Spaceport Alpha, Spaceport Bravo & NASA CoLab sims closed down

Daniel Voyager

UPDATE

According to Katherine W Prawl there is good news about the ISM project in Second Life. Because of a recent accepted donation, the ISM team should be able to bring back the sims online when payment issues are resolved. “ISM is coming back (as soon as we get the account straightened out)”. This is really good news and I’ll look forward to visiting ISM when it returns. YAY!

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It seems like Spaceport Alpha, Spaceport Bravo and NASA CoLab sims have already closed down this year. I was planning to visit the space sims again in Second Life this week but I found that the main ones I wanted to visit are no longer on the grid which is really sad news. I searched for the regions on the weekly New SL Sims in past week thread on the SLUniverse Forums and all three were listed there.

Today when I looked at the map it shows the remaining active space regions without the three Second Life space sims listed above. The teleports and SLurls failed straight away which is a real shame to be honest. To see these historical Second Life space locations disappear from Second Life completely is heart breaking.

The snapshot belows shows a map of the space regions back in July 2011.

Check out my blog post called Space exploration places in Second Life 2011. 🙂

The snapshot belows shows a map of the space regions back in July 2010. Since then various regions have been disappearing and it’s very alarming to see it so empty in the (above map).

There has been no explanation as to why these space SL sims have suddenly gone from the grid. If anyone knows why? Please feel free to comment. Thanks!

15 thoughts on “Spaceport Alpha, Spaceport Bravo & NASA CoLab sims closed down”

  2. A wide-angle screenshot of the ISM, posted in November 2007 on a science/space forum, was my inducement to join Second Life. I’ve been there many times, and fortunately took lots of my own shots.

    Sad to learn it’s gone, but not surprised. We’re not even flying our own astronauts to the ISS any more… I doubt NASA would have found justification in their budget for continuing a museum sim in SL.

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  3. Spaceport Alpha and Speceport Beta weren’t NASA sims – they were sims belonging to the International Speceflight Museum, which is (was) operated entirely independently of NASA by a team of volunteers who formed ISM Corporation, a Kansas non-profit corporation.

    Not sure what is going on with ISM – the blog hasn’t been updated since June 2011, although there were meetings still being held through until the end of last year (or so I’ve been informed).

    Doesn’t change the fact the sim are gone, however, at least for the present :(.

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  7. Thanks for the kind words about Spaceports Alpha and Bravo, but I must correct you — they were NEVER NASA sites! The International Spaceflight Museum has always been an independently run all-volunteer organization, supported solely by donations.

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  8. Another impressive 3D showcase lost to the Second Life world 😦 To everybody involved, thank you so much for this beautiful location which I have been visiting and presenting in talks here in Germany since early 2007. NASA, in the meantime, has moved on to do a lot of work with 3D engines such as Unity3D. Same goes for NOAA who created the fabulous Meteora sim and many more in SL (visit them while they’re still on the grid!), while the Army is progressing at high speed with the creation of the OpenSim development grid MOSES.

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  9. Thanks for the comments and correction pointed out about NASA renaming.

    UPDATE!
    According to Katherine W Prawl there is good news about the ISM project in Second Life. Because of a recent accepted donation, the ISM team should be able to bring back the sims online when payment issues are resolved. “ISM is coming back (as soon as we get the account straightened out)”. This is really good news and I’ll look forward to visiting ISM when it returns. YAY!

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  10. The best long term solution for the ISM is to get every creator/builder to EXPORT their builds via XML to an external website archive. From there, build up an OpenSim *.oar file.

    Then ISM can live with zero cost forever in perpetual virtual endless life.

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  11. VERY good news about ISM, indeed!

    Here’s some additional info on NASA and its use of immersive 3D. “NASA eEducation” and “Explorer Island” as seen on the maps provided above are NASA projects; others such as “NASA Inspire” or “National Space Society” are associated. All these are still on the grid as of today. Meanwhile, the educational MMO game “Moonbase Alpha”, created for NASA Learning Technologies with the Unreal Engine and launched in 2010, has become quite a success; project lead Daniel Laughlin already has the next one in the making. (More on Moonbase Alpha here: http://ipp.gsfc.nasa.gov/mmo/.) Yet NASA CoLab is gone, after more than five years in SL. It was started as a mixed reality project by NASA Ames in downtown San Francisco and the virtual world of SL; in 2007, Jonathon “Earth Primbee” Potter created a machinima on the CoLab, its creators and their vision for the virtual world, still worth watching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr3vXuxEPB8&eurl=

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