired 155 millimeter shells over vast distances, and was purchased by both South Africa and Iraq. Bull continued to work with the Iraqis on the design of the supergun, but was assassinated in 1990, most likely by Mossad agents, as Israel would have been the target of that gun.
• During the U.S. military's Operation Plumbbob series of nuclear tests in Nevada in 1957, a 900 kilogram steel plate covering a safety shaft was sent shooting skyward at enough speed to attain escape velocity, and it was never found again. Some researchers think that it broke the Earth's gravity and is in space somewhere, but others believe it melted in the upper atmosphere.
• When Disneyland Paris was designed, the Imagineers drew heavily on the French love for their native Jules Verne, and as a result Space Mountain was built as an homage to this book. In fact, there's an enormous cannon mounted on the building, which is meant to "fire" tourists into space. Inside the ride you pass by the Columbiad which fires and recoils as you pass it. Logos for the Baltimore Gun Club and the Columbiad Cannon are visible throughout. Additionally, the ride lies right next to the attraction inspired by Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.
• A verneshot is a geologic term where a hypothetical volcanic eruption caused by a buildup of gas deep underneath the Earth's crust could launch parts of the crust and mantle into orbit. It's named in tribute to both Verne, and From The Earth To The Moon.
• Warren Ellis' excellent Planetary comic book features many homages to classic literature, including the discovery of the shell fired by the Baltimore Gun Club (now the American Gun Club). However, in Ellis' story there was a miscalculation in the trajectory, and the shell orbited the Earth for years before crashing back to Earth, and the astronauts aboard died due to lack of food and water.
• In 2005 a video game called Voyage: Inspired By Jules Verne was released, based on this novel and its sequel, and The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells. It's set in the year 1851, and you play the part of French adventurer Michael Ardan who travels to the Moon aboard the shell. The story then deviates from Verne's work, having Ardan meet an entire civilization that lives under the surface.

Artist Mark Goerner paints concept art for film and illustration projects, and in his spare time he likes to paint desolate images like the one above. In fact, this is the first part in a series of paintings that follow the aftermath of the moon crashing to the Earth through Spring, Summer, and Autumn.

The scenario starts with the effect of a meteorite's collision with one of the planet's moons as the catalyst for a series of events that would get the process of organic reanimation started. Imagine the fragments of a moon falling out of orbit, dashing across the planet's surface, and burrowing into the tectonic plates causing massive volcanoes and the release of giant gas clouds and dust.

It's a depressing time to work in crewed spaceflight at NASA. After the space shuttle ends its service in 2010 there figures to be a five-year hiatus before the new Orion vehicle is ready. Once that happens our grand plans for space exploration include going back to the Moon and using Orion to ferry people and supplies back and forth from the International Space Station.

Are you tingling with anticipation yet? Neither were David Korsmeyer, Rob Landis and Paul Abell, so they recently published "Into the beyond: A crewed mission to a near-Earth object" in the journal Acta Astronautica (sub required, but you can read the abstract). The mission would take humans out of the Earth-Moon system for the first time and allow field tests of technologies that could eventually be used to go to Mars.

Yawn. This type of argument smacks of compromise and half-hearted ambition. We all know that NASA's facing budget cuts, and to their credit they've done amazing things with their robotic missions around the solar system. But should the coming-out party for the next generation of human spaceflight really be a mission to a cold, dark, almost certainly lifeless pebble? There's a reason the term "Moonshot" entered the vernacular as a phrase meaning "hugely ambitious project with great risk and great reward."

If we're going to reinvigorate the exploration of space, we need a Mars-shot. I want to hear less "Well, we could find out interesting things about the evolution of our solar system if we went there," and more "We're going to Mars, bitches!"

Image: Cornell University

Scientists with the European Space Agency experimented with marigolds grown in crushed anorthosite, an Earth-rock that is a close analogue to the lunar surface. Just potting the flowers in anorthosite was not effective. They didn't grow. But adding certain bacteria made a huge difference. The marigolds didn't exactly flourish in the faux moondirt, but they did grow and even blossomed. The bacteria facilitated the transfer of nutrients from the anorthosite to the plants.

