The Boeing 747 entered service with Pan American Airlines in January 1970 and has since become the workhorse of the world’s long-haul, high-capacity fleet. It was the first passenger jet to have a twin-aisle cabin section and a staircase leading to an upper deck in the nose section.
Powered by four Pratt & Whitney/General Electric/Rolls-Royce turbofans the Boeing 747 remains the world’s fastest subsonic passenger jet. It has carried more than 3.5 billion passengers on 35 billion miles of revenue-earning service with 80 airlines.
NOVA goes behind the scenes at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to offer a look at the construction and launch of the two Martian exploratory rovers, ‘Spirit’ and ‘Opportunity’.
NOVA goes behind the doors of Boeing’s Phantom Works and Lockheed’s legendary Skunk Works to record classified meetings, fly the most revolutionary planes, and examine the high-stakes battle to build the most capable and versatile fighter ever created – the Joint Strike Fighter.
In the first in this four-part series, we chart the extraordinary rise of blogs, Wikipedia and YouTube, and trace an ongoing clash between the freedom the technology offers us, and our innate human desire to control and profit.
Exploring how the web affects politics and the struggle for power in both democractic and authoritarian states, and also how the internet has inspired freedom of speech via social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Telling the inside story of the gold rush years of the dotcom bubble, and revealing how retailers such as Amazon learned great lessons.
This episode also charts how, out of the ashes, Google forged the business model that has come to dominate today’s web, offering a plethora of highly attractive, overtly free web services – including search, maps and video – that are in fact funded through a sophisticated and highly lucrative advertising system which trades on what we users look for.
Are we empowered, connected and enlightened with the world’s knowledge at our fingertips? Or distracted and addicted with shorter attention spans? Are our skittering brains bombarded and stupified by the ‘yuck and wow’ of the web? Is the web really changing us – the way we think, the way we behave, the way relate to each other? And is it for better or for worse?
Time is flying by on this busy, crowded planet… as life changes and evolves from second to second. And yet the arc of human lifespan is getting longer: 65 years is the global average … way up from just 20 in the Stone Age. Modern science, however, provides a humbling perspective. Our lives… indeed the life span of the human species… is just a blip compared to the age of the universe, at 13.7 billion years and counting.
From a distance, our galaxy would look like a flat spiral, some 100,000 light years across, with pockets of gas, clouds of dust, and about 400 billion stars rotating around the galaxys center. Thick dust and blinding starlight have long obscured our vision into the mysterious inner regions of the galactic center. And yet, the clues have been piling up, that something important, something strange is going on in there. Astronomers tracking stars in the center of the galaxy have found the best proof to date that black holes exist. Now, they are shooting for the first direct image of a black hole.
A presentation of the facts and theory surrounding the astronomical phenomenon of black holes, using the latest in computer-generated imagery. Theories regarding their origin are presented, along with speculation about what lies with and beyond them.
The Channel Tunnel, the world’s longest undersea tunnel is set 131 feet beneath the sea. It took six years to build and can transport up to 31 million passengers a year. A marvel of modern construction, the tunnel offered a great potential to link England with the rest of Europe.
The Antonov AN 225 is the heaviest and largest jet ever built, with a landing gear system comprising 32 wheels, and a wing span of 291 feet. It was designed for the Soviet space program in 1988, and is able to airlift the Energia rocket’s boosters, Buran space shuttle or ultra-heavy and oversize freight, up to 250,000 kg.
