Star Trek designers Mike and Denise Okuda disagree with the new direction in the space program and have sent a letter to fans, encouraging them to write to President Obama and to their elected representatives in hopes of getting Project Constellation restored.

The letter is as follows:

Dear Friends,

As long-time supporters of real-life space exploration, Denise and I were disappointed to learn that the proposed NASA budget for 2011 would cancel Project Constellation and the planned return to the Moon. Constellation, as you may know, began in 2004, after the tragic loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia and its crew. NASA was determined to make spaceflight safer for its astronauts, and it knew that it had to give those astronauts a worthwhile mission: Exploring the final frontier.

Constellation is tasked with developing boosters, spacecraft, and other systems to provide a safer replacement for the Space Shuttle, one that would enable a return to the Moon for the specific purpose of developing the ability for humans to live on another world. Unlike Apollo, Constellation is designed to run on a comparatively constrained budget. Constellation’s Ares boosters are based on Space Shuttle technology, reducing their development costs and improving safety and reliability.

Since 2004, NASA has made a lot of progress with Constellation. New rocket engines have been designed and tested. A new launch pad has been built at the Kennedy Space Center, and a massive new launch tower has just been completed. Prototype Orion capsules are being tested, even as prototype moon rovers are trekking through the desert. Design work on Altair lunar landers and next-generation space suits is well underway. And last October, NASA conducted the successful first launch of Project Constellation, the Ares I-X Development Test Flight. We’re finally on our way back to the Moon, and heading out to Mars.

Now, the administration has proposed to cancel Constellation in favor of a “flexible path” of technology development and the use of commercial launch services for astronauts to get into orbit. While technology development is a very good idea, it’s not a substitute for an actual mission with a real goal. Without a goal and a specific plan, we believe that NASA, however well-intentioned, will simply end up spending a lot of money without actually going anywhere. It’s happened before. We don’t want it to happen again. And while we believe that commercial spaceflight will be a reality in the relatively near future, the fact is that no such capability exists yet. Spaceflight is a difficult, dangerous enterprise, and it would be foolish to gamble the future of our nation’s space program by abandoning systems that are already well into development. With so much progress already made, we believe that canceling Constellation would be a serious mistake.

The good news is that the proposed budget is just that: A proposal. Over the next few weeks the Congress will review the proposal and will make whatever changes it deems necessary. Constellation can be saved if members of Congress, and the President, see that their constituents want it. That’s why we’re asking you to support Constellation by writing to the President and to your elected representatives.

Here’s a website that we’ve put together with more information on Constellation, plus resources on how to reach your elected officials.

Support Constellation

Space exploration is vital source of technology and innovation for our society. The space program is one of the most effective means to stimulate economic growth, both in the short term and the long run. And exploration inspires our young people, even as it helps us comprehend the wonders of the final frontier, now and in the future. Please join us in making that future a reality by writing letters and by spreading the word to your friends. We very much need your help, and we need it today.

Sincerely,

Mike and Denise Okuda

The key to Star Trek: Online was figuring out what had happened to everyone’s favorite races, then deciding where to go from there.

According to Star Trek: Online’s Christine Thompson, there was a “metastory to the game.” “We needed to figure out what happened with the Romulans, the Klingons, the Cardassians, etc.,” she said. “And once we had all those pieces in place, we needed to figure out where they move from there. There are things you go through in the game tutorial that are relevant later on, when you’ve ranked up to admiral. There are things we’ve set up that run all the way through the game, and beyond.”

“Beyond” means planning for the game’s future, which will be evolving and changing. “Because this is an MMO, the cool thing is, we’re never done developing it,” explained Thompson. “We’re always going to be adding new stuff and new story to it. So I’m already thinking six months out, twelve months out, ‘Okay, what are we going to do next? How will the story move forward? When the players find out, for example, what was really behind the destruction of Romulus, how will that affect everything else?”

“The first three major areas of the game each have fourteen episodes,” said Thompson. “Those episodes each constitute about forty-five minutes to an hour and a half of play, and they’re strung together to tell a larger coherent story. In addition, we have all the patrol content and exploration content, and those are little one-act tasks players can perform, but they’ve given me opportunities to drop in a little more story for the overall game.”

