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.