On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Gizmodo points out a possible venue for the Budapest story that Natasha and Hawkeye allude to during the Battle of New York. Photography is absolutely haunting...and the history of the place? Heartbreaking in its way.

Turns out there's a name for what happened in the movie Gravity: the Kessler Syndrome. It's something that people are planning preventive and remediating measures for, and that's a good thing.

(Also, the source of that article, Space Safety Magazine, is a real thing. If we want those shipyards, hotels, and whatever else we decide to build outside atmo...)

Apparently, there are people looking to make this happen for real.

Given the last few decades of Petro-Dependency, Alberta getting into this game at whatever speed they can would be a Very Good Thing to my mind. However, I can't spare a lot of cash myself right now. I do, however, have this nice little blogging platform with which to spread the word to (a) those who can investigate the project further and - once confirmed that this is a Real Thing in Progress - to (b) those have more cash than I to spend who share my thinking can do something helpful about it.

If this is not a Real Thing in Progress (and there's a chance that someone's indeed out on an internet lark), I'd like to be able to say to my nieces and nephews and their kids and grandkids that I helped in some small way to make it real.

As far as group (a) goes, I know several people reading this weblog are journalists and reporters of some experience and skill. I think I can rely upon you to investigate the matter. Once that's squared away, we can move to group (b).

Because various people have been pointing things out to me via Facebook that are catching my attention tonight.

The Geometry of Starship Design - Star Trek from robotjackelope.com. Focusing mainly on the TOS Enterprise, but a page is set aside for the Klingon D-7 as well. I was never the best geometry student in high school. I barely recall ever hearing about the "golden ratio" concept, and we never got into the Fibonacci Sequence material at all. But this is interesting. Thanks to the Star Trek Art Group on Facebook for this!

(For those of you interested in Star Wars, there's another page from the same blog.)

From the Icarus Interstellar Blog, pointed out to me by David Brin, we have some thoughts on starship design in a different direction, based on assumptions that artificial gravity will have to be attained by more realistic means. Mostly, they focus on the probability that long-haul generation ships really are going to have to be mobile towns on the scale of Melville to Moose Jaw in terms of population in order to work.

Not a mathematician or an engineer, so I'll be interested in seeing opinions from the rest of the room re: these two articles.

Finally got around to viewing this footage, and got another dose of appreciation for the workload being handled on a daily basis "upstairs".

...that I'm probably safer living in a world like this one, where such things are very rare and unskilled users aren't crashing themselves into shopping malls, office buildings, apartment towers and so on.

Much safer.

I'd still like to see those permanent settlements on the Moon, Mars and in the L-4 and L-5 points between Earth and the Moon, though.

Smartphones are filed under "nice to have while I wait for the space settlements".

So some stuff's been happening while I was fixing up the sidebars here at this here LJ...

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Spotted this IEEE Spectrum opinion piece on the state and possible future of Kennedy Space Centre today, as a result of looking for more recent news on the Cape Breton Spaceport project.

I think, based on some of the speculations in that opinion piece, that we have a fairer business rationale for anyone looking to build a spaceport in Nova Scotia now. NASA's going to want a fallback position. Probably more than one for the decades to come.

Am I wrong?