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 The bet between Tibor Pacher and myself continues to draw emails, proving that my friend Tibor was right when he saw an interstellar wager
as a teaching opportunity. I still maintain that an interstellar
mission will not be launched anywhere near as early as 2025, but Tibor
does have his advocates, as you can see on the Long Bets site.
Moreover, it’s been useful to plug in distances and velocities for a
2000-year mission to a place like Proxima Centauri when I speak to
audiences about how large the distance between the stars really is.
2000 years is a long time, but we’re still talking 650 kilometers per
second, and just 20 years to the Oort Cloud!
And as a guy who used to build model airplanes back in my youth,
first in plastic and then from balsa wood (wonderful memories of
working with kits of World War I and II aircraft from Guillow), I can relate to Tibor’s latest venture. MiniSpaceWorld
is an attempt to create, at a European site still to be determined, a
wide-ranging exhibit covering the state of the art in rocketry and
pointing toward a future that encompasses missions to extrasolar
planets. Tibor’s inspiration for this was the amazing Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, an exhibition that may be the most spectacular gathering of model railway talent ever assembled in a single place.
With content ranging from the experiments of Galileo up to existing
space installations worldwide and extending to showcase potential
exoplanetary environments, MiniSpaceWorld aims to cover the gamut of
space exploration, all in a miniaturized format that can pack an
enormous amount of material into a small space, roughly 3500 square
meters in two levels, with a potential for growth. The design contest
soliciting ideas in all categories can be accessed through the MSW
site, where details of contest entries and the format to be used are
also provided. A jury including Tau Zero’s Marc Millis will judge the
winners, with an award ceremony to be held in December in Budapest,
organized in conjunction with Galaktika, the award-winning European science fiction magazine.
One aspect of MiniSpaceWorld will be modeling of existing space installations around the world. Image credit: Ferenc Gál.
The contest is open now and will run until October 15, a chance to
contribute to a scale model world for space exploration that, Tibor
hopes, will help to promote public interest and funding for future
ventures. It’s an ambitious project that deserves support. I notice
that the Miniatur Wunderland venue in Hamburg draws 700,000 visitors a
year, a demonstration that small scale modeling can grow into a
significant opportunity for education over time. Building the
intellectual framework now — especially for the kids — can help us down
the road once we emerge into a time of more robust funding for deep
space missions.
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