If the Star Trek: Online structure seems like a new season of Star Trek, that’s not accidental, according to Star Trek: Online Executive Producer Craig Zinkievich. “All of the content in Star Trek Online, the vision of the content in the game, is to make it feel as though you’re in an episode or a movie,” he said. “And like those, you’re never in one place for any period of time. You’re in space, you receive a distress call, you beam down to a planet and rescue some scientists, beam up to a space station, collect vital data, get back to your ship in time for a climactic space battle. That is really what we want the content to feel like, players constantly moving back and forth between environments. You’re constantly moving, constantly exploring.”

Star Trek Magazine issue 24 arrives at newsstands on February 9.

In addition to the Klingons, Star Trek Magazine issue 24 will give readers “exclusive access” to the Star Trek DVD launch party with comments from some of the stars of the movie, and “Tribble Tweets,” a new way at looking at The Trouble with Tribbles.

J.G. Hertzler shared his memories of playing General Martok in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, admitting that he didn’t know much about the Klingons when he first began. “Well, first of all, I didn’t have any depth of knowledge about Klingon culture or behavior, so whether or not I could ‘be’ a Klingon and fill those boots was a question for me,” he said. “However, I’m a former college football linebacker, so I figured I had a shot at it. I don’t know how much you know about football, but you have to play it in a state of controlled frenzy, which is not unlike being a Klingon.”

Part of being a Klingon was intimidating the non-Klingons so that Martok could do what he needed to do in a scene where the regulars were being tested to make sure that they were not shapeshifters. Hertzler explained how he went about doing that. “As a recurring actor or guest-star coming onto the show, to try to intimidate the likes of Avery Brooks on anything is impossible, but I took a whack at it. I had to risk making these people hate me in order to be effective in the scene, and I think I succeeded.”

“I have to admit that I underestimated their ability to separate actor from character,” said Hertzler. “Nana Visitor [Major Kira] was one of the first people to say how enjoyable it was to have me play Martok. She was extremely supportive and made me feel good about being there. It’s hard to walk into the middle of a well-oiled machine like Deep Space Nine and fit in. It takes a little machete and stiletto action, or should I say Klingon bat’leth wielding, to carve out a comfortable niche for yourself. It was hairy for a few minutes, but it turned out okay.”

Martok was there to stay and Hertzler had plenty of time to figure out his character. “I had almost four years to work on my character and develop various aspects of Martok,” he said. “And as the writers got to know me, they began adding new character traits with regard to my own life, gestures and outlook on things.”

Star Trek Magazine issue 24 arrives at newsstands on February 9.

Plot Summary: While mapping a globular cluster using a modified deflector grid, several crewmembers experience strange afflictions. Riker has trouble staying awake, LaForge’s VISOR fails, Data’s chronometer falls out of sync with the ship’s, Worf believes the ship’s barber is trying to attack him, and an explosion appears to damage a cargo bay though minutes later there is no sign that anything occurred. Since the symptoms seem to affect people who worked in the cargo bay, LaForge investigates and discovers a bulkhead in molecular flux from a subspace field that has somehow penetrated the ship. Troi tells Riker that she has talked to several crewmembers experiencing extreme anxiety and suggests getting them together to talk. When they meet, they realize that they all had identical experiences of being cold and trapped. On the holodeck, they work together to recreate an operating table upon which they all believe they were experimented. Crusher examines them and finds that they have inexplicable injuries – particularly Riker, whose arm appears to have been cut off and reattached. Moreover, Data’s self-diagnostic indicates that he was off the ship for more than an hour. Picard learns that two more crewmembers are missing; when one is returned a short time later, he dies in agony before he can speak. Because Riker has apparently been taken several times, Picard agrees to let him use stimulants to stay conscious and wear a homing device so they can try to track him when it happens again. That night Riker is removed from his room and taken to a dark laboratory. Aliens try to sedate him, but he remains aware of his surroundings, spotting the sedated missing ensign. The aliens try to widen the subspace rift in the cargo bay, but the Enterprise crew is able to close it just after Riker gets himself and the ensign through the rift. Data wonders whether the aliens were explorers like themselves, but Riker recalls the dead crewman and Picard worries that the abductions could happen again.

