Transfer Orbit
Waking the Leviathan
The story of how James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse went from game concept to blockbuster TV series
, before Syfy debuted its adaptation of the series in December. I’m reprinting it now with some minor edits.
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Image: Alcon
It’s March 2015, and I am standing on the bridge of a starship. The crew work stations look worn, the walls are covered with warning signs, and the grated floor looks like something designed to be functional. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that I was standing on a real ship, hurtling through space. Instead, I am on the set of a new television series, a location that, until now, only existed in words on a page.
(1)
YouTube channel to host it. At the link is his impressive list of sources.
I’ve spent several weekends working on a presentation of twentieth-century science fiction set in the year 2021, and here is the fruit of my labours, a 21-minute video.
(2)
BEEP BEEP, BEEP BEEP. Phil Plait, in a “Bad Astronomy” entry at
…A standard radio astronomy technique to make sure that what you see is coming from the object you’re observing is to move the telescope back and forth a bit to point to a different part of the sky and see if the signal persists (perhaps leaking into the dish from a source nearby); this is called “nodding” because it’s like a head nodding. When they did this, the signal went away, then came back when they repointed at Proxima.