Of course, the area where the plants were grown would need to be domed (they still need air) and watered, but they could be part of a water filtration system or even provide food for a self-sustaining lunar colony. While the ESA has no actual plans to go to the moon anytime soon, some scientists think we could send a robot to plant lunar veggies before the first colonists arrive. Photo by: BBC.

Plants 'thrive' on Moon rock diet [BBC]

The Earthrise photo (and check out the video if you really want to feel tiny) taken from Apollo 8 is one of the most famous space pics ever taken. Along with a few other nearly identical images, the shots are the only space-borne perspective that feature our pale blue dot from anything like a wide-angle view. This sort of thing is exactly what we need more of, Wolfe said. Imaging all of the phases of Earth (crescent, half, gibbous, full, etc.) from at least one lunar distance away would give us tons of info for what a world with continents, a dynamic atmosphere and water looks like.

The grand prize would be taking an image of the Sun's reflection on our oceans in polarized light. "That would give us a measurement of what the glint of sunlight on water looks like," Wolfe said, which could be used to determine whether planets are other stars have liquid water on their surfaces too.

Image: NASA

Minton, who already created vector maps of the islands in this sea, writes:

I went ahead and digitized the shoreline of the unnamed methane sea . . . It is one of the largest bodies of liquid known to exist on this moon of Saturn. This body of liquid methane, ethane and nitrogen is about the size of Lake Superior.

The orange opacity of Titan's atmosphere makes the moon appear bigger than it actually is - astronomers have since distinguished between permanent cloud cover and surface, and downgraded it from the first- to the second-largest moon in our system, after Jupiter's satellite Ganymede.

Not until the flyby, in 2004, of the Cassini-Huygens mission could scientists confirm the speculation, first ignited by both Voyager missions and then heightened by Hubble observations, that Titan is the only heavenly body (save Earth) to contain large liquid surfaces - or seas, as non-astronomers would call them. For they seem a bit too small to be labelled oceans.

These seas, or lakes, most probably consisting of methane or another hydrocarbon, can be seen on this page of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

EVS-Islands [via Strange Maps]

To-Do List for Futurists: Create a Moon Colony

1. Today: Find out more about what's necessary to create a moon colony by reading about two experiments in contained-atmosphere colony life. On Earth, a group of people tried to live inside a completely sealed biodome to test out theories of dome life on other planets. They stayed inside Biosphere 2 for over two years. Read the first-person account of one of the survivors of the experiment, Jane Poynter. Her book is called The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2. Last year, a team at the International Space University came up with a plan for how they'd create an 11-person moon base. Their document is free online, and is called the Moon Colony Blueprint [PDF].

2. This week: Grow plants with LEDs. LEDs are low-energy, high-efficiency lights that feed your plants the exact chunk of spectrum they need to grow, without all that extra stuff that sucks up energy. For these reasons, it's almost certain that moon colonists will use LEDs to grow plants. You can help by starting an LED plant farm in your own home, and demonstrating the benefits. Instructables has a great tutorial on how to set up your own LED moonfarm.

3. This month: Many scientists believe that the best way to establish a moon colony will be to set up a space elevator which allows people to travel between Earth and the Moon very rapidly. A few companies are already prototyping materials for space elevators, and the Spaceward Foundation has an annual contest (with lots of prize money) for people who want to test components of a potential space elevator. Read all about it and get a team together to enter the space elevator competition this year. [The Spaceward Foundation]

4. This month: On the moon, colonists will have to recreate Earth nature from scratch, inside an artificial environment. They'll be trying to make a biosphere, containing plants, animals, and a system for recycling all waste back into the environment. Now you can help advance knowledge about biosphere dynamics by building a tabletop biosphere, a tiny version of what colonists might create on the moon under domes. Of course, Bre Pettis from MAKE magazine can explain it all for you. [MAKE]

5. This year: Enrich your brain and support the burgeoning commercial space industry by visiting a real-life space port. [Mojave Space Port]

Lost Planet: Colonies is a "Platinum Hits" rehash of the original humans-versus-alien-bugs game, but at a discount price of $29.95, it might be a good jumping-on point if you haven't tried the game yet. Plus, it includes tons of extra features. There's a multiplayer online mode, where one player gets to be one of the big bug enemies, and everyone else is a human trying to take you down. There are also four new player characters, including a robot and two women.

It sounds as though Rhona Mitra's mission to a plague-quarantined Scotland, to find a cure for the plague which is starting to hit the outside world, may turn out to be futile. Unless, of course, Malcolm McDowell is wrong... which is almost unthinkable.

• In Michel Gondry's next film, Return Of The Ice Kids (not Kings, as previously reported), teenagers invent water that makes you hear music while you drink it. And in one scene, a teenager relives a moment when he made a farting noise with his mouth during an exam, and everyone noticed, so he kept making noises "to cover his nerves," but it sounded like he was covering up a fart. Apparently this actually happened to the teenage Gondry. The kids in the film are "writing a book of peace," and it features some utopian scenes. [MTV movies]
• The live-action Star Wars TV series, which takes place between episodes three and four of the movies, may be about a Sopranos-esque crime family during the rise of the Empire. [IESB]
• Sam Rockwell's space traveler stranded in a moon base is "lonely but not alone," in Moon, the directorial debut of David Bowie's son Zowie, which just finished shooting. [ShockTillYouDrop]
• Lost's ageless island-dweller Richard, played by Nestor Carbonell, will be back in at least one episode later this Spring, and his return leads to "interesting revelations." Also, in one of the season's final five episodes, we meet two Bedouin horsemen and a luxury doorman of "British extraction" in a flash-back or flash-forward... and they may have something to do with the enigmatic Charles Widmore. [Ask Ausiello]
• With Lana missing for much of Smallville season eight, Clark's next love interest may be Lori Lemaris, the mermaid living among people from the comics. Also, season eight will still feature Chloe as a series regular, and may feature a fair bit of no-longer-regulars Lana and Lex too. [Ask Ausiello again]

NASA administrator Doug Cooke says, "We now know the south pole has peaks as high as Mt. McKinley and crater floors four times deeper than the Grand Canyon." So your Moon condos could have beautiful mountain top views, or lie snuggled at the base of a sweeping canyon. Plus, there are more advantages, according to NASA:

The location has many advantages; for one thing, there is evidence of water frozen in deep dark south polar craters. Water can be split into oxygen to breathe and hydrogen to burn as rocket fuel—or astronauts could simply drink it. Planners are also looking for "peaks of eternal light." Tall polar mountains where the sun never sets might be a good place for a solar power station.

New Radar Maps of the Moon [NASA]

At only a $79 million dollar budget, a major studio could just buy this project out and turn it into a shot at box office gold. In the Hollywood version, the spacecraft would wake up a dormant alien being, long buried underneath the lunar surface, or they'd start a chain reaction that would cause the moon to break up into a billion pieces, which would begin raining down on the Earth. Then NASA would have to hire a maverick space jockey — Eric Bana? — to either deal with the alien menace, or the falling debris.

Or what if the moon turned out to be a deep space probe that's been orbiting the planet for eons? Silently biding its time. Then, a rude awakening comes in the form of us crashing things into it and the bot pilots running the probe try to send down big guns to mete out some stellar justice. It feels like the start of a bad Dimension Films plot, we know. But, there's probably a good idea buried in there somewhere. Just as long as it doesn't dislodge the moon from orbit and force us to watch the only good scene in The Time Machine again.

NASA Takes Aim at Moon with Double Sledgehammer [Yahoo News]

Image from the 1902 George Méliès film A Trip To The Moon.

What was the most challenging aspect of making a film that involved teleportation?

We did everything for real. We didn't use computer generated characters. You know the superhero films that preceded this have relied heavily on them, and obviously it would have been a really simple way to do the visual effects, because if you computer generate the characters, you can easily make them "jump." It's a lot more difficult to have somebody teleport when you have a real actor doing it. Part of the reason the visual effects stand out in this is because we put all that extra work in when we were shooting.

Traditionally, there have been two kinds of Hollywood tentpole movies: there's the visual effects version where you shoot it all on a soundstage, you never leave it although you "pretend" you left it to go to all these places, and you use visual effect to do the pretending for you. Then there's the version where you physically travel the world, a la James Bond or Jason Bourne, but then you don't do any visual effects in those places. You justify that by saying since we're going, we won't have to use visual effect to communicate that we're there.

