Tag Archives: Mark Devlin

BLAST’s Christmas Launch!

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Happy New Year, DPers!  We wish you all the best for 2013!  Also, a little bit of news we’ve been sitting on…. this Christmas, Mark Devlin, the star of our film BLAST! has launched the BLAST telescope from Antarctica for the 3rd time!  Check out the video of the launch here as well as the article below for additional information!

 

The telescope is still in the air! You can track BLAST’s progress here!  Follow the scientist’s blog here.

NASA Launches Telescope-Toting Balloon from Antarctica on Christmas

“A giant helium balloon is slowly drifting above Antarctica, about 22 miles (36 kilometers) up. Launched on Tuesday (Dec. 25) from the National Science Foundation’s Long Duration Balloon (LDB) facility on Earth’s southernmost continent, it carries a sensitive telescope that measures submillimeter light waves from stellar nurseries in our Milky Way.

“Christmas launch!” wrote officials with NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, which oversees the agency’s balloon research program, in a Twitter post yesterday. “BLAST launched today from McMurdo Station, Antarctica.”

This is the fifth and final mission for BLAST, short for the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope, and mission designers hope it will reveal why so few stars are born in our galaxy.”

BLAST! DVD
BLAST! Trailer

BLAST! – Mark Devlin on The Colbert Report

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Posted by Paul Devlin:

Could we have ever guessed at the start of this project that it would culminate with my astrophysicist brother appearing on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report? My science adventure movie, BLAST! was very popular internationally. It screened on television all across Europe, Japan, Canada, even had a weekend of global broadcasts that reached 120 countries on BBC World News.

But the United States is the toughest market for independent filmmakers and BLAST! received a lot of resistance from both film festivals and broadcasters in the U.S. – even though the movie was a suspenseful story by an American filmmaker about an American scientist. Was it because of too much science? Too little science? Too much religious discussion? No “Voice-of-God” narrator? Too personal – breaking convention by examining scientist’s family sacrifices? Who knows? But the traditional gatekeepers kept BLAST! from a national broadcast in the U.S.

That didn’t stop my brother and me. We knew there was an enthusiastic American audience we needed to reach. So, we went around the gatekeepers, distributed to regional PBS stations and found other important allies. These included Leonard Lopate of WNYC Radio, Ira Flatow of NPR’s Science Friday, and Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report. We reached the nation despite it all – the Colbert Nation, that is.

Sometimes it’s about the quality of the people who get your work, not the quantity. Colbert almost never shows movie clips, so I consider it a personal triumph that he showed a clip of BLAST!

BLAST! DVD
BLAST! Trailer