16 Sunsets to launch next week: the history of the Space Shuttle

On Thursday 7th November, TellTale Industries and Antica will release the first episode of brand-new podcast, 16 Sunsets, in partnership with Acast.

The 10-part series chronicles the dramatic history of NASA’s Space Shuttle era, as told by the people who built it and flew it.

16 Sunsets is an independently produced series from the production team behind the multi-million-times downloaded and award-winning podcast, 13 Minutes to the Moon. Last year, TellTale raised substantial funding and a loyal community of fans through for this series through a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

The series is written and presented by doctor, and broadcaster Dr Kevin Fong, and scored by celebrated composer Christian Lundberg, part of Hans Zimmer’s Bleeding Fingers Composers’ Collective.

From long-term collaborators Antica Productions and TellTale Industries, 16 Sunsets marks the beginning of a new content arm dedicated to premium, global-facing audio originals building highly engaged communities. Antica and TellTale have further original titles built around personalities in the US and UK in production for launch in the next quarter.

First launched on April 12th 1981, Shuttle was a unique vehicle the likes of which the world had never before seen. Sitting on the edge of space in low Earth orbit, hurtling around the Earth at more than 17,000 mph, its astronaut crews would watch 16 sunrises and sunsets every 24 hours.

Across thirty years and 135 missions, it changed what we knew about the universe and the way we saw ourselves. It offered a vision of hope and a future in which there might be a place for everyone.

But the full story of how it came to be is a strange and fascinating tale that – until recently – remained hidden in classified US Government documents. Now in this ten-part series Kevin Fong recounts the events, people and political forces that forged the space shuttle programme into existence.

Through searching interviews with NASA’s space shuttle engineers, astronauts and flight controllers, Kevin and the 16 Sunsets team chart its voyage and surprising origins: from inception as an instrument of the Cold War, to its role as a ship of exploration like none other before it.

And for Kevin this is a personal story; he grew up inspired by the space shuttle and its astronaut crews, and later went on to work as a doctor with NASA’s space life science and medical teams in Houston. He was one amongst a generation of people for whom space shuttle represented the edge of possibility.

16 Sunsets is the story of that time, of a flourishing space age and the hopes of a world in which the dream of human space exploration had become a reality.

Exec producers on the series are Kevin Fong, Jago Lee, Rami Tzabar and Stuart Coxe.