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.
Holy carp… the first stage made it back to Canaveral and landed itself just like it was supposed to.
Woo!
UPDATE:
Live video from LZ-1 pic.twitter.com/Ve6gEXfOdh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2015
Live webcasts start around 6:30 Mountain time, a couple different places. Seems the land-landing attempt has gone to “may try it.”
http://www.spacex.com/webcast/
http://spaceref.com/live/spacex-webcast.html
OK, so I wrote about the “Have Sting” orbital railgun, and produced some provisional diagrams of it, publishing them in US Space Projects #3. A blog article was written for War Is Boring discussing “Have Sting,” based in no small part on my diagrams. OK, so far so good. But then other blogs start writing about Have Sting, and an error is introduced.
Whenever a blog post links to my blog, a “pingback notification” is sent to my blog dashboard. I’ve just glanced at these, haven’t given them much thought. For the most part they seem to be just parroting the verbiage from the War is Boring piece. But with one change: “Have Sting” has become “Have Sling.” A “T” became an “L.”
Examples:
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/219718-exploring-the-death-star-space-gun-america-never-built
In September, the Aerospace Project Reviews Blog published some fascinating diagrams depicting “Have Sling,” which aerospace historian Scott Lowther described as “[a] General Electric design for a gigantic orbital railgun.” Have Sling was never built, of course.
http://www.usaspeaks.com/news/exploring-the-death-star-space-gun-america-never-built/
September, the Aerospace Project Reviews Blog published some fascinating diagrams depicting “Have Sling,” which aerospace historian Scott Lowther described as “[a] General …
http://www.usaspeaks.com/news/exploring-the-death-star-space-gun-america-never-built/
http://www.viralnewstrend.com/exploring-the-death-star-space-gun-america-never-built/
And a bunch more, all seemingly the same post over and over.
And if you Google “have sling” and some other terms, some seriously wacky stuff appears, which I’m guessing is the result of some weird auto-translation:
http://www.bbtechnonews.com/index.php/2015/12/19/exploring-the-death-star-space-gun-america-never-built/
In September, the Aerospace Task Reviews Blog site released some remarkable layouts portraying “Have Sling,” which aerospace chronicler Scott Lowther
“Aerospace Task Reviews?”
And:
http://journalfocus.com/2015/12/exploring-the-death-star-space-gun-america-never-built/
Exploring the ‘Fatality Celebrity’ space gun America never built
UNITED STATE protection coordinators did at one time think about constructing a huge Fatality Star-like gun in space as component of the “Celebrity Wars” rocket protection program, as Warisboring’s Steve Weintz advised us this week in the middle of the hullaballoo of the position of The Pressure Awakens.
In September, the Aerospace Job Reviews Blog site released some interesting representations portraying “Have Sling,” which aerospace chronicler Scott Lowther…
… the styles explain a space tool the dimension of the International Space Terminal, each Lowther.
Buh?
So now when people try to research orbital railguns, there’s every chance that they will be presented with the fallacious designation “Have Sling.”
I just did a Google search on “railgun” and “Have Sling.” It spat back 741 results. “Railgun” and “Have Sting” only produced 321 results. The lie traveled around the world while the truth was still putting on its boots. And entertainingly, in doing some Googling for this post, I found this blog post. It is illustrated in part by “Do NOT try this at home: schematics for the orbital railgun . (Image courtesy up-ship.com.)” I found this illustration amusing for two reasons… firstly, when you say “Image courtesy whoever,” generally you’ve asked whoever for permission to republish. I usually don’t mind people reposting the images I create, but I wasn’t asked here, just sayin.’ More entertainingly, the diagrams of the “orbital railgun” are in fact my diagrams for the 10-meter USAF Orion. Which ain’t a railgun.
If all goes well, SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 later today (between 6:30 and 7 PM, Mountain standard time) sending 11 Orbcomm satellites into orbit… and the fist stage will return to the launch site for a land-landing. If all goes well.
UPDATE: put off till tomorrow.