Analysis: I think of “Schisms” as The X-Files episode of Next Gen, though of course the theme of alien abduction in science fiction is much, much older. Humans get abducted and experimented upon by malevolent aliens! They wake at home, unable to articulate exactly what has happened to them, and people think they’re crazy! Since this is Star Trek and we know these characters, they don’t actually turn out to be crazy, which takes away some of the fun — when it was Fox Mulder, we were never completely sure, even when we were seeing what he was seeing. And being Starfleet officers, none of these characters are given to fury or panic for more than a few seconds at a time. They go looking for answers. At least we really see why Troi is invaluable – while Crusher doesn’t guess that all these random complaints might be related, and while LaForge can’t guess how an engineering anomaly could be affecting people from all over the ship, Troi decides that it would be helpful for everyone having similar experiences to talk to one another and see if they can recreate what’s been troubling them. No sooner does she get them all on the holodeck than one person’s memories and mental images begin to trigger the next. The scene where the crewmembers together design and modify the table upon which they’ve been tortured, in a dark room with grid lines but no other distractions, is as creepy as anything this series ever pulled off.

Sadly, the rest of the episode doesn’t have the same level of intensity, and by the time we actually get to see the evil clicky aliens, there’s almost a comic element to their menace. This is largely because the intense situation is muddled with far too much technobabble. What I think happens, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that the aliens create a subspace field using tetryons, and since LaForge says that shouldn’t even be able to exist in the Enterprise’s space-time continuum, no one notices them using it to abduct crewmembers. So the Enterprise shoots its gravitons, which may or may not be what LaForge is channeling through the deflectors to speed up mapping the globular cluster and thus bringing the ship to the attention of the aliens – this point is really never made clear, since Riker is falling asleep on the job before LaForge implements it. Somehow the gravitons open a rift right where Riker needs one, then close it before the aliens can retaliate further and destroy the Enterprise. It’s hard to take any threat to the ship seriously, since we know that even if it blows up, some temporal reversal will bring it back. It’s also a pretty good bet that Riker, LaForge, Worf, and Data will all survive.

This means that the biggest threat would appear to be to the woman working with the others to recreate the alien torture chamber; everything about her screams red-shirt, even though she’s wearing blue. But after getting us all involved with what happened to her while she’s working with the command team, she’s not even among the missing when the computer finally does a head count. (You mean to tell me the computer doesn’t notice every time a comm badge goes completely AWOL? Not the best security system, Starfleet.) Sure, it’s sad that a crewmember we don’t know has convulsions and dies, and that another crewmember we don’t know looks practically dead when Riker finds her in the alien lab, but since those people aren’t even involved in building the operating table with Worf and LaForge, we have no connection to them, and we aren’t given a reason to care about them as individuals – no one exclaims about how wonderful the missing ensign is at her job. I know the original series comes under criticism for killing off so many ensigns, but at least they usually get a few lines first – we have a reason to like them. These aren’t even characters we’re seeing, they’re just names in uniforms.

There are some wonderful major character moments in the early minutes when Data holds a poetry reading that nearly bores the entire crew – not just the afflicted Riker – to sleep, ending with a delightful nerdy ode in honor of his cat Spot. (”O Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display/connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array.”) It would make sense for some glitch relating to that event to connect to the threat – for the problem with Data’s chronometer to be directly related to the clumsiness of his poetry, for LaForge to mention Data’s stickler-for-detail personality when they disagree about how long he was gone. There’s not really a B storyline, just vignettes, so the dialogue has to be sharp. In the scenes where it is, like Worf complaining to the barber about his last haircut and getting lectured about using hair conditioner, it’s a terrific show…but in the scenes that get bogged down with tetryons and gravitons, it’s hard to work up much concern even for Riker when he’s strapped to the torture table. Plus the special effect that carries him off the ship is cheesy beyond belief. Evil aliens are a risky prospect at best, so on a show that can’t do horror-movie gruesome or kill off a regular, it’s important to make the audience care about the victims and keep the storyline focused. I wish my reaction at the end was more of a shudder at Picard’s concern that the aliens could return for more, rather than an instinctive desire not to have to sit through any more of the same technobabble.

The pair will work on an adaptation of Locke & Key, a comic series written by Joe Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez. Locke & Key is set in the village of Lovecraft and is the story of the Locke family, who move to their estate (Keyhouse), after the murder of the head of the family by a deranged high school student.

Keyhouse has “fantastic doors” (opened by special keys) “that transform all who dare to walk through them,” including a door that turns one into a ghost after walking through it and a black door that must “never be opened.”

The estate is also home to a “hate-filled and relentless creature,” Dodge, “that will not rest until it forces open the most terrible door of them all,’ the black door.