We did something that was a bit unusual. We physically traveled to all these places, and then we did visual effects in those environments. We really flew a helicopter over the Sphinx and around the Pyramids. It would have been a lot easier to just generate that stuff in a computer; they're simple geometric shapes, there's just desert in the background, it couldn't have been simpler to generate. But it would never look the way it looks when you see Hayden Christensen on the Sphinx. There's a level of reality that computers just can't achieve at this particular state.

Was he actually on the Sphinx or digitally put up there?

He wasn't digitally put on top of it. We designed the shot, we pre-visualized the shot, we went to the Sphinx without Hayden and flew a helicopter around it following a very specific trajectory. Then we took the telemetry of that shot and filmed Hayden in Mexico using a cable-cam which could play back the moves the helicopter did, and then we combined these two pieces of film the old-fashioned way. It didn't require any digital creations because they perfectly matched up. Every single of grain of film is real, not something that was created in a computer. We shot the real elements wherever we went.

We know the film is based on Steven Gould's books Jumper and Reflex, and now he's also published a novel called Jumper: Griffin's Story which is meant to tie-in with the film. What was the script like when you came onboard?

There was a first draft by David Goyer, which was very faithful to the Steven's novel. Anyone who has looked at my Bourne adaptation will see that I kind of take the cool idea from the book and then reinvent the whole thing as a movie, and I tried to bring that whole logic to Jumper. In particular because the book dealt with terrorism, which I didn't like. The combination of jumping and terrorism didn't seem good to me. There wasn't a second jumper in the book. I had really just fallen in love with Steven Gould's character David who was using his power for selfish means, and I wanted to actually pursue that more than he had in the novel.

I love the notion that... okay, you're a superhero, you're globetrotting, you have it all, and then suddenly you meet another superhero who is significantly more talented at it than you are, and you're not the big man on campus anymore. I found that really interesting. The moment I decided to chase David Rice's darker side, you don't get to have your standard cookie-cutter superhero movie plot. There's not a villain who is setting out the destroy the world, and you don't have a hero who is trying to save the world. I didn't feel the Hollywood need to have David Rice become a hero in the Hollywood finale. I didn't want to see Hayden Christensen become Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man in the second half of the film.

Did you create anything for the movie that wasn't in the books? The movie uses jumpscars and jumpcraters whenever someone uses their jumping ability. Were those created for the movie?

Those were created for the film. The source for them is that I wanted this movie to follow, as much as possible, to follow the real laws of physics that govern this planet and the universe. One of the most primary rules is that you don't get something for nothing. It's all a closed loop, it's a closed system. Everything you do has some kind of a price. For example, cars seemed like a magical device when they they were first invented, but they ultimately came with a price with pollution and global warming.

In other superhero films, people tend to have the power, but there's never any physical price that the person or the planet pays in order for that phenomenal event to take place. I wanted there to be some kind of consequence every time you jump, and that leaving behind a trace would ultimately mean that you wouldn't want a lot of people jumping because of those effects. They could be dangerous if somebody walks into them, they could be harmful to the environment.

I've tried to show that in some really subtle ways. For instance when he jumps from New York to Ann Arbor, the tv changes momentarily to a New York station. I'm trying to communicate that these portals stay open for a short burst... for instance if you jump from the Sahara desert to the Arctic, would be bringing warm air and cold air to each environment, and that might not be good for the planet on a large scale. If you jumped and there were no after effects or repercussions, it would seem like a much more magical power. But, my bullshit meter in me says this would come with a consequence, and wouldn't be like Superman just being able to fly. If he could actually fly, he'd leave a wake turbulence, and there would be consequences to him and other people when he'd fly. These things can't just happen for free.

What about Samuel L. Jacksons character and the Paladins who pursue the Jumpers?

There's no Paladins in the book, there's no mythology of that, there's no one pursuing the Jumpers in that first book. In the second book people are trying to catch the Jumpers for personal gain. You know if you could get a Jumper to work for you, they'd be extremely useful. I was more curious to explore a villain who really wasn't a villain, other than that they wanted to destroy the Jumpers simply because of what they can do. I really believe that in our current climate, if there were people who could actually teleport, there would be people who would think that was treading on some sort of holy land, and that should only be reserved for god. There are already plenty of people who kill in the name of god for far less dramatic reasons.

We do like the fact that there isn't a lot of exposition in the film about how the jumping works, or explanations of things like jumpsites and jumpscars. They just accept it and get right into it.

