Dreamtime Delivers Cutting Edge TV Technology
Deborah Rivera
Headquarters, Washington, DC
(Phone: 202/358-1743)
Jerry Berg
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL
(Phone: 256/544-0034)
RELEASE: 00-153
NASA’s multimedia partner, Dreamtime Holdings, Inc., has
delivered the first of two shipments of high definition television
equipment that will be used to provide cutting-edge coverage of
upcoming space missions.
Marshall Space Flight Center has received, assembled and tested
this first of two deliveries from Dreamtime. NASA estimates the
television equipment is worth $100,000 and it’s expected improve
the quality of ground television coverage of space launches, as
well as provide enhanced documentation of Earth-based scientific
and research activities.
The camera lenses, tripods and support equipment are headed to
Russia and will be used for television coverage of the historic
Expedition One launch, currently planned for Oct. 30.
Expedition One, launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in
Kazakhstan, will fly American Commander Bill Shepard and Russian
cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev to their new home
aboard the International Space Station (ISS). They will be the
first crew to live and conduct experiments aboard the ISS,
spending four months in orbit before returning to Earth.
“Dreamtime will also provide NASA two high-definition television
cameras that will document the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery
at the Kennedy Space Center on Oct. 5,” said Rodney Grubbs, deputy
manager for the collaboration partnership and lead for NASA’s
digital television implementation at the Marshall Center.
“Following that launch, technicians from Marshall, Kennedy Space
Center and Johnson Space Center will carry the cameras to Russia
and prepare for coverage of Expedition One.”
NASA’s enhanced television coverage of upcoming Shuttle flights is
one goal of its unique commercial partnership with Dreamtime.
Dreamtime also will provide high-definition television
documentation of crew activities aboard the orbiting Space Station
and on Space Shuttle missions, as well as research and science
activities across the Agency.
“This is a very important step in the NASA and Dreamtime
partnership,” said Brian Kelly, NASA collaboration manager for the
partnership at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “It puts NASA
on the cutting edge of digital technology and is tangible proof of
what can happen when NASA and industry work together toward a
common goal.”
Earlier this month Dreamtime delivered to the Johnson Space Center
a high-definition television encoder that will be tested as a
prototype for future high definition systems to be flown in space
in late 2001.
The NASA-Dreamtime partnership also calls for Dreamtime to produce
educational and documentary programming, as well as create an
interactive, multimedia portal site, http://www.dreamtime.com,
that will provide more complete and in-depth access to information
about space and space exploration than is currently available.
The multimedia database will combine NASA video, audio, still
photographs, high-resolution images, historical documents and
three-dimensional views of spacecraft. This space portal will
offer public access to thousands of NASA images, sounds,
documents, blueprints and plans.
The NASA-Dreamtime collaboration represents a first step in
accomplishing the commercialization goals established by Congress
in the Commercial Space Act. Congress asked NASA to conduct an
independent market study to help identify potential commercial
uses for the U.S. Space Station Program. One of the most promising
commercial markets identified by the study was to use of space
imagery in the areas of education and entertainment.