Kurtzman and Orci will produce the product through their development deal with DreamWorks.

If Star Trek: Online is embraced by gamers, expect to see such things as further “full-scale” releases/packs to complement the game in future. “Much will depend on the success of Star Trek Online,” said Zinkievich. “We would love for this game to do well, not just because it will earn us money, but because we’re all huge Star Trek fans.”

“We definitely want to have free new patches and full-on new expansion packs,” added Zinkievich. “But like I said much will depend on the success but we would love to take this game where no game has gone before.”

The game has proven to be popular thus far, to the point where the servers were straining to keep up. According to Star Trek: Online, that problem should soon be in the past. “We just wanted to update you on our in-game server capacity status,” said a notice posted at the official site. “Throughout Head Start we noticed the overwhelming response to the game and we are working on changes to further increase the number of people who can play Star Trek Online at any given time. Our current plan is to have these changes in place sometime this coming weekend. We will, of course, keep you updated on progress as it happens.”

Anovos Productions will be rolling out their new high-end Star Trek uniforms in mid-March, offering styles for both the original series and for Star Trek XI and UGO.com has some photos of the uniform tops and pants.

“Star Trek is pretty much a well-branded property,” said Anovos Co-founder Joe Salcedo. “Surprisingly enough, there are very rarely any companies that have actually pinpointed and focused on uniform replication, the high-tier replication.”

There will two versions of uniforms. The stunt version will cost between $250-$315, and the hero version will cost between $400 and $475.

According to a press release from Cryptic Studios and Atari, a million Star Trek fans have already created accounts at the official websites.

“After much anticipation, we are pleased to present Star Trek Online to fans and gamers nationwide,” said Jeff Lapin, CEO of Atari, SA. “Throughout the last four decades, Star Trek has been a mainstay in pop culture, influencing legions of ‘Trekkers’ through television, film, and more.  We expect Star Trek Online to give fans and gamers an unprecedented Star Trek experience.”

Star Trek: Online features the voices of both Spocks; Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto. Nimoy voices the Star Trek: Online introduction and other key scenes in-game, while Quinto voices an Emergency Medical Hologram as well as the tutorial for the game.

For British fans of the game, Namco Bandai (distributor of Star Trek: Online) and Atari will attempt to set a Guinness World Record for the “largest gathering of people dressed as Star Trek characters” on February 14th at 1:00 PM on London’s Millennium Bridge to help celebrate the release of Star Trek: Online.

Fans are encouraged to dress up as anything Star Trek related, from an “Andorian Ensign” to a “Zakdorn strategist.”

In addition to helping set a world record, the best dressed fans of the day will win exclusive Star Trek: Online prizes including lifetime subscriptions to the game and the recently released digital version of Star Trek XI.

Thanks to Rana Rahman for the tip!

Kurtzman and Orci will bring in show ideas, create their own projects (with or without others) and recruit writers as part of the deal.

“We’ve been pursuing this deal for quite some time,” said 20th Century Fox TV Chairman Dana Walden. “They would elevate any type of development. But they were very thoughtful about the kind of commitment they were making. They didn’t want to overpromise.”

“We’ve been excited about going back into TV, but wanted to wait until the feature side of our company was on its feet,” said Kurtzman.

“One of the things that drew us back to TV was the idea that we could do the kind of stories that we’re not known for in features,” said Orci. “From sci-fi to procedurals to medical genres, those are all the kind of shows that we love.”

The deal with 20th Century Fox begins on March 1.

Rumor had it that Stewart would be working on Mad Max: Fury Road, possibly with Tom Hardy (Star Trek: Nemesis), as TrekToday and others reported recently, but Stewart’s publicist set the record straight, saying that the rumors were untrue.

Fans will have to be content with watching Stewart on other projects, including his appearance on tonight’s Frontline (Digital Nation), which airs on PBS. On Digital Nation, Stewart and others will talk about what it means to be human in a 21st-century digital world.

Stewart talks about his love of technology on the show, including the Internet as well as  his beloved iPhone, but not Twitter, which Stewart doesn’t use, feeling that it is of little use to him. Stewart also admitted to not gaming, but he had a good reason for his avoidance. “I do have an addictive temperament,” he explained. “I have a stack of games. I’ve never taken the covers off of them, because I feel that if I do…I’m finished.”