Last March I was in an episode of The Travel Channel's Mysteries at the Museum. Season 10 Episode 4 will air on Friday July 22nd at 9pm EST on the Travel Channel.
In the episode I play Bill Peters, head of the NASA team responsible for crashing landing the Skylabe space station into the Indian Ocean.
My previous entry describing the shooting day can be linked to here:
On that post I posted a brief excerpt from Wikipedia about Skylab:
Skylab was a space station launched and operated by NASA and was the United States' first space station. Skylab orbited Earth from 1973 to 1979, and included a workshop, a solar observatory, and other systems. It was launched unmanned by a modified Saturn Vrocket, with a weight of 150,300 pounds (68,175 kg).[1] Three manned missions to the station, conducted between 1973 and 1974 using the Apollo Command/Service Module (CSM) atop the smaller Saturn IB, each delivered a three-astronaut crew. On the last two manned missions, an additional Apollo / Saturn IB stood by ready to rescue the crew in orbit if it was needed.
The station was damaged during launch when the micrometeoroid shield separated from the workshop and tore away, taking one of two main solar panel arrays with it and jamming the other one so that it could not deploy. This deprived Skylab of most of its electrical power, and also removed protection from intense solar heating, threatening to make it unusable. The first crew was able to save it in the first in-space major repair, by deploying a replacement heat shade and freeing the jammed solar panels.
Skylab's demise was an international media event, with merchandising of T-shirts and hats with bullseyes,[22] wagering on the time and place of re-entry, and nightly news reports. The San Francisco Examiner offered a $10,000 prize for the first piece of Skylab delivered to its offices; the competing Chronicle offered $200,000 if a subscriber suffered personal or property damage.[23] NASA calculated that the odds of station re-entry debris hitting any human were 1 to 152 and when multiplied by 4 billion becomes 1 in 600 billion for a specific human,[24] although the odds of debris hitting a city of 100,000 or more were 1 to 7 and special teams were readied to head to any country hit by debris and requesting help.[23]
We assume that Skylab is on the planet Earth, somewhere.
Charles S. Harlan, Skylab mission controller[22]
In the hours before re-entry, ground controllers adjusted Skylab's orientation to try to minimize the risk of re-entry on a populated area.[23] They aimed the station at a spot 810 miles (1,300 km) south southeast of Cape Town, South Africa, and re-entry began at approximately 16:37 UTC, July 11, 1979.[3]:371 The Air Force provided data from a secret tracking system able to monitor the reentry.[25] The station did not burn up as fast as NASA expected, however. Due to a 4% calculation error, debris landed southeast of Perth, Western Australia,[3]:371 and was found between Esperance and Rawlinna, from 31° to 34°S and 122° to 126°E, about 130–150 km radius around Balladonia. Residents and an airline pilot saw dozens of colorful fireworks-like flares as large pieces broke up in the atmosphere.[22] The Shire of Esperance facetiously fined NASA A$400 for littering, a fine which remained unpaid for 30 years.[26] The fine was paid in April 2009, when radio show host Scott Barley of Highway Radio raised the funds from his morning show listeners and paid the fine on behalf of NASA.[27][28]
As I've mentioned, the reenactment shows have very tight budgets, and Mysteries at the Museum does a great job of utilizing all resources at hand, including reusing actors. So, look for me as a Zeppelin pilot in one of the segments, as well. The segment tells the story of blimp pilots that disappeared during a scouting mission along the Pacific Coast during World War II. Season 10 episode 4 was the second time I worked on Mysteries at the Museum. Previously, I had worked on an episode for Season 9, where I played George "Machine Gun" Kelly.
My writing on those two shooting days can be linked to here:
http://thecommonone-jtw.blogspot.com/2015/11/on-set-mysteries-at-museum.html
and
http://thecommonone-jtw.blogspot.com/2016/01/on-set-mysteries-at-museum-season-9.html
For Season 9, I was not only played George Kelly, but was also a nineteenth century detective tracking down a confectioner who was murdering children by adding cyanide to candy, a Red Coat during the Revolutionary War, and an elder during the Salem witch trials.
Episode 9 for Season 9 already aired in April. However, if you keep your eyes open and check the schedules, the Travel Channel frequently plays reruns.
Or, if you're really ambitious, there are segments posted on the Mysteries webpage. However, I haven't been able to navigate the selections, and that leads down a rabbit hole of constantly scrolling down and being sidetracked by other videos!
That links is here:
http://www.travelchannel.com/shows/mysteries-at-the-museum/video
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