The Truth is In Here: Inside The X-Files' Premiere Party (PICS)

You can believe again. The X-Files is back, 23 years after it first premiered in 1993, and is once again a hit. The first two episodes scored big ratings this week for Fox, with four more weeks to go of Mulder and Scully's reunion.

I had a chance to spend a day on set last summer in Vancouver, and it was a treat to see David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson reprise their Mulder/Scully banter, just like old times. My cover story is on stands now.

Here are a few pics I took at the premiere party on Jan. 12, at the California Science Center. Guests celebrated the show's revival under the space shuttle.


David Duchovny (Mulder) is back!


Creator Chris Carter gives a welcome speech, while Vince Gilligan and Duchovny look on.


Red carpet.


"I Still Want to Believe."


Inside the party.


"The truth is still out there."


Under the space shuttle.


Guest star Joel McHale.


TV Guide Magazine's X-Files issue!

More reading:

Inside The X-Files Revival, and the Surprises Mulder and Scully Will Face

On The X-Files Set: An Extended Interview With Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny

X-Files Creator Chris Carter Explains Why the Series Came Back; Plus, See an Exclusive Clip of the First Ep (VIDEO)

The X-Files' Chris Carter Reveals Plans for His Next TV Project

 

The South L.A. Tree Massacre

(Pic via LA Weekly)

Sadly lost in the excitement about the arrival of the Space Shuttle Endeavour has been the move to chop down nearly 400 trees in L.A.'s poorest neighborhoods. The trees had to come down in order to drive the shuttle from LAX to the California Science Center -- yet there was never any discussion or warning that this would happen, and never an attempt to try an alternative. The L.A. Weekly looks into the lies and spin that led to the mass tree removal. A snippet:

Until the moment Inglewood residents awoke to buzzsaws outside their homes on Sept. 3, few people knew of California Science Center president Jeffrey N. Rudolph's controversial plan to hack down more than 370 magnolia, coral, bottlebrush, eucalyptus, sycamore and pine trees that line the 12-mile shuttle route from LAX.

"This is unbelievable!" well-known wetlands activist Marcia Hanscom says with disgust.

She views the destruction of nearly 400 trees — after zero public notice or involvement — as "symptomatic of deeper problems: Here in L.A., it's OK to bulldoze a wetland away because 'it will come back.' The same disconnected thinking leads to approval of something like this tree massacre: 'We'll just plant more!' "

Few people realize that the city and the museum got away with, well, tree murder, by abusing an obscure section of L.A.'s municipal code that was actually meant to protect, not destroy, trees. Those rules normally apply to "house moving."

How Southern California Built the Space Shuttle

As the Space Shuttle prepares to lift off one last time this Friday, the L.A. Times describes how Southern California played a crucial role in its birth and continued operation:

Constructing the shuttle fleet was testament to how advanced Southern California's aerospace engineering and labor workforce had become by the 1970s — and assured that the vast assemblage of brainpower and engineering know-how would not be lost in the Southland...

The shuttle — large and aerodynamically unstable — needed sophisticated computer controls to guide the flight. The system, known as "fly by wire," is common on today's aircraft, but it was a rarity in flying machines in the 1970s. Engineers in Downey developed the computer-aided autopilot flight controls similar to today's systems that allow mammoth Boeing 747 jumbo jets to almost fly themselves.

Another challenge was building rocket engines sturdy enough to work flight after flight for 55 missions. Before the shuttle, rocket engines were mostly one-of-a-kind chemistry sets — good for one flight only. The main engines, made by Rocketdyne in Canoga Park, helped propel the 2,250-ton shuttle assembly as high as 384 miles above Earth.

"We were wrestling with the technology at the time," said Robert Biggs, project engineer at Rocketdyne. "We had about 20 major accidents, but we finally got it right."

To keep the shuttle from burning up in the furnace-like heat upon reentry, new protection was developed. More than 30,000 silica ceramic tiles were individually contoured to the spaceship's body — like a jigsaw puzzle — dissipating heat around 2,300 degrees. The tiles, made by Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. in Sunnyvale, Calif., were key to the reusability of the shuttle.

Read more here.

Did You Hear the Sonic Boom?

(Los Angeles Times pic by Gary Friedman.)

The Space Shuttle Endeavour touched down at Edwards Air Force Base Sunday afternoon at around 1:25 p.m. We were just coming out of a movie, and so missed the famous sonic boom. Darn. (Endeavour was forced to land here due to bad weather in Florida. The landing here means the shuttle must now be placed on a jet and sent back East.)

One of these days, I'd love to make the trip out there to see a landing... but unfortunately, they come so infrequently -- and usually with little notice -- that I don't know when that's going to be possible.

Had the Space Shuttle Challenger not exploded in 1986, there's a chance we'd regularly be viewing Space Shuttle launches out here on the West Coast. That's because Vandenberg Air Force Base had been selected as the home to the shuttle's west coast operations. The Air Force's first Space Shuttle flight -- STS-62-A -- was scheduled for the summer of 1986 -- but the Challenger disaster put that on ice. The west coast program was eventually scrapped all together.