I watched the two-hour movie Virtuality from Friday night. The plot was interesting to me, but my favorite part was how hard they worked on some of the science. The craft Phaeton is to be the first interstellar mission, and the story picks up as they're approaching Neptune for a slingshot out of the solar system. The craft is built like a large ring (like the rotating ship in Battlestar Galactica) with an orion propulsion system. The entire mission is being filmed as a reality TV show with some awesome views of the spacecraft exterior showing the stars rotating relative to the motionless camera, and the crew uses virtual reality goggles to escape for some R&R. The show wasn't picked up by Fox, but there's certainly some potential for another network (SciFi?) to do so. If you want to try and make that happen, there are some resources here. There's also some cool videos there, like this one showing the building of one of the sets.

So, we're coming up on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, and the laser experiment based on equipment left on the surface gets cut. Make no mistake: if there's no good science coming from it, I think it's time to cut it, but the timing is just weird.

In other news, the first couple to get married in zero gravity tied the knot.

Not the new Orion that NASA's building, but the original Orion, proposed to get us to the stars and get rid of nuclear weapons at the same time. Check out twelve minutes of the show.

The show looks good without the Orion angle, but the geekiness quotient went over the top with it.

If the House's attempt to cut funding for COTS is allowed to stand, the way forward for cheaper space access will be murky at best. I may have more to say later.

Sunday Update: Looks like this story is less than the original fire. I love the whole "we saved money by winding down a program that was already winding down" stuff. All politicians do it, but I still twitch when I see it in action.

Some discussion at Selenian Boondocks and Transterrestrial Musings about NASA's current risk culture and how that may have played into their decision for the current architecture to take us back to the moon and beyond. Plus, I've been a fan of depots for a long time.

A couple is getting married on a Zero-G plane. This is a pretty cool concept. I guess the next step is a marriage on a suborbital flight.

I'd read about this before, but hadn't seen the actual artwork. I think it's pretty cool.

While I think its significance will be overplayed, I've been following Atlantis's mission to Hubble pretty closely. There are roles for people in space, and no mission shows it better than these repair and upgrade flights. I went to an on-site showing of release (when Atlantis let Hubble go) and that's a whole separate story that won't get posted here. I wish they'd been able to show this video however, as it shows the crew crowding around the windows to see it go away, and you can actually hear the shuttle's thrusters firing. You also hear camera shutters clicking, leading to images like this.

There's an article out there saying that the Global Positioning System (GPS) is due to fail in the year 2010. I'm pretty sure that this is a case of the media overblowing things. The system is designed to degrade gracefully, meaning that the first indications would be a decreasing accuracy, and it would take the failure of many satellites to mean a complete loss of navigational data. Of course, when GPS was designed the cold war was going on, and the thought was that satellites would be lost in combat, not contractual delays and budgetary malaise. In the end, the effect is the same.

Update on Friday: The Air Force weighs in, though the article author isn't buying it. In an odd coincidence, it looks like the AF spokesman used to carpool to work with my wife. This is a problem with satellite operations in that most spacecraft are one failure away from ending their mission. When you need 24 of them to keep a constellation going and have 30, with 3 more you could "un-retire", it's not a completely rosy picture, but it's certainly not black either.

Norm Augustine has been asked to lead a review of human spaceflight plans. Some people see this as a chance to redirect the current direction of NASA, away from the Ares Boosters that are the backbone of current plans to get people into orbit and beyond after the shuttle retires.

This is the second time Norm Augustine has been asked to do something like this, the last time was in 1990. I haven't read the report, but since Bob Park thinks the 1990 report is a good place to start for this new one, I guess I should.

The Onion investigates.

Note: While this story is funny and clean, the other 'news' segments are less wholesome.

I attended the 6th Annual CubeSat Conference at Cal Poly last week. The whole thing had a very "Home Brew Computer Club" feel to it. Summary of the event here.

I presented an overview of TEMPO. We're definitely not on the hairy edge of what a CubeSat can do, but people were excited to see CubeSats contributing to human spaceflight, even if it's in a small way. Our current direction, going through final approval now, is to drop a CubeSat-like object from a balloon at high altitude. This test can be done very cheaply, and will provide a few seconds of artificial gravity before atmospheric drag becomes a big problem. We'll also get some spectacular pictures and films, such as this group. Be sure to check out the last ascent video, which transitions rapidly to a descent video.

Lots of good discussion about NASA's need for an administrator here at Space Politics. It also includes news of a potential review of the current architecture and a re-direct. Of course, that blog allows comments (my software doesn't allow it), so you can chime in...

The Orion spacecraft, now being built to carry astronauts to the space station and later on to the moon, was originally meant to carry six astronauts to Earth orbit and four beyond. Now, the design is changing to make it just carry four astronauts to orbit. According to the article, the design change is meant to save development time by only building one interior configuration, not to save weight.

and the guy who built a 1/10 scale, 1600lb Saturn V rocket then flew it in Maryland is definitely on the line. In all seriousness, though, this is very cool in a way that cool is not normally measured.