In mid-December the Syfy channel will run a three-night miniseries called “Ascension.” The idea seems interesting enough… in 1963, with JFK freaking out that nuclear war was soon going to wipe out mankind, the US secretly launched a starship on a 100-year mission to another system. Little snippets have been shown of the show; of course it’s much more “human drama” (they’re 50 years into their mission and the first murder happens, there’s social trouble on board, lots of unrealistically sexy people having sex, etc.) than actual science fiction, but I was curious to see what the ship would be. until recently only a part of the ship had been visible int he available trailers, but Syfy has released some videos that show that it is in fact an Orion-type nuclear pulse vehicle.  It’s a ship the size of the Empire State Building, and with decks laid out like in a skyscraper (a whole bunch of small decks stacked atop each other as opposed to a smaller number of really long decks, like on a cruise ship).

The science… well, she seems to be the science we’ve come to expect from Syfy, even though David Brin is the tech advisor. They’re fifty years into their mission, and the claim is that they are now at the point of no return… when in reality that point would have been very, very soon after the *beginning* of the mission. The ship also has gravity, oriented as in a skyscraper; this is done either by Magic Gravity Generators (1963? bah) or by having the ship *still* under a 1-g acceleration (after fifty years of that, ship time, they would have crossed the known universe thanks to the beauty of relativity… see HERE for the math), which seems to be the approach based on what Brin said.

So unless the imagery is inaccurate and it’s actually tumbling to generate G’s… well, there it is, I suppose. Some vids:

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And some screenshots illustrating the ship:

A display model showing the ship. It’s not a precise match for the ship shown in space, though.    

A series of pullback shots, starting at a window up front.

Interior of the “good” part of the ship.

Two views of something that doesn’t look like the Ascension. Maybe the Soviet equivalent, bopping along out there? Or the Ascension 2, built circa 2014?

Because every starship needs to have a deck where people shovel stuff into furnaces. The Enterprise D had one. oh, sure, they never showed it, but that was only because the Federation is really good at covering up the grungier stuff. But there were *hundreds* of sweaty, meaty guys below the engineering deck shovelling dark matter pellets into the Enterprises boilers.

Looks like something to add to the Nuclear Pulse Propulsion book.