Side-view diagram of a Boeing concept for a hydrogen-fueled supersonic bomber from 1956. This monster is shown to scale with a North American XB-70. More info and diagrams of this are in US Bomber Projects issue 9.
May 082016
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May 082016
A Moon Man for Vice President
Where the paid Gawker shill makes fun of the idea of Newt Gingrich as Donald Trumps Vice President because Gingrich wanted to build a lunar colony.
Sorry, but Trump picking Newt would be one of the few things he could do that would make me actually want to vote for him (as opposed to merely voting against Hillary).
May 082016
A Bell Aerosystems advertisement describing the hydrogen peroxide attitude control thrusters on the Mercury capsule. Hydrogen peroxide, H2O2, was passed through silver-coated fine metal mesh screens; this catalyzed the H2O2 to decompose into O2 and H2O in the form of high-temperature steam. While the O2 could be combusted with a fuel such as kerosene or hydrogen to generate a true bipropellant rocket engine, the O2/H2O exhaust from the monopropellant reaction was adequate for small attitude control thrusters. Bell was building a similar system for use on the Dyna Soar spaceplane.
May 082016
May 072016
An ad from a 1957 issue of Aviation Week extolling the wonders of the Ryan X-13 “Vertijet.” The thing worked, but not well enough to be turned into any sort of operational aircraft.
It must’ve been nice to live in an era when entirely new types of aircraft would be sprung on the public with some regularity.
May 062016
A NASA illustration of an advanced solid rocket motor concept, dated 1963. The most obvious difference between the “present” and “advanced” design was the buried nozzle. By properly shaping the solid propellant grain, the motor would perform normally but with a minimum of unused internal volume; this allowed the motor to be substantially shorter than the conventional design. This would make the associated interstage section equivalently shorter, lighter and cheaper. And by shortening and lightening the interstage, the launch vehicle would be shorter, lighter and stronger, with slightly sturdier structural dynamics.
The advantages of a more compact motor like this are pretty obvious. The disadvantages, maybe less so. The most apparent disadvantage is the *need* for far more advanced materials. That buried rocket nozzle is shown to be quite thin, thinner than the “present” design, yet it would be subjected to horrifying heating rates on *both* sides. There are few materials that could withstand that and retain any sort of structural strength.
Additionally: the desire is shown for thrust vectoring. Numerous options for that are available for the conventional nozzle… but it would be much harder with a buried nozzle. It might be easiest to simply gimbal the entire motor. Stop/restart capability has been achieved with solid rockets, but neither design show here provides for that. It is a non-trivial feature.
The igniter is show to be a small rocket motor suspended within the nozzle, directing it’s exhaust forward into the bore volume of the main motor. Variations on this sort of igniter are quite common for relatively short and stubby upper stage motors such as these.
May 062016
A Falcon 9 first stage successfully landed on a barge out at sea after launching a satellite to geostationary. This was a high-velocity mission that SpaceX did not have high hopes of a successful landing for, yet they succeeded anyway.
This is the third successful landing of a Falcon 9 booster, the second on a barge. The two barge-recovered boosters are to be re-launched at some point. And at some point, the landing and recovery of a space launch rocket will become ho-hum boring. And that will be *awesome.* Because the transformation of a NASA program into boring means a loss of public interest and very likely a program cut; a transformation of a private program into boring means economic success and increased profits and utilization.
Coming soon: the launch of a Falcon 9 Heavy with two boosters, with simultaneous recovery. And at some point, the attempted recovery of a Falcon 9 Heavy second stage. Recovery of one of those would be a whole new level of technical challenge.
May 042016
Gotta love good hand craftsmanship:
The Death Star, along with the Star Destroyer, is one of those wholly 9mpractical, un-scientific Sci Fi designs that I’ve always wanted to make a *large* scale model of and/or make big ol’ blueprints of. Sigh…
May 042016
Now that Trump is it for the Republicans and Clinton is nearly certain for the Democrats, this election will be an exciting choice between a dishonest power – mad New York liberal and an power-mad dishonest liberal from New York.
Spectacular.
May 022016
About three weeks ago I posted video of a device called the “Flyboard Air” which purported to be a VTOL turbojet platform a single pilot stands on. At the time, numerous aspects of the video made it seem kinda fishy, like perhaps it was a hoax, or in some other way not quite what it was claimed. Well, it seems it *is* what it claims. It recently got a Guiness World Record for flying around a harbor in France.
The “Flyboard Air” has four turbojets (eventually the control system will allow the craft to safely fly on three if one of the four conks out, but right the prototype isn’t up to it) with a total power of about 1,000 horsepower. The inventor wants to incorporate a wingsuit; this would allow the pilot to lean far forward, tilting the thrust from vertical to horizontal and moving the pilot at 180 km/hr. In this record-winning flight, the pilot flew for nearly four minutes, landed… then took off again and did a “victory lap. Total flight time was probably something like 5 minutes, an order of magnitude improvement over the thirty seconds you’d get out of a rocket belt. Potential flight time is given as 10 minutes. You’d think 1,000 horses would guzzle the jet fuel, so I’m a little surprised it even gets that much.