I'm excited about 'Enterprise in Space'—and so will you!

You've never seen anything like this.

You've seen Kickstarter and other crowd-funded projects… you've seen fan films, games, novels, events… a lot of them I'm involved with. But no—you've never seen anything like this: 

"This" is the Enterprise in Space project you may have been hearing me hint about in recent weeks.

Look, I had no clue I'd be wrapped up in this non-profit mission as the year started. Now I'm thrilled I got involved and can spill the beans and the excitement: There's so much!—but hang with me while I try. The site and project is finally LIVE, and it is based on a few simple premises:

Take our shared and inspired love of space and exploration, whether fact or fiction (right?)... give 100+ student minds worldwide a chance to fly their space projects in orbit—all disciplines and, for once, for free ...let the donors come along as virtual crewmembers... and make science fact out of that science fiction. It's a great way to play the adventure and pay homage to all our sci-fi heroes and creators with a real-world result.

There are SO many groovy moving parts, it's hard to get it all out. For starters, you can take a look at the website's first video to get an idea.

But as founder Shawn Case says, simply: "Isn't it time a real Enterprise flew in space?" That was Shawn's starting premise... and if all goes as planned, that will finally happen in 2019—along with a big outreach to educators and students, helpful corporations and non-profits, and of course grassroots funding... all over the world. And after the 8-foot craft re-enters for recovery, the whole thing goes on a tour of museums and conventons before going on a display at a major space museum (yes, we're talking with THAT one). And, of course, the experiments' data will be maintained, analyzed and made available.

Just to be clear: The NASA space shuttle Enterprise was an unpowered test ship, remember, and flew key but dummy drop-tests; Richard Branson's same-named Virgin craft was sub-orbital. Thus, the name "Enterprise" is an honored one, from namesakes of Star Trek's various iconic and beloved ships to their own namesake as two heroic US Navy aircraft carriers, and even sail ships before that.

Shawn, a Trek fan and space buff from Oregon, did what a lot of us do in our daydreams:  figure out how to marry up the most inspirational, optimistic science fiction with science fact, right? It got me excited, and it got the National Space Society excited too—where both Gene and Majel Roddenberry served as prior board members...excited enough to sponsor what Shawn and his team have planned out for over three years, now officially the "NSS Enterprise orbiter." It's got the likes of Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin and Nichelle "Uhura" Nichols, Grace Lee "Yeoman Rand" Whitney and renowned broadcaster Hugh Downs...and many more... just as excited.

And the first part of all is... there's a contest—open to ANYONE—to design the thing! Sure the orbiter has to be spaceworthy, but check out these rules and get your entry in. Call all the designers, doodlers and CG artists you know as well. That's why there's no shiny spacecraft to show off—yet—but the contest ends Nov. 27, so get cracking. Or sharing.

The optimistic brand of science fiction—from Gene's Star Trek to the forward-tilting futurism of Heinlein and Asimov—has always had a mutual love affair with NASA and our real-life space heroes, right? I mean, as I've said often, I was a NASA kid way before I was a Trek fan, growing up on all the early flights—especially the Apollo moon landings. We played Apollo at recess, guys! I turned our treehouse into a LM and we put on whole Apollo missions.

I bet you feel the same way, right? You swell with pride every time we fix a satellite, discover a new deep-space secret, or rev up another rover on Mars. And I bet you've fumed "Stop picking on NASA, budget-cutters!" more than once the last decade or two, right?

Now, yes, we're not talking backyard model rockets here. But Shawn's dream isn't just shared by you and me: It tugs at the heartstrings of inspiration for a lot of fans—many of whom are today's aerospace pros, rocket scientists, project managers, top educators... and that's exactly who got excited enough to join the EIS team. I now know the guy who oversaw Citibank's world-record eCommerce system ... the woman who managed the $6 billion expansion of O'Hare Airport... a longtime engineer for the space shuttle and unmanned probes galore... NASA's only two-time educator of the year—but Buck Field, Alice Hoffman, Fred Becker and Lynne Zielinski are just the tip of the iceberg of the talent within the EIS group, all under the legal sponsorship of the National Space Society. The meet has been meeting twice weekly for months, jointly on Skype calls from California, Oregon, Texas, Illinois, other states and even Chile.

And THAT is why this $40 million project can be done, with Space X boosters and SpaceWorks capsule fabricators as the intended contractors—that kind of talent pool. ... Wait, did your eyes glaze over at that budget? How about, as Shawn says, you think of it as "2 million people worldwide giving $20 each...one time"? We have non-profit and corporate grants, too, and aerospace tech testing materials for re-entry... but our viral target stays the same. No one or two big sponsors in control ... but grassroots for "the cost of a movie ticket," as Shawn says.


