Space

A UFO lands and a little alien scrambles out and heads out to plant a flag in the middle of the Space blog.  Little alien proclaims in a high pitched voice: "I claim this blog in the name of ...::consults the Technorati Profile::... Phantascene."

It appears that there was a small glitch in the transporter... not the one that Scotty is famous for having operated, no, in the transport that took James Doohan's ashes up into space and back to Earth.

Charles Chafer, owner of Space Services Inc., the company behind the launch, had said: "We launch his remains into space and return them so there's a keepsake of a little bit of Scotty who has flown to space."

Apparently Scotty did not care to be a keepsake - the rocket that carried his ashes, and those of 200 others including astronaut L Gordon Cooper, one of the first men into space, is missing in the mountains.

A company spokesman for Space Services Inc. said: "The terrain is very mountainous; it's not somewhere that you can walk or drive to. My understanding is that it will take some time to get up there."

I suggest we all drink a little toast to Mr. Doohan.

WALTER M. SCHIRRA
(CAPTAIN, USN, RET.)

Born in Hackensack,
New Jersey on March 12, 1923, Walter "Wally" Schirra was one of the original seven astronauts for Mercury 7 Project in 1959.
Schirra was the only astronaut to fly in three of the pioneering space programs: Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.

Selected by NASA as one of the first group of astronauts. Others selected: Gordon Cooper, Scott Carpenter, John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Gus
Grissom and Deke Slayton.

NASA Flights:

October 3, 1962 - Fifth Project Mercury flight. He orbited the Earth six
times

December 15, 1965 - Commander of the Gemini 6 flight.

October 11, 1968 - Commander of Apollo
7, first manned flight of the Apollo spacecraft and the Saturn 1B
rocket. Crew mates: Walter Cunningham and Donn Eisele. Mission lasted 11 days.

Schirra retired from the Navy and NASA in 1969.

Schirra co-authored several books, including: "The Real Space Cowboys" with Ed Buckbee, and "Schirra's Space" with Richard N. Billings.

Six people were injured after a train bridge collapsed.  The train
the people were riding on was also carrying eight solid rocket boosters
destined for the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla..

The eight 120 foot tall boosters, which had been coming from the ATK-Thiokol plant in Utah, had been intended for use on shuttle launches in October
and December.  The train landed on its side in a wooded area, no
reports as of this writing on the condition of the six people injured
in the bridge collapse.  The cause of the collapse is under investigation.

"Hello Computer." - Scotty: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

For years James Doohan, in his role as Scotty, kept the Starship Enterprise, NCC-1701, going. As Montgomery Scott he insisted that reading technical journals was relaxing, was andament that you could not change the laws of physics, and always sqeezed just a little more from the Enterprise's engines, usually after protesting that the ship could not take any more.

Scotty fought Klingons hand to hand for insulting his ship while turning the other cheek to anything they said about his captain. And James Doohan is credited, in the Director's Edition DVD for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), as having come up with an unrefined version of the Klingon language.

James Doohan was with the Royal Canadian Artillery when they landed on Juno Beach on D-Day. The landing left Doohan with a missing finger and nearly cost him his life. He was hit by four bullets to the leg, the middle finger of his right hand was shot off, and a bullet struck his chest and is reported to have been stopped from killing him by a silver cigarette case his brother had given to him.

Diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in July 2004, James Doohan would also face Parkinson's disease, diabetes and lung fibrosis.

James Montgomery Doohan died on July 20, 2005, the anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon. On April 28, 2007 some of his ashes were launched to the outer reaches of Earth's atmosphere on a suborbital mission. The spacecraft will then fall back to Earth.

"We launch his remains into space and return them so there's a keepsake of a little bit of Scotty who has flown to space," said Charles Chafer, owner of Space Services Inc., the company behind the launch.

Chafer goes on to say that another portion of Doohan's ashes will fly on a future mission, when they will be released into orbit.

"NCC 1701. No bloody A, B, C, or D."

Scotty
yelling at
the Enterprise-D's holodeck computer
Episode: Relics