The launch will be webcast here:
ORBCOMM? Damn. My first Real Job out of college was a distressingly short stint at Orbital Sciences. Got hired to design the thrust structure for the X-34B… which was cancelled the week after I got there. I was cancelled shortly after that… last in, first out. In the three or so weeks of panic between the cancellations, when everyone who knew the system better than me was running around finding new jobs within the company, I attempted to get onboard the ORBCOMM project. Odd to see satellites I kinda-sorta worked on (but not really) very nearly 20 years ago are just now being launched.
It has been a while since I’ve put out a Pax Orionis story, but a new one has just been made available to the Pax Orionis Patreon patrons. This one tells of the maiden voyage of the Columbia and the resulting changes in geopolitics…
The bonus version (available to $2 & up patrons) includes diagrams and data on the Nova-class lofter as well as a bonus news article. If interested, check out the Pax Orionis Patreon. It’s cheap!
For those unaware: Pax Orionis is an alternate history project. In short, the Cuban Missile Crisis goes a little “funny,” resulting in the US fielding nuclear pulse propelled spacecraft (Orions). The goal is hard SF covering a number of decades of events, good, bad and really quite awful.
This is worth looking at… a Hubble photo of jets being shot out of the poles of an accreting protostar, Herbig-Haro 24 (HH 24), about 1300 lightyears away in the Orion B molecular cloud. The star itself is hidden behind dust clouds. The jet is disrupted here and there due to hitting the gas and dust in the region, setting up turbulence and shock waves.
Once again… science is awesome.
Short version: Approved. Would watch again.
Longer version: infinitely better than the prequels. Very entertaining, definitely a good Star Wars Movie. But I’m unsure if it’s quite as good as the original trilogy… didn’t come out of the theater as thrilled and exited as I was by the original. But then… I was seven when “Star Wars” originally came out, so that might have something to do with it. Also: by far the most applause I’ve seen in a movie. Not just at the beginning and end, but several times during.
There is a lot of spoilery stuff that I won’t spoil, but rumors of someone important dying were accurate. Now, this being space fantasy, maybe death ain’t death… Spock came back, after all. But the death here seems every bit as final as the Emperor’s in “Jedi.”
And this being space fantasy, you’re better off not trying to analyze the science. Because it’s pretty outlandish here. Such as a Very Big Gun on Planet A that is many lightyears away from some observers on Planet B shoots a hyperlight weapon at Planet C, which is many lightyears from both A and B. I can buy that the weapon gets from A to C lickety-split, what with the hyperdrive and all… but the observers on B *watched* the weapon cross the sky – from lightyears away – in real time. Buh?
Oh well. No Jar Jar, and no characters nearly as irritating, so it gets a pass. There are some CGI characters that still look pretty CGI, especially “Supreme Leader Snoke,” the replacement for the Emperor. You only see the character via hologram (a technology that has apparently greatly improved since the Empire went down), but he’s still pretty fake looking. Shoulda been done as a muppet or makeup, IMO.
Some good humor as well. The main bad guy, one Kylo Ren, is essentially a Darth Vader fanboy. Collects Vader memorabilia, wants to follow in his footsteps and be as powerful as him. Like Vader, he has anger issues. But where Vader would get mad and be a contained scary guy who’d just stand there and make everybody uncomfortable, Ren whips out his lightsaber from time to time and just whacks the crap out of anything nearby in a tantrum. This leads to one of the best laughs in the movie when a couple stormtroopers who were walking down the hallway see this and turn around and decide to walk somewhere else.
Less than a month ago I posted about a gravitationally lensed galaxy many billions of lightyears away that had displayed a supernova in most, but not all, of the separate images, and that astronomers would be looking for the supernova to appear in one of the remaining images. The expectation was that it would appear in 2016… but the Hubble Space Telescope has just seen it:
After word that there are people willing to spend millions to build museums and planetariums specifically to teach that the world is best explained via magic, there’s really only one thing to say:
A paper has been published that makes a case for the bright spots on Ceres being largely salt with a bit of water ice. it would seem that there is probably a layer of frozen brine under the surface, a layer that gets exposed from time to time by meteorites.
Next up: Cerean Sea Monkeys.