ARIA News - National Geographic
Interview Images Courtesy of Windfall Films
Big, Bigger, Biggest
On April 28, 2009 Lieutenant Colonel Michael Kiley, retired ARIA pilot, was interviewed by a film crew from Windfall Films from Great Britain for an upcoming television special to be aired on the National Geographic channel. The special, which will be a documentary about the evolution of Space Stations, is scheduled to be shown in the fall of 2009 on the National Geographic program titled Big, Bigger, Biggest.
The interview involved a description of ARIA's and Lieutenant Colonel Kiley's involvement in the Skylab mission which was launched in 1978. During the interview he describes failures with the space laboratory during launch from Florida, ARIA's role in recording the failures transmitted from Skylab, and NASA's subsequent repairs during manned space missions that enabled Skylab to be operational.
The filming occurred at the Pima Air and Space museum in Tucson, Arizona. A KC-135 formally operated by NASA for training astronauts in a weightless environment was used a background for the filming. Time constraints did not allow the British crew to obtain permission to film on Davis-Monthan AFB using a retired ARIA aircraft as the backdrop. Lieutenant Colonel Kiley was the Aircraft Commander for the mission which recorded the failures with the unmanned Skylab launch and also participated in two of the following manned launches of Skylab using astronauts to man the space station.
National Geographic later sold the Big, Bigger, Biggest shows to the Science Channel.
