Kevin If you’ve been here for a hot minute, you’ll be familiar w/ my Can We Talk series, which are posts dedicated to random shyt I found out about or stuff I like. In honor of Space Exploration Day 2022 and Moon Day 2022, let’s make today’s installment about NASA TV.
I first discovered the greatness of NASA TV back in college, when we first got satellite TV. I won’t say the name of the provider, since they aint worth the time or the effort to mention, nor do I wanna sully this blog w/ any mention of them. They suck donkey balls, and that’s about it to say on that one.
Up until then, it was network TV, and some of the channels didn’t come through worth a damn on account of the part of town we live in.
One night, when my mom went to work, I was cleaning out the trash pile that was mounting in her room. The novelty of satellite TV was still there for me, since I only ever saw it at someone else’s house before. I hauled the last bag of trash out to the bin for pickup day, and sat down on her bed. I had a bag of tortilla chips, a container of my old favorite spicy guac, and some of the spicy salsa I’d loved since I was a kid.
This was before I lost the weight, btw. I then turned on the TV, and started exploring the channels. After I came across a channel airing some lame propaganda piece from like 1960, I saw another one, NASA TV.
I hit that one, and footage from the International Space Station came on the TV. After some time had passed, I moved on to MTV2, aka the way MTV used to be before it became nothing but reality shows.
From that point on, I forgot about it somehow, and the satellite TV novelty wore off. I wanted to get rid of it long before that actually happened. I found a TV on eBay and an antenna I heard good things about from Best Buy. Network TV it was for me.
Until I got Rokus for my mom and me before the move a year and a half ago, that is. I was setting up my Roku first so I could play around w/ it and learn it, after I got the year of Paramount+ on a major deal.
The subscription’s long since lapsed at this point, and I no longer care anyway, haha. I mainly got it for my mom since they had all the Perry Mason episodes, and in far better quality than what the nameless satellite TV provider ever had.
I saw that NASA had an app for Roku, and I added it to the channel list, along w/ a bunch of others I thought I’d like, and several I thought my mom would like.
I watched it as we got closer to the move, busting my ass hardcore as I continued looking for work, and busting my ass at the job I had at the time. None of it mattered to anyone in my life on a regular basis at the time, either.
After the drama from the move, I somehow ended up forgetting about NASA TV, until I grew sick and tired of the near-nonstop (and beyond nauseating) 1960s Popeye on the Classic Toons channel on Pluto TV in recent months.
Now I remember what I was missing out on. The old-school short films on the Apollo 11, Mars exploration, and the like, brought me back to a time where it was the calm before the permanent forever hardcore shitstorm on steroids my life’s become now, and will remain that way until the end of time.
I’m so glad I savored those moments, since I’ll never feel that way again. Those short films w/ their grainy film quality and the social studies film on a projector-type feel to the audio brought me back. For a super brief nanosecond in time, it told me on some level it’s all gonna be ok.
The screenshot in this post came from an airing of the Apollo 11 footage from 1969. I’m guessing NASA restored the footage for broadcasting, but it was hard to make out what was what in it.
If anyone’s interested, but y’all don’t have Roku or whatever, don’t bug out! The fun of NASA TV can still be had here! However, I wish NASA TV had closed captioning for their programming. I got the closed captioning on my Roku, but it doesn’t appear that there’s a caption track available when I checked the options list. Other than this, that’s my only beef w/ NASA TV.
Over to you, readers. Have you seen anything on NASA TV? Doing anything to celebrate Moon Day and Space Exploration Day? I’d love to hear your thoughts and takeaways, so drop it all like it’s hot, and let’s talk.
