Last year Dona Ana County in New Mexico voted for an increased tax to help build a new spaceport in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico. Now it's time for Sierra County, including the town of Truth or Consequences, to take a vote. The county will vote on a 0.25% sales tax to help fund the construction of the spaceport. If the tax passes in Sierra County, then the government can legally begin collecting the spaceport tax. Apparently New Mexico tax districts are multi-county groupings. The new tax proposal has generated some news coverage by promoting contention between people who want the spaceport and people who don't want to pay the tax. A pretty common protagonist-antagonist match-up in the papers.

The Musion Eyeliner from Musion Systems is a 3D holographic display capable of showing full sized images of people or even cars. The Musion Eyeliner is being used by Toyota to promote their new concept car. An exhibit is live at the Bluewater Shopping center in Kent, UK until about February 20th.

The display creates a 5m x 3m (16.5 ft x 9.8 ft) image using a single projector. Images are similarly captured using one camera. Setting up the Musion Eyeliner requires an additional 4m (13 ft) of depth. Sets can be as big as 20m x 100m. Musion claims that their displays can be used to play electronic games...

NanoTX07 a nanotachnology industry conference expo will be held at the Dallas Convention Center October 3-4. The event will feature an exhibit by NASA graphically showing initial elements of NASA's Global Exploration Strategy and proposed U.S. lunar architecture. The exhibit promises to highlight space technology spin-offs for the nano and nicro technology fields.

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif., Dec. 18 -- NASA Ames Research
Center and Google have signed a Space Act Agreement that formally
establishes a relationship to work together on a variety of challenging
technical problems ranging from large-scale data management and massively
distributed computing, to human-computer interfaces.
As the first in a series of joint collaborations, Google and Ames will
focus on making the most useful of NASA's information available on the
Internet. Real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution
3- D maps of the moon and Mars, real-time tracking of the International

HUNTSVILLE, Ala., Dec. 15 -- NASA is searching for the
next generation of space explorers to participate in the fun, exciting and
educational challenge of designing and building their own version of NASA's
lunar rover or "moonbuggy" to compete in NASA's 14th Great Moonbuggy Race.
This annual event will be held at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in
Huntsville, Ala., and is sponsored by the Northrop Grumman Corp of Los
Angeles. The high school competition will be Friday, April 13, 2007, with
the college competition scheduled for Saturday, April 14.
College and high school students from across the country will put their

Remember how I said that I wanted to know more about the material being used by Norman Foster in the Astana tent project in Kazakhstan? Well, I took the extraordinary step of looking it up. Turns out that the material is called ETFE (Ethylene Tetrafluoroethylene). It has been used in some other similar applications around the world - notably the Eden Project and a few sports stadiums. Evidently it is very lightweight and relatively strong, making it a good material where the transparency of glass is needed, but weight is an issue. People also use this material in the creation of greenhouses.