US Spacecraft Projects #4, Transport Projects #5 now available

 aircraft, history, new products, projects, rockets, spacecraft, US Spacecraft Projects, US Transport Projects  3 Responses »
Jan 232016
 

USSP #04

US Spacecraft Projects #04, the Lander Special is now available (see HERE for the entire series). Issue #04 includes:

  • GE Electrically Propelled Cargo Vehicle: A lunar lander with a nuclear reactor and ion engines to reduce the cost of lunar logistics
  • Douglas LASS: Landing an S-IVb stage on the moon
  • Convair PLAME: VTOL crew return with jet engines
  • North American Mars Excursion Module: the iconic conical Mars lander
  • Martin-Marietta Ballistic NIMF: A nuclear “hopper”
  • Early LEM: One of the first recognizable designs, by Maxime Faget
  • ROMBUS: probably the largest lunar lander seriously proposed
  • Boeing Lander Module 2: A recent Mars crew lander

ussp04ad1 ussp04ad2

USSP #04 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $5:

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USTP #05

US Transport Projects #05 is now available (see HERE for the entire series). Issue #05 includes:

  • Boeing Model 820-100: The B-52 can haul more than bombs…
  • Lockheed Nuclear Tug: Want to tow two C-5s across an ocean?
  • Martin Super Ocean Transport: A WWII-era design for a post-war giant passenger transport
  • HOT EAGLE: 13 Marines to Benghazi in minutes
  • Sikorsky SST: An early supersonic transport concept
  • Lifting Body Cargo Airplane: A wartime design for a multibody design with a separate cargo module
  • Resource Air Carrier: A giant “flying pipeline” to haul petroleum
  • Boeing Model 763-165: A side-by-side New Large Airplane design

ustp05ad2 ustp05ad1

USTP #05 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $4:

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 Posted by at 7:31 pm

Whups.

 Hmm..., news, rockets, spacecraft, youtube  11 Responses »
Jan 182016
 

Video of the Falcon 9 landing,  burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. Or something like that. Basically it boils down to “oooh, so close.” I’m not convinced that the rocket would have stayed upright even if the landing gear hadn’t collapsed, due to the rough seas; but it’s still a hell of an effort.

 

Given that weather seems like it might have played a role here, my earlier comment hearkening back to the Challenger suggestion “don’t launch when it’s cold” suddenly seems pretty applicable. “Don’t launch when it’s foggy,” or, more likely, “don’t expect to get it back if you launch when it’s foggy.”

 Posted by at 12:56 am

Looks like Falcon 9 went kersplat

 AARRRGH, blather, Hmm..., news, rockets, spacecraft, youtube  11 Responses »
Jan 172016
 

A SpaceX Falcon 9 was launched out of Vandenberg today, putting an ocean observation satellite into orbit. A secondary goal was to land the first stage on a barge out at sea… it appears that this was not successful. The rocket landed on the barge but didn’t stick the landing; it seems one of the legs may have collapsed due to hitting too hard. Ocean conditions were pretty rough, as can be seen in the video below… which cut off literally seconds before the landing at about 50:30.

So… from a limited dataset, the Falcon 9 is good at landing on pads that aren’t bobbing up and down, not so good at landing on pads that are in motion. Even if this issue isn’t resolved, it’s still useful on many missions to be able to land-recover the first stage.

So, presuming the booster was lost on landing, what we have here is a learning experience. If it was NASA… program shutdown, months of Congressional hearings. SpaceX: “don’t launch when it’s cold.” Or to be more specific, don’t expect to land when the seas are rough.

 Posted by at 12:59 pm

I’ve contributed to the Smithsonian. Kinda. If you stretch definitions a lot.

 art, awesomeness, history, models, photography, rockets, science fiction, spacecraft  4 Responses »
Jan 102016
 

Years ago I bought a Saturn V blueprint off ebay. I then scanned it and sold it on my site. One buyer was Randall Munroe of XKCD,who used it as a basis for his “Up Goer Five.” I suggested to him that he should sell large prints of the UG5, which he did (I imagine I was hardly the only one to suggest this to him). Someone bought one of these prints and stuck it up in a restoration facility at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum’s Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center, where it was photographed in the background during the restoration of the original starship Enterprise filming model. See here:

Star Trek NCC-1701 Studio Model Restoration in 2015

DSCN6074

ug5

So, yeah, it’s a stretch to lay claim to any value here… but whatever there may be I’ll take.

 Posted by at 7:21 pm

Cathedrals of Light

 art, awesomeness, history, Hmm..., photography, rockets, science, spacecraft  3 Responses »
Jan 072016
 

Yeah, yeah, the title hearkens back to some politically unfortunate events, but it fits here.. two photos of the Saturn Ib and Saturn V on the launch pad lit up by the amazingly brilliant lamps NASA used for the job. The image of the Saturn Ib gets to me… I think it’s the contrast of The Most Amazing Thing EVAR in the background, while in the foreground are a number of fellers just doing a job.

S68-46285 S69-25879

 Posted by at 11:38 am

And *BOOM* goes the productivity

 aircraft, awesomeness, history, Hmm..., news, spacecraft  2 Responses »
Jan 062016
 

The Aviation Week archive is now online. You need to sign up to gain access; I had to try with two different email addresses. Part of the process is they send you an email you have to click on to finish the registration process; the first address never got the email, the second got it in seconds. Shrug.

Not that it’s not the *complete* archive. There are still a number of issues missing… perhaps unsurprisingly, one specific issue from the 1980’s I went looking for isn’t there. Presumably it’ll show up eventually. But even so… there is a productivity-destroying amount of stuff available. At least in some cases the online images are higher resolution than the best scans from actual issues of the magazine.

http://archive.aviationweek.com

 Posted by at 5:21 pm

Aero Art

 aircraft, art, books, history, Hmm..., projects, spacecraft  11 Responses »
Jan 052016
 

I recently decided that I wanted to at least look at the idea of producing a printed and bound book or two of aerospace artwork. For copyright reasons selling coffeetable tomes filled with other peoples art is probably not a good idea, so this would likely be something just for myself, if it can be made affordable. But step one was gathering the artwork I have into one location so’s I can figure out what to include. So I dug through the ol’ hard drives and gathered stuff into one folder. A few conditions: the images had to be large/high-rez enough to be printed at at least 8.5X11; they had to be in color, not B&W; they had to be paintings (not CGI, not photos of models, not line drawings); they had to be “official” images, not fan art of the like; they had to be interesting.

I’ve been thinking of perhaps a few different volumes… “Saturn/Apollo,” “Shuttle Program,” “Conceptual Designs,” etc.  I was looking for something on the order of 50 images per volume.

End result: the “Aero Art” folder has 982 files for a total of 7.73 gigabytes. I guess I have enough to take a stab at this…

What I’d *really* like to do is to have a larger format book… preferably 11X17 or so pages. But that’s probably a bit much.

 Posted by at 1:50 am

NIMF Art

 aircraft, art, history, nukes, Patreon, projects, rockets, spacecraft  7 Responses »
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.

martin-marietta_nimf0009

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.

patreon-200

 Posted by at 1:25 am
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