NASA Month: NASA & the Movies

All this month, I'm NASA! This means every weekday in March will feature a new post about NASA, and I'm hosting a giant giveaway in order to encourage people to spread the NASA love. For more information on the giveaway, check out this post.

Today we have a special guest post by author and fellow League member Lissa Price! She's posting about NASA in film.

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NASA and the Movies

by Lissa Price

Small wonder that the movies have had a love affair with NASA. But did you know that NASA also has a love/hate affair with the movies? Here are two lists that NASA created in 2011. One is their “best science fiction movies” of all time and the other is their “worst” list.

List 1

1) Gattaca (1997)

2) Contact (1997)

3) Metropolis (1927)

4) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

5) Woman in the Moon (1929) (the first film to use the countdown that NASA later copied)

6) The Thing From Another World (1951)

7) Jurassic Park (1993)

List 2

1) 2012 (2009)

2) The Core (2003)

3) Armageddon (1998)

4) Volcano (1997)

5) Chain Reaction (1996)

6) The 6th Day (2000)

7) What the #$*! Do We Know? (2004)

You probably guessed that List 2 is their “worst” list. In fact, they use Armageddon as part of their training program, quizzing trainees to find all the impossibilities in the film (approx. 168).

Some films dealing with space exploration or NASA

• Contact 
• Moon 
• Space Cowboys 
• Apollo 13 
• The Right Stuff 
• October Sky 
• Gattaca 
• Space Camp 
• 2001 
• Alien 
• Deep Impact 
• Red Planet 
• Destination Moon 
• Independence Day 
• Solaris 
• Mission to Mars 
• The Astronaut’s Wife 

If you have a favorite film or one that wasn’t listed here, tell us in the comments.
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Lissa Price’s debut novel STARTERS is an international bestseller published in over thirty countries. Dean Koontz calls this YA futuristic thriller “a smart, swift, inventive, altogether gripping story.” STARTERS was chosen by Barnes & Noble and the Chicago and LA Public Libraries as one of their Best Books of the Year for Teens. It won awards in Germany and France where it was one of the top ten books of the year. The sequel, ENDERS, will be published in Europe this Spring.

Lissa loves water sports and travel that involves furry creatures. Visit her at www.lissaprice.com or LissaPriceAuthor on FBt or @Lissa_Price on Twitter.

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This post is a part of the month-long celebration of NASA I'm hosting on my blog. In order to encourage people to celebrate NASA, I'm also hosting a giveaway!

One grand prize winner will receive all the books in the recent Breathless Reads tour, as well as ARCs of two anthologies and a signed Breathless Reads poster:

As well as swag from NASA, courtesy of Kate @ Ex Libris:

To celebrate NASA creatively: you could blog about why you like NASA, you could reach out to an astronaut for an interview, you could make space fan art, you could sing a song about NASA, you do a vlog, you make a list of all the ways NASA rocks...any of this counts! Just celebrate NASA in some awesome way, post it online, and include the link in the Rafflecopter. I even set that part of the entry open for multiple entries, so you could blog and vlog and Facebook and tumblr and Pinterest about NASA and they all count. The only requirements: post a link back to this contest, and put the full URL of the site in the Rafflecopter. Full details here.

To enter: be sure to read the full rules and terms of the contest here. Then fill out the Rafflecopter below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway