Pretty sure this sort of thing tends to be frowned upon by the Secret Service. Imagine this was 2014 and the play used an Obama stand-in…
Stay classy, actrons.
This is, ummm…
This is *not* a NASA concept, but one produced by the “Parker Brothers,” builders of Hollywood prop vehicles. It kinda looks “cool,”which is certainly good from a PR standpoint… but there’s a whole lot about the engineering design that’s head-scratching. Why the concessions to aerodynamics, when that is of approximately zero use in the incredibly thin atmosphere of Mars? Why all the artsy doodads, like the flags and logos that appear to be metal *relief* structures? Why does it look like something Batman would be busy welding Gatling guns to? And I’m frankly stumped by the wheels. They said the “cutouts” are so the wheels don’t get clogged up. Is… is that actually a concern with the incredibly dry Martian sand? Couldn’t rocks get jammed into those cutouts? What’s with the external bars in front of the windshield?Is this thing pressurized? Is it nuclear powered, and can the reactor put out 1.21 gigawatts? Does Jan Michael Vincent keep a dirtbike in the back?
Yet even moar:
Commercials tend to “pull at the heartstrings” in order to sell you crap. There have been I don’t know how many commercials that tell a sobby story about some family getting together for one last family road trip; one running right now – I think for a car company – has three or four generations of folks taking granny on a trip across America with her dead husbands ashes, because he always wanted to take her, blah, blah, blah. Many other commercials that extol the virtues of “big dreams,” and the promise kids have of being anything they want to be when they grow up.
And then there’s this kind, which made me laugh a lot more than it probably aughtta.
Face it: few things funnier than reality smacking up “dreams” upside the head. At least when its someone elses dreams… when it’s your own, it’s a tragedy. But someone else? Comedy.
Space.com has a few really nice photos from the recent launch & landing. Especially nifty is a close-up shot showing the booster shortly after launch.
For those unaware, “Cowboy Bebop” was a late-1990’s Japanese anime TV series. Set in the late 21st century, it follows a small crew of bounty hunters as they, well, hunt bounties across the Solar System. For a lot of people, the jazz soundtrack had them hooked. For me, it was the interesting world building. Earth was trashed a few decades ago when a “gate” (the large orbital “stargates” that let ships travel FTL from world to world) being tested on the Moon went kerflooey. But society at this point seems to have moved on, with colonies on Mars and Ganymede and such, with a number of vast rotating O’Neill colonies.
Calling it an animated prototype for “Firefly” would not be entirely uncalled-for.
It did suffer from the same WTF-itis that assails the majority of anime, with a lot of silly-weird Just Cuz,but it was nonetheless an overall damned fine series.
And now… live action:
No data on what network or who’s going to star in it. Keanu Reeves was a whole lot of people’s favorite to play the main character of Spike back in the day when fans discussed a hypothetical live action adaptation, but Keanu is a few decades too old by this point. If the series is faithful to the environments of the original it’s going to be *expensive.*
Fantastic Plastic has released the 1/200 scale model of the Deep Impact “Messiah” spacecraft that I mastered for them in CAD a few years ago. Took a long time to get here, but it looks like a really spiffy model. At 27 inches long and 200+ pieces including photoetch, it’s kind of a beast.
Even more Utah skies via phone.
Yes, you too can have nuclear power in your own home. Seems to actually work. Only one problem…
In short, little sealed glass vials of beta-emitting tritium with a phosphor coating on the inside to convert the beta radiation into visible light are sandwiched between two PV cells. This leads to a battery that puts out just enough juice to power very small devices. Cool! The problem is that those tritium vials cost about $15 to $30 a pop, so you’re looking at more than $30 in parts to make said nuclear battery. Is it cost effective? Is it fundamentally practical? Mmmm… probably not. But for less than a hundred bucks, you end up being able to boast that your thermometer or some such is Nuclear Powered.
Here’s another, talkier video describing much the same thing:
Leave it to the cartoon squirrels to say (using NSFW language) what we’re all thinking: