It’s a record! As of June 29, Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka has spent a total of 804 days in space — more than any other human in history.
Source: Space Record: Cosmonaut Logs 804 Days (and Counting) in Orbit
Monthly Archives: June 2015
‘Floating Cloud’ Could Replace Mirrors on Future Space Telescopes
Using clouds of glitter to reflect light could be a way of reducing the mass of telescopes that rockets need to heft into orbit, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory suggests.
Source: ‘Floating Cloud’ Could Replace Mirrors on Future Space Telescopes
“Ultimate Voyage” Concert Tour Dates Announced; North America Performances Start January 17
Dates after the jump.
Star Trek’s Oldest Living Actor Speaks
News – Olaf Pooley, who guest starred in the Voyager episode “Blink of an Eye,” is Trek’s oldest living actor. Check out or extensive interview about his life, career and Trek experience.
Fall On Your Sword: Shatner of the Mount
Enterprise: The Andorian Incident
Join us at 9:30pm Eastern for the TrekFan Watch-Along every Friday night! This week’s episode is ‘The Andorian Incident,’ episode 7 of the first season of ‘Enterprise.’ To join the watch-along, simply follow this link to the TrekFan chat, and get your Netflix episode queued up! As always, new folks on the TrekFan chat are eligible for cool prizes. Come by, and feel free to invite your friends!
Why Star Trek: Voyager Meant The World To Me
Twenty years ago today, Star Trek: Voyager premiered. Of the five live-action Star Trek series, Voyager is not the best. If you were ranking them, Voyager and Enterprise would probably duke it out for last place. But none of that matters, because Star Trek: Voyager meant everything to me as a child.
SpaceX Rocket Fails During Cargo Launch to Space Station
An unmanned SpaceX cargo mission crashed back to Earth today (June 28), marking the third failure of a resupply flight to the International Space Station in the past eight months. SpaceX and NASA officials still aren’t sure exactly what happened.
Source: SpaceX Rocket Fails During Cargo Launch to Space Station
Star Trek: Vanguard: Precipice
Star Trek: Vanguard: Precipice by David Mack
The fifth book in the excellent Vanguard series, Precipice continues the excellent storytelling that makes this series worth reading. Sort of like ‘DS9 during TOS’ Precipice takes a somewhat darker and more long-term story arc approach to telling its story than typical TOS-era stories. There’s several inter-linking storylines during the book and, like any big story arc, it will be really hard to understand if this is your first Vanguard novel so I’d start at the beginning. However, if you’ve read the other Vanguard books this may well be the best one yet. In this book, Cervantes Quinn goes against his usual character to help fight the Klingons a la Errand of Mercy; Diego Reyes is kidnapped by the Klingons and brought to a much younger Gorkon; and Tim Pennington and T’Prynn go off on an adventure together despite their earlier mishaps. Finally, Carol Marcus and Ming Xiong study the mysterious Mirdonyae artifact.
Like most of David Mack’s books, the writing is crisp and not overly flowery as some Trek authors can tend to be on occasion. The book ends with a cliffhanger which is annoying, but to be expected for a book part of a series like this. Overall, this is a solid outing in the Vanguard series and fans of the earlier works can expect the same high quality here they’ve seen in earlier books in the series.
Score: 8 out of 10.
Reviewer: Daniel Handlin