See, fans, don't think of your typical Kickstarter, here. One of Shawn's goals that I Iove is that there IS no donor bureaucracy with EIS—no levels, no toteboard, no manic requests on ticking-clock deadlines. 'Cause let's be honest: you know I will support all my projects and hope you do too, but there is a bit of crowdfunder fatigue out there.

So, with EIS, just send in $20 for the entire project, and be a virtual NSS Enterprise crewmember: You get an immediate certificate, plus first updates on every step of the mission AND, most cool: Your name goes on a chip that will fly and come back post-flight, for you to see yourself at an event near you. And, for just that $20, you've got plenty left still to help out your other fave projects asking for your help—or shop for those great Trek Christmas gifts!

Look, do me a favor: Share the design contest info now (it closes Nov. 27). (Later there'll also be a contest to design the mission patch.) Share the website, Facebook and Twitter, Google+ and YouTube with everyone you know—the more far afield the better (I'm lookin' at you, my European and Asian friends, for starters!). Tell all the cool teachers and bright young minds you know about the experiments submission and curricula materials. Volunteer to help out, either live or online...or even be a sponsor if you want to go big. We need everything from local event speakers to video/animators to social media voices.

Most of all, please "sign aboard", cadets, with your $20 donation that helps make it all possible—and claims your place on the digital manifest you can see yourself in a few years.

Then follow along as Enterprise in Space, step by step, makes this inspired dream a reality. There's more to come: a tablet showing your "crew" image waving from the portal window, filmed by a tether-towed camera? A new technology of AI-style vocal smart computing for experiment and craft control, a la Starfleet? The ideas are rolling in as we speak...others are volunteering help from their expertise areas .... and there will soon be a weekly EIS podcast produced by our Trekland: On Speaker producer and friend Chris Jones at trek.fm to really keep everyone up-to-date, along with the e-newsletter you sign up for on the homepage.

I am aboard as the "promotions manager" for EIS, which mostly means I'll be the voice and face of bringing the excitement and details and talented people of EIS to the fan, space and genre community at our live and recorded events...and at conventions and conferences. I won't blog here at Trekland so much as link you over to our posts, podcasts, and press releases as each project milestone is reached. 

But I do hope you sign up and join us on this adventure—a positive, real-world outcome based on all the good vibes from that positive future that Gene and so many others aspired and inspired to.

As for me ...It feels great to be a "space kid" again!

A map of distant galaxies? This puts it in perspective!

Whoa, and I remember when the "little blue dot" used to refer to EARTH.  Nope, here the blue dot is the entire MILKY WAY GALAXY. But this really puts all the quadrant rivalries into perspective!

(Though I hope you still find this little reference to be of help…)



By Ken Croswell at ScienceMag.org ...

How to find your way home from deep space

If aliens ever abduct you to a galaxy far, far away, this map might help you find your way back home. Presented online today in Nature, the map spans more than 1.5 billion light-years, coloring the densest concentrations of observed galaxies red and areas with the fewest galaxies blue. 

Your home galaxy, the Milky Way, is the blue dot at the center. The red region above the Milky Way includes Virgo, the closest galaxy cluster, about 55 million light-years from Earth. The orange curve illustrates the key finding of the new work: It encircles galaxies that would fall toward one another along the curved white lines if space weren't expanding; the astronomers have named this huge assemblage Laniakea, after Hawaiian words for "spacious heaven." It is 100 quadrillion times as massive as the sun—equivalent to 100,000 Milky Ways—and stretches across more than half a billion light-years of space. 

… more...

Shields up! A better "invisibility cloak" unveiled

More treknology, folks:

I don't know what's more amazing—that science has already made more major strides in this area, or that the lead paragraph uses Harry Potter instead of Romulans:

'Perfect' Invisibility Cloak Uses Metamaterials To Bend Light

The days when invisibility cloaks were confined to the world of "Harry Potter" may soon be over. Physicists at Duke University announced Monday that they had successfully cloaked an object with "perfect" invisibility. ...

...So how did they keep these reflections out of the new design?

"Landy's new microwave cloak is naturally divided into four quadrants, each of which have voids or blind spots at their intersections and corners with each other," explains io9. "Thus, to avoid the reflectivity problem, Landy was able to correct for it by shifting each strip so that is met its mirror image at each interface."

Ah. Well, at least we got a Clue about the quadrants in there: "Secret passage to Gamma Quadrant: one wormhole move."

Once again, reality trumps Star Trek—amazing!

Forget your cell-phone example and your hands-off medical scanner prototypes.



What happened this weekend ...

Baumgartner Completes Record-Setting Jump

ROSWELL, N.M. — Extreme athlete Felix Baumgartner landed gracefully on Earth after a 24-mile jump from the stratosphere in a dramatic, record-breaking feat that may also have marked the world's first supersonic skydive.