Well, because David Rise isn't a physicist. If I had a character who was quantum physicist at MIT who one day discovers he can teleport, then that character would commence an investigation as to how that happens. But, a high school dropout is never going to understand how he's able to teleport, and since I'm telling the story from his perspective, I didn't feel like it was necessary to bog down in science that the characters themselves wouldn't understand.

Can you tell us about your next film? We know that it involves going to the moon, but what else can you let us know?

The premise of the movie is about a group that mounts a private expedition to not only go to the moon, but also to colonize it. It's set present day, and it is not science fiction, it's science fact. The blueprint for going to the moon was designed 40 years ago, and the components for implementing it are so old that they're in museums waiting to be stolen. So the group steals, buys, and in other ways pull together all the components it would take to launch and actually land on the moon.

Their goal is to actually leave somebody behind. They're recreating the Apollo mission up to a point, and then exceed it by leaving someone behind and starting mankind's exodus out into the universe. Plus, you can imagine how much shit can possibly go wrong, and it does. It's actually a miracle that it didn't go wrong in any of the lunar landings. What I'm also hoping to do with this film is to once again celebrate what was America's greatest accomplishment in its 200 and some-odd year history. There really is no other country that could have done what we did in the 1960s with the space program.

We know you're executive producing the Knight Rider television movie that comes on this weekend, how involved have you been with it?

I've been very involved with it, at least as involved as I can be given the fact that I'm finishing a visual effects movie. But I'm very involved with it and I would remain a producer on it if it goes to series.

This was the first film Scholl had ever worked on, and he found himself hooked. He just finished production design for Jumper, and has worked on everything from Batman Forever to The Time Machine.

Moon 44, Roland Emmerich's first science fiction film, involved robot miners being hijacked for their precious mineral cargo. In an act of desperation, the mining corporation sends a band of hardened criminals to defend them, and of course things don't go that well. Let's see: robots, expensive minerals, and criminals. Sure sounds like a recipe for success.

After several failed attempts, scientists now believe that by withdrawing water from deep within the moon's inner core of newly discovered ice caverns, their terraforming operation will at last prove successful. Once the water is brought up to the surface and pumped through the eight mile wide transforming spheres, it will then be dispersed as new oxygen-rich compounds, which eventually will create a livable lunar atmosphere. The surrounding city has grown twofold in the last several months and its inhabitants anxiously await the momentous outcome.

In May, China launched a satellite for Nigeria, the first time another country paid the Chinese to put a commercial satellite in orbit. And in late October, China launched the Chang'e lunar orbiter, named after a Chinese goddess who flew to the moon. The Chang'e will orbit the moon for a year, sending back images and data on the Moon's surface. China's seeking more private investment in its space program. And India isn't far behind.

Maybe the competition will force the U.S. to improve its science education, hopes Washington state business leader Don Brunell:

Americans may need a national emergency, like the launch of Sputnik, to wake us up. Perhaps the Asian space programs will be the catalyst.

Space.com reports:

Io's volcanoes spew out sulfur dioxide, which is a gas that stinks of freshly lit matches and almost entirely makes up the moon's atmosphere. As Io rotates from daylight into darkness, chilling the yellowish rock down to -226 F (-143 C), the gas freezes into a solid, much like dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide gas). About 1 to 3 percent of Io's dayside atmosphere, it turns out, is created by the volcanoes. The rest is generated from frozen sulfur dioxide turning directly into gas which, over eons, has accumulated on Io's surface.

New Horizon also got a cool image of Io's "aurora," which is caused by all that volcanic gas getting hurled into the air. Looks awesome.

Famous names: Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Barry Morse, Catherine Schell, Gerry Anderson, Sylvia Anderson

Crunchy goodness: 3

Stunt casting: Joan Collins is Kara, one of the last survivors of a super-advanced race who wear togas and survive by stealing organs from a group of hairy barbarians. (Who'd begrudge Joan Collins a kidney?)

The shit: The camera always zooms into Catherine Schell's eye whenever her sexy shapeshifter turns into a bird or donkey, as the plot requires.

Life lesson: When you find a new home planet that looks perfect and idyllic, you might want to check for alien mind controllers, vampires, ancient intelligences or creepy blobs before you settle in.

Space:1999 Net, a collection of Space: 1999 themed websites