You’ll never run out of considerations when you set out to construct a multi-story tower-mounted particle physics imager in a desert three thousand miles away. While it doesn’t involve slag burns or vacuum tubes, sharing stories from the creation process helps people form a palpable connection with the work. We want to give people a taste of the madness involved in what will amount to the terrestrial equivalent of launching a satellite into space.

If you know Doug and live in the Boston area, there’s a good chance you could be conscripted into a half-day of drilling, grinding, de-burring, or any number of things that will give you hands-on memories of bringing Cosmic Praise to life.  I still have a scar from working on a certain rapid egress slide, and now I know how to properly use a de-burring tool. Barring mutilation, how can we best share the enormity of effort taking place? How can we show the journey from notebook to playa with the impact the task deserves? No really, how?

We’ve got a few renderings up of the tower for shape and scale, an engineering notebook full of secrets to redact, and stories from the front lines. The hum of potential energy is fierce and bites back. Raw material orders are coming in and novel fabrication techniques are being tested. There are multiple work tracks, some operating like semi-autonomous splinter cells so that structural work, illumination programming, facade deco, oh and yeah that whole spark chamber thing, can all come together for final fitting before being packed piece by piece into a truck so Doug, and faithful early crew, can drive it to a desert three thousand miles away.

I’m pretty excited.