... was pretty much Trekland science fiction in 1994:


Okay, so technically—to echo Kirk's "orbital" skydive (and B'Elanna's via Holodeck, from Voyager's "Extreme Risk" )—a true "orbit" would occur at a minimum of about 100 miles altitude, and Baumgartner jumped from about 24. Thus, unlike Kirk's dive suit seen here (which likewise was recycled for B'Elanna's scene) there was no need for any high-friction re-entry "personal heatshield" tiles; Baungartner simply wasn't high enough up to encounter that kind of atmospheric friction heat.

 But still... wow. 

Space elevators? Not just for the Nezu anymore

It was hardly the origin of the idea in either sci-fi or sci-fact, but Trekland got its take on the long-time "orbital elevator" concept as the plot device behind Voyager's third-season "Rise!" The script was an ambitious if not overtly satisfying Tuvok/Neelix pairer aboard a sabotaged mag-lev "tether carriage" rising (get it?) into the clouds about a disputed Nezu colony.

That was the fiction. Now, a Japanese company says it wants to do the same, basically .. and can likely do it.

By 2050 ...

Space Elevator Plans Unveiled by Japanese Company

... According to the proposal, 30 passengers at a time would depart from the equator and travel in an enclosure guided by a 60,000 mile (96,000 km) cable that stretches a quarter of the way to the moon. The final destination would be a spaceport that contains laboratories and living quarters 22,000 miles (35,000 km) above the Earth's surface. ...

Yep, another one: the Star Trek/"Email" creation link

Didn't exactly realize it til today, on the 29th birthday of the copyright of the term "email"—another brand lost to generic language use!—but the guy behind the name and early system credits Star Trek for that, too.


Says developer V.A. Shiva on his website, getting attention today in news stories for the anniversary of his Aug. 30, 1982 copyright filing—first developed at age 14!—for his EMAIL messaging system.

"The two words, 'Electronic' and 'EMAIL' juxtaposed together for me originally brought images of vaporizing paper and somehow transporting it across electrical wires, like the transporter in Star Trek," says Shiva. "That is how NEW those two terms next to each other were in 1978." 

Once again, it's NASA and/or Star Trek that inspired the dreamers—plus, in this case, a a college computer lab professor's personal challenge to create such a system. We never know where, or how—but it comes back, time and again. And it's waaaay beyond just cell phones.

That's why we need them BOTH back—at full funding, and more frequently than just the occasional splash! (I'm lookin' at you, Congress and CBS...)

There's a lot more about it all on Shiva's website (Shiva, at left), including a great timeline infographic about his work and others' in the development of email—a great snapshot for those of you whom this all sneaked up on, or for those of you who never knew anything else!

Tight makeup budgets justified!: Russian says alien first contact due by 2131—with bipedals!

I know we've had some loopy surveys and opinion pieces from Russian pols and scientists in the past...

But here comes one, Andrei Finkelstein, who predicts that Earth humanity will have "real" alien first contact far ahead of Cochrane's with Vulcans in 2063—32 years or more earlier, to be exact.

And stop pooh-poohing the bumpy-headed aliens, while you're at it:

"The astronomer added that 10 percent of known planets circling suns in the galaxy resemble Earth, making life on such planets highly likely, and that aliens are most likely to resemble humans with two arms, two legs and a head, per Reuters."

Finkelstein's remarks came Monday during an international SETI conference in Russia. Ironically, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in Mountain View, Calif., is suffering from funding cuts and a trimmed budget that has left its ATA program unable to scan the stars for life, even as this bold pronouncement is being made. You can help out by giving what you can to its $200,000 fund drive here.

The brick heard round the world: who's really to thank?

We say it tongue in cheek on this anniversary date...

You can watch the clip below, but don't thank William Shatner—thank Gene, and Matt Jefferies, and Wah Chang—as you thank Dr. Martin Cooper (right) for making (and building) that first cell phone call happen 38 years ago today.

(And note, per the best in fictional "continuity checking," that Cooper made his call to a land line—of course. What other cell phone was there?)

Yes, but can *it* eat tritanium?

If you're a good little Trekland dweller—and I know you are—I'm sure your mind turns to thoughts of Bird-of-Prey hulls when you read this headline:

New Species of Rust-Eating Bacteria Destroying the Titanic

... Using DNA technology, Dalhousie scientists Henrietta Mann and Bhavleen Kaur and researchers from the University of Sevilla in Spain were able to identify a new bacterial species collected from rusticles (a formation of rust similar to an icicle or stalactite) from the Titanic wreck. The iron-oxide-munching bacterium has fittingly been named Halomonas titanicae. ...

I wonder if it's just A Matter of Honor that there's no fat, pissed-off Klingon commander out there bellowing about how losing the Titanic ahead of schedule to these little beasties is really just a Federation trick?

Can't you just see the real "rusticles" sitting pretty as undersea snacks here?