Have you ever had a vivid dream of being at work, and then your alarm sounds and you end up all disoriented and bummed out because you thought you were already at work but now you realize you have to get up and actually go to work? Yeah, that’s how my day started, and it hasn’t gotten much better since then.

Luckily, I’ve had the InterWeb to provide me with some distraction: I’ve been catching up on my spaceflight-related news. Here are some highlights for any loyal readers who may be interested:

• NASA’s Crew Exploration Vehicle, the still-undesigned shuttle replacement that’s supposed to take us back to the Moon, now has a name and an official logo. In keeping with the pre-shuttle tradition of naming big initiatives after mythological characters (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo), they’ve decided to call the new spacecraft and its lunar mission Project Orion. I’m not sure I like it… for one thing, there may be some confusion with the old Project Orion, which explored the possibilities of propelling a spacecraft using nuclear bombs. And the Pan Am “space plane” in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey was also called Orion, although naming a real spacecraft after a fictional one is nothing new (remember, the first space shuttle prototype was called Enterprise, thanks to the efforts of those crazy Star Trek fans).
• The videotapes of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon are missing. Specifically, the slow-scan television (SSTV) images recorded at various tracking stations, which were “scan-converted” for the TV broadcasts seen at the time, have been misplaced and possibly even erased at some point. Apollo veterans who are involved in the search are quick to point out that they did nothing wrong and that no one bungled the archiving of the tapes, but they are nevertheless trying to locate them. I’m always interested in stories of “lost treasures,” but the most tantilizing aspect of this tale is that “if [the tapes are] recovered and given a 21st century digital makeover, they could yield a far sharper view of that momentous day, compared to what was broadcast around the globe.”
• Burt Rutan, the maverick designer of SpaceShipOne — the first manned civilian vehicle to reach space — is hard at work on SpaceShipTwo, a larger vehicle that will be capable of making orbit. This interview provides some insight into what he thinks the near-future holds.
• Meanwhile, an engineering group is trying to rescue the past by restoring the full-size training mock-up of the old Skylab space station. The mock-up has been rotting away at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama for years; the real Skylab re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and burned up way back in 1979. I was nine years old at the time, and I remember being terribly disappointed that NASA had been unable to get the shuttle operational in time to save it.
• And finally, if you’ve ever wondered what it would like to tear through the sky without a plane, just like The Rocketeer, you might want to consider checking out the 2006 Rocketbelt Convention. This event is not a sci-fi con; rather, it’s dedicated to real rocketbelts and jetpacks like the famous device developed by Bell Aerospace in the 1960s and seen in several movies and TV series of the day. I’d love to take a little hop with one of those babies. Details about the Rocketbelt Convention and the history of these amazing toys is available here.

And that’s all for now. Hopefully, I won’t have any more dreams about work tonight…