bluedot 2019 | James Burke & Dallas Campbell: The Voyager

[Music] your broadcasting career has been so extraordinary and I've got a little clip that I want to play so this is this is from 1977 and I I mean I you know I presented a few television documentaries and I still think that this is the greatest piece to camera of all time now the problem is it's kind of the whole piece is about 10 minutes long and I kind of want to show you the whole piece because it's this it's the single dolly track and you're talking about the history of rocket science you're talking about Wow how do you get from the thermos flask to the rocket and you give us this wonderful potted history in a single tank you talk about so coughs key and you talk about Hermann Oberth and you talk about Robert Goddard's but I'm gonna pick it up about halfway through because otherwise we'll be here all day but but it's the ends that I want you to concentrate it's the very last shot so let's have a little look at this you see all three men had understood that certain gases ignite and that the thermos flask permits you to store vast quantities of those gases safely in the frozen liquid form until you want to ignite them at which point you take the top off the flask the gases evaporate you apply light and boom now two gases do that better than any other and it was Albert's assistant who put them together most efficiently his name was Verna von Braun and the two gases that he released from his particular version of a thermos flask the one lying on its side behind me now were hydrogen and oxygen if you release those two gases into a confined space with a hole at the other end of it and mix them as you do so and then set light to them you get that [Applause] what I was lucky enough to to go out to Kazakhstan for ten peaks launch and I was covering 10 Peaks launched live for the BBC and I had this brilliant idea said why don't we get cuz the Soyuz is on its side and we could do the whole history from the r7 all the way through net and do the launch and everyone looks at me like it was insane and they were like no we won't we can't do that kind of stuff now but just tell us so that was that was the Voyager that was the Voyager spacecraft 1977 yeah just talk us through the timing of that shot because it is a brilliant well pista camera great think about NASA is 99.9 percent of the time it does what it says it's gonna do like launches and so I the walk down the side of the rocket as you say is much longer and I wrote that and did that and then that last cut where you cut to a tight shot of the distance out of out of focus rocket and I walk in blah blah I wrote 10 seconds of words it takes one second to walk in so that's 11 it takes one second to point one second to pull focus so that you focus the rocket and the rocket goes so it's 13 seconds and we could hear the countdown coming from the last speakers so at 13 seconds to go I stepped in and did my bit and we took it home and we said to the BBC look what we did and they said yeah it looks like looks like back projection now for those of you who don't know what back projection is you run a film and you stand in front of the film and it looks as if you're really there yeah and I said you can't change focus to back projection because that's a focus full of three miles and that back projection film would be you know 27 inches away and they said the audience doesn't know about pulling focus tip back projection and I said the audience doesn't about back projection and they said no all right but nobody said good really it's funny because I've got to tell you it's been doing the rounds recently on Twitter and on the internet and you know the world has fallen in love with that particular clip were you not terrified I know you know you'd counted the seconds but we did you not have just a terrible fear that you're gonna muck it up and if we could fluff your line or because you can't say oh can we but you can we just get it back down again and then you know go again yeah I suppose a bit nervous yes but not much because it's only words and if you got it we have spare camera on the rocket so we can get the rocket anyway you know so if it didn't go it didn't go yeah I was scared yes

Channel: bluedot festival

Views: 6,713

Rating: 4.9254661 out of 5

Keywords: bluedot, festival, james burke, dallas campbell, the voyager, bbc, space, space exploration, science

Id: c5a987U9Kdc

Length: 4min 45sec (285 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 26 2019