Sep 292022
 

Say what you will about United Launch Alliance and the fact that it is far, FAR behind the times when compared with SpaceX, they’ve recently been issuing some damned impressive videos.

And they’re retweeting some good vids of their Delta IV launch:

 

 

Some great launch videos. Now, to release some equally impressive landing videos, demonstrating that ULA is in the business of recovering and reusing rockets to not only lower launch cost (and compete with SpaceX) but also to ramp up launch rates in order to save western civilization off-world, because it’s going to hell on *this* one.

 

 Posted by at 11:09 am
Sep 282022
 

The images coming in of the DART impact are absolutely remarkable.

Dude. DUDE.

 

 Posted by at 6:23 am
Sep 262022
 

This is what men can do when they strive for greatness using the precepts of western science: we can bullseye a 500-meter-wide pile of rubble from across the friggen’ solar system.

 

The plume was visible from Earth-based telescopes.

The Webb and Hubble telescopes were aimed at the impact, but I haven’t seen anything from them yet. Probably takes time to process.

 Posted by at 11:41 pm
Sep 192022
 

A mid-1960’s North American Aviation concept for a sorta-lifting body spacecraft that would use deployable rotors for landing. Functioning as an autogyro, these rotors would be a more controllable alternative to a parachute, in principle allowing fairly pinpoint runway touchdowns. I had cause to go looking for information on this recently; i was fairly certain that I had a few reports on the subject, but could not find them. Grrr.

A few photos I found online a few years ago of a display model, presumably originating from an auction website such as ebay:

 Posted by at 6:43 pm
Sep 182022
 

It’s about time:

It never had a real Blu Ray release, which always seemed odd to me.

And why not:

 

And why the hell not:

Update: it was once again brought to my attention that Amazon Text+Image links are nuked by ad blockers. So here are the text links to the 4K movies I linked to:

Real Genius [4K UHD]

Poltergeist (4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital)

Red Dawn – Collector’s Edition 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray [4K UHD]

Star Trek I: The Motion Picture – The Director’s Edition Complete Adventure

Star Trek: The Next Generation 100-Piece Engineering Field Kit Tool Set

 Posted by at 1:50 am
Sep 122022
 

An unmanned test flight of the New Shepard suffered a catastrophic engine explosion. The capsule seemed to successfully separate and landed normally, but that would have been a *damned* rough ride, with a bunch of eyeballs-out G’s for a few seconds.

On other launch matters: Firefly is gonna try to launch again today, not sure what time:

WHOOPS: scrubbed.

 

And NASA wants to try to launch Artemis on the 23rd.

Its maiden flight is now tentatively scheduled to take place on:

    • Between 6:47 a.m. EDT and 8:47 a.m. EDT on Friday, September 23, 2022.
    • Between 11:37 a.m. EDT and 12:47 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, September 27, 2022.
 Posted by at 3:59 pm
Sep 062022
 

I looked through a small fraction of my surprisingly vast pile of CAD diagrams for some I thought might look good in really large format. Some I’ve gone some distance towards formatting them that way already; some are still formatted for small sheets. There are more, of course. In no particular order.

Lockheed CL-400 “Suntan”

Lockheed M-21/D-21:

Lockheed A-12:

Lockheed SR-71A:

Lockheed YF-12A:

X-20 Dyna Soar/Titan III:

A number of 10-Meter Orion vehicles/sub-vehicles:

USAF 10-meter Orion:

General Dynamics “Kingfish:”

North American XF-108:

Lockheed A-12 concept w/canards:

Boeing B-47E:

Boeing B-52G:

Boeing B-52H:

Boeing B-52H + Skybolt:

Boeing DB-47E + Bold Orion:

Rockwell Star Raker:

Boeing “Big Onion” SSTO:

Boeing Space Freighter:

NASA Saturn C-8:

Lockheed STAR Clipper:

 

 

 Posted by at 4:47 pm