WASHINGTON – NASA announced Wednesday that its multimedia partner, Dreamtime Holdings, has delivered the first of two shipments of high-definition television (HDTV) equipment that will be used in upcoming space missions.

The equipment will deliver high-quality, ground television coverage of space launches, as well as provide documentation of Earth-based scientific and research activities, the agency said.

"Dreamtime will also provide NASA two high-definition television cameras that will document the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery at the Kennedy Space Center on October 5," said Rodney Grubbs, deputy manager for the collaboration partnership and lead for NASA's digital television implementation at the Marshall Center.

Expedition One, launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, will fly American commander Bill Shepherd and Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev to their new home aboard the International Space Station (ISS). They will be the first crew to live and conduct experiments aboard the ISS, spending four months in orbit before returning to Earth.

Dreamtime also will provide HDTV documentation of crew activities aboard the orbiting space station and on space shuttle missions, as well as agency research and science activities.

The NASA-Dreamtime partnership also calls for the latter to produce educational and documentary programming, as well as create an interactive, multimedia portal site (http://www.dreamtime.com) that will provide more complete and in-depth access to information about space and space exploration than is currently available.

The multimedia database will combine NASA video, audio, still photographs, high-resolution images, historical documents and three-dimensional views of spacecraft. This space portal will offer public access to thousands of NASA images, sounds, documents, blueprints and plans.

The Silicon Valley start-up has been going through some growing pains since it came on board this past May. Some top NASA officials' feathers were ruffled when Dreamtime didn't show up for the July launch of the Zvezda service module with an HDTV camera to record the historic event.

Further tension between the partnership was apparent last week when NASA learned that Dreamtime met with CBS, ABC and Fox networks to discuss plans for a reality-based TV show involving civilians in space. In a letter to Dreamtime, NASA said that that the multimedia company "shall, at no time, represent or claim to represent NASA or act as NASA’s agent."

But, today’s news seems to be a step in the right direction for the joint effort.

"This is a very important step in the NASA and Dreamtime partnership," said Brian Kelly, NASA collaboration manager for the partnership at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "It puts NASA on the cutting edge of digital technology and is tangible proof of what can happen when NASA and industry work together toward a common goal."