Some recent colorful photos:
Jan 042016
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Jan 032016
propellant tank, structure, landing gear and a nuclear rocket engine, to be used for landing a payload on Mars and for flying or hopping around. The propellant would be liquid carbon dioxide, easily compressed from the Martian atmosphere; the performance would be, by conventional liquid hydrogen nuclear rocket standards, reasonably awful, but it would be adequate to lurch back into Mars orbit or to do long range hops.
Two main designs seem to have been studied: a conical “ballistic” vehicle that would be a dedicated “hopper,” landing on its tail, and a winded vehicle that would land vertically in a horizontal attitude. This latter design was sent to me in the form of diagrams and five computer renders. The renders – early 1990’s vintage – came as viewgraph transparencies, clearly photographs of a computer monitor. The winged vehicle had simple shock absorbers for landing gear, terminating in dishes rather than wheels meaning that a rolling start or stop was impossible. The available information sadly doesn’t explain how the thing was supposed to land vertically.
The full-rez scans of the viewgraphs have been made available to APR Patrons in the 2016-01 APR Extras Dropbox folder. If you’d like to help out and gain access to this and many other pieces of aerospace history, please check out the APR Patreon.
Jan 022016
An interesting if somewhat confounding article:
Google takes quantum leap into artificial intelligence
The claim is here made that Googles “D-Wave” quantum computer is “100 million times as fast as any of today’s machines.” Which would be both great and impressive, but the article also says “each 10-foot-high D-Wave computer also needs to be super-chilled to a temperature that’s 150 times as cold as that of deep space.” What the hell temperature is *that,* given that deep space has no temperature, being deep space and all? And even if you compared the temperature to something measurable like, say, the freezing point of water, what does it mean to be “150 times colder?” Is something that’s 150 times colder than 0 degrees Celsius the same temperature as something that’s 150 times colder than 32 degree Fahrenheit? Hmmm.
A truly functional quantum computer that has all the kinks worked out, bugs swept out and Heisencats shooed off would be a dandy device. This would seem to be a computer within shooting distance of the approximate power of the human brain. So it *might* turn out that the first true AIs aren’t digital computers, but quantum. And Loki only knows what sort of wacky insanity *that* might produce.
Jan 022016
Protest in Tehran after Saudis execute Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr, 46 others
The headline kinda misses the important point: Iranians stormed the Saudi embassy in Tehran and set it on fire. Storming embassies seems to be the Iranian national pastime. Of course, there are occasionally some minor repercussions to invading an embassy; it took a little while, but after the Iranians invaded the US embassy, the Iraqis invaded Iran, leading to hundreds of thousands of dead Iranians. I believe the CIA had some small role in seeing to it that that war came to pass. It’ll be interesting to see if some unpleasantness occurs between Iran and Saudi. If so, that’ll play hell with the petroleum market; get used to expensive fuel. I suspect that won’t bother the likes of Vlad Putin; might finally help yoink the Russian economy out of the toilet, at least for a little bit.
It would make for some entertaining CNN…
Dec 312015
A nice video describing the Gyrojet pistol. For those who somehow don’t know, the Gyrojet was a neat idea that just didn’t work out: a rocket pistol. The pistols (and associated carbine) were lightweight structures since they were not subjected to the usual stresses associated with firearms… rather than one high pressure explosion, the Gyrojet rounds were propelled by an internal rocket motor that burned for 0.1 seconds or so. While that was great for the firearm, it sucked for the bullet itself: muzzle velocity for the pistol version was about ten feet per second. Over the next fifty or so feet the projectile continued to accelerate to something like 1200 feet per second, creating a nicely lethal round. But the initial slow velocity meant that wind would easily blow the thing around… accuracy was a bit of a joke.
I’ve often wondered about modernizing the Gyrojet. Apart from the lame fixed internal magazine the firearm itself is fine, but the projectiles could do with an update. A two-stage motor would seem the way to go… a very fast burning first stage so that the muzzle velocity is stepped up to something meaningful, several hundred feet per second. Additional ballistics work to assure something resembling accuracy. Advanced versions with laser seekers and thrust vectoring.
Even the best modern Gyrojet will almost certainly be an inferior weapon compared to a proper automatic. But it’d make a dandy weapon for the Space Marines… the minimal recoil and low system mass would be useful for guys in space suits. Plus, it’d just be durned cool. And let’s face it, that’s reason enough.
Dec 312015
The next issue of US Space Projects will, like the previous issue, include diagrams created via 3D modelling. This time it’ll be for the North American Aviation Mars Excursion Module.
Dec 312015
Engineer finds examples of ‘horrific’ construction in tornado wreckage
Someone “tried to nail a steel bottom plate to the concrete,” he said. “There was no connection [between] walls, there was no connection at the roof, and it was simply nailed to the concrete foundation.
Humans have been building structure for probably in excess of fifty thousand years. For most of that time, the structures were little more than igloos and tents and teepees and lean-tos, but somewhere around 6,000 or so years ago we started building permanent structures. In that time we’ve transitioned from simple piles of store to complex multi-story buildings of steel and concrete; in order to do that, we had to learn *how* to build such things. There is a science to it, an engineering to it, a set of math for it. There is, in the typically stern STEM worldview, right and many wrong ways to build buildings. And it appears that the chuckleheads who built some of the buildings trashed in the recent tornadoes decided to not bother with those 6,000 years of science and engineering. For reasons of greed, or laziness, or ignorance, or arrogance, or just plain stupidity, the builders apparently chose to go in a different direction. They are to structural engineers what faith healers are to doctors, what lunatics who think they’re superheros capable of flight are to aeronautical engineers. And yet many people still believe that STEM is over-rated, that what we need are more people who live in fluffy muddle-headedness:
Old Navy Doesn’t Want Your Kids to Become Artists
Dec 312015
Most places just shoot off some fireworks to celebrate New Years. Dubai? They torch entire skyscrapers.
Fire rages at downtown Dubai’s high-rise Address hotel
Apparently “Address” is the name of the 63-story hotel sparkler.
Dec 312015
Passengers horrified after blood seeps out of cruise ship elevator
The article is vague, but it seems that an electrician was working in or on an elevator and got squished or chopped or something. The result, as can be seen in the video, is a whole lot of blood pouring down the outside of the door.
It’s bad enough that modern cruise ships have to deal with ghost pirates and pirate ghosts, but now also ghost electricians (or electrician ghosts, I always forget how that works).
Dec 302015
A NASA illustration (probably from 1964-66) showing the Saturn launch vehicles planned for the Apollo program. Note that the Saturn Ib shows the Lunar Module ascent stage, sans descent stage. This could have led to some interesting mission possibilities.
The full-rez scan has been made available to APR Patrons in the 2015-12 APR Extras Dropbox folder. If you’d like to help out and gain access to this and many other pieces of aerospace history, please check out the APR Patreon.