Star Is Out Tonight
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008Okay. Not at all space related… but it is star shaped. It’s made of stars… rock stars. At any rate, you can get it at www.chopshopstore.com. My other day job.
Okay. Not at all space related… but it is star shaped. It’s made of stars… rock stars. At any rate, you can get it at www.chopshopstore.com. My other day job.
Click either image below to load the 4MB high-res tiff file from JAXA. Your will need to be able to read tiff files to view in the browser or click here to download and save the file (right click on the link and choose “save file”).
Near Side
Far (unseen) Side
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Download this pdf to check out these soon to be produced desktop globes of Jupiter’s moons and contact them about any interest in buying them here. These are cardboard-substrate globes on simple plastic bases, but they still look pretty cool. Even at the high price of $300 (a pre-production estimate) – I have to say that I am pretty tempted.
The weRobot tee posted here a few weeks ago has taken over my life here at wanderingspace. For anyone not aware, my real day job is running The Chopping Block and Chop Shop out of New York City. We were at the NY Comic Con over the weekend and while there Gizmodo and Boing Boing both posted our robots tee and we were slammed by traffic. So space has had to take a back seat for the last week or so.
More appropriate for this forum perhaps is the more recent alienWe tee we just released on the temp site (yes, we are still recuperating from the server load). Take a look and if you like, mosey on over to the order form.
Map-makers of the world rejoice! For the first time since the days of Columbus, you now have the opportunity to map out the details of undiscovered shores! Tim Minton has a passion for map-making, but his pursuits usually involve Earthly destinations – how could he resist the new Lakes and Seas of another world? Check out his flickr page for other maps and in particular his Titan set.
Okay, so this is not space related, but I am so excited to finally have my 51 robots design up and for sale at chopshopstore.com. See the Men’s style or Women’s.

This one was fun as it was supposed to be based upon real science, so we were able to take advantage of more reality based imagery. The idea was to get a good image of an astronaut with a suitcase and just have that with the title. A google search for astronauts turned up this excellent image of a guy looking like he is literally truckin to the launch pad. So we switched the color of his uniform, darkened the visor (one of the only things you cannot do with NASA images is show an astronaut’s likeness) and tried to make the case look a bit more like a suitcase than an oxygen unit of some kind. It really was perfect, but not high resolution enough to go large… so to fill the frame other astronaut legs were added to suggest the story is about mankind, not just the dude with the case.
Of all the Tor Books Chopping Block executed, this was always a favorite of mine.
We posted this tee available for sale at redbubble.com that borrows from the old NASA logo to create this visual play on words. The quality above looks a bit low, but see the link for a better representation.
This is the second tee we are posting here and due to a simple address error, we have not received either product to do a review. Once that happens we will post.
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Hard to find nicely designed planetary items. Too late maybe for Xmas, but certainly not too late to get it in time for New Horizons flyby in 2015!
One day wanderinspace.net expects to release a poster celebrating the Cassini mission. In the meantime, there is this tee available for sale at redbubble.com that features the Cassini spacecraft which will be featured in that design.
We just ordered one and it hasn’t come in yet. So we don’t know how the printing quality will be… we cannot vouch for that as of this time. But the site does offer that they come on American Apparel tees available for in men and women’s sizes, which are known to be top quality tees. When the purchase arrives here at wanderingspace control center, we will offer an update.
My day job makes wicked cool tees for designers, nerds, geeks, centaurs, graphic artists, computer freaks, tech-dorks, fools and kings. Prices have been a cheap $15-17 for the first 3 months of operation, now we are moving the prices up to the still low price of $20-22. So get some now before its costs more!
Okay… one more from the archives. I have been digging up these old design files from my company’s back up discs for a presentation I gave at HOW in Atlanta last week.
So I started finding some old designs where I incoporated images of planets and moons and couldn’t resist posting them here. The most obvious reference I could potentially post was the entire NASAlized version of the Chopping Block site from around 1998. That old site is actually still live, so you should go check me out in the “Flight Crew” section under “Romer”.
Scored another one. This time it is hi-res and I think this came out around 1996. I also just happened to get a copy of “Mars Underground” (unrelated) on DVD just yesterday which is about Zubrin’s “Mars Direct” concept of getting men (and women!) on Mars. I am thinking perhaps now this may finally be embraced as NASA’s Mars 2.0 plan going forward?

Once upon a time I did a large number of book covers (or dust jackets) for a Sci-Fi publisher known as Tor Books. While looking through old back-up files today I found this one that featured Saturn’s rings and it’s now famous moon Titan. Since I am currently working on a poster that celebrates the Cassini mission, I thought I should post this design on here as it happens to be one of my favorites.
I would have to guess that I have been involved with designing around 200 book jackets designs for Tor, both before and after starting the Chopping Block. Among some of the more famous titles I got to work on were Jonathan Lethem’s “Gun with Occasional Music”, Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Three Californias” trilogy and vampire title, (soon to be a major motion picture) “I am Legend”. The Lethem and “Legend” books had provided artwork, but we also got to do a few other Lethem titles where we did all the art as well as the design.
Image Note: I found this file (not shown) I thought was the hard cover artwork, but instead it was the less impressive mass market edition of the jacket. I will upload a better hi-res version next week when I get back to the office. In the meantime I found this version online of the hard-cover and tried to clean up the jpg artifacts the best I could.
My full time company (unrelated to space interests) has launched its “shop” and is sporting a bunch of tees and designs aimed at computer nerds, designers, illustrators and nerds in general. While I don’t have any directly space related designs up there (yet), there is a poster we did for an event I spoke at does feature me as a robot surrounded by a few moons. You may even recognize one as slightly Mimas looking and the other a bit Europan. The other two are just your generic cratered looking ice balls.