Japanese Mini-Shuttle

 aircraft, art, projects, spacecraft  3 Responses »
May 142015
 

A brief article on a Japanese mini-shuttle, photographed from an issue of “Space World” magazine a few months back (sadly, I didn’t catch the date of the article, but it would have been sometime in the early/mid 1980’s). This is, I believe, an early design of the “HOPE” spaceplane which was more or less Japans answer to the French Hermes spaceplane. This mini-shuttle would have been a little bigger than the Dyna Soar from twenty years earlier, but equipped not only with its own onboard rocket propulsion system but also a pair of turbojets of atmospheric propulsion.

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 Posted by at 10:22 am

PDF Review: So you want to know what a Lacrosse satellite looks like…

 Hmm..., news, Patreon, photography, russian empire, science, spacecraft  3 Responses »
May 102015
 

If you’ve got a hankering to find out what the super-secret Lacrosse radar satellites look like, the Russians got you covered. A Russian satellite tracking facility in Siberia used telescopes to take photos of several of these satellites, and then, rather unconventionally, released the images. The images were collected and analyzed, and posted in a PDF album:

An Album of Images of LACROSSE Radar Reconnaissance Satellites
Made by a 60 cm Adaptive Optics System
at the
G.S. Titov Altai Optical-Laser Center

The images are not spectacular… nobody will be making details models based off them. But you can get a sense of the overall configurations(s), as well as the size of the antennae; from that, an analyst could give you a good idea what the capabilities of the sensor systems are.

Much more aerospace stuff is available via the APR Patreon.

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 Posted by at 1:25 am

ISS Mass Properties Databook

 awesomeness, books, history, news, Patreon, spacecraft  No Responses »
May 072015
 

I’ve uploaded the fourth of four parts of the ISS Mass Properties Databook which provides a pretty complete overview of the ISS and all its major components, including layout diagrams of all the modules and whatnot. This is available for all APR Patreon patrons at $4/month level and above.

Check HERE to sign up. Many, many other aerospace goodies also available.

 Posted by at 10:26 pm

SpaceX Dragon Pad Abort Test

 awesomeness, history, news, rockets, science, spacecraft, youtube  7 Responses »
May 062015
 

Looks like it was a successful test. It also looks like one *hell* of a ride. The test occurs about 16 minutes into the video:

The finned cylinder aft of the capsule turns out to not only be a very effective aerodynamic stabilizer, it turns out to be *vital.* As soon as the capsule separates from the stabilizer… wow. I’m sure there are adrenaline junkies who’d pay good money for this ride.

 Posted by at 7:15 am

LEM art

 art, history, Hmm..., rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
May 052015
 

A blog reader passed along this view of a piece of early LEM art, hoping to see a higher resolution version. Can anyone help?

LEM

Bonus points if you recognize where the blog reader saw this…

 Posted by at 11:15 pm

EM drive vacuum tested

 blather, Hmm..., news, rockets, science, spacecraft  17 Responses »
May 012015
 

I’m still skeptical, but testing is testing:

New Test Suggests NASA’s “Impossible” EM Drive Will Work In Space

The electromagnetic drive works – if it works – by rattling microwaves around inside a metal can. Through the magic of… well, magic, I guess, the vanishingly tiny thrust developed by the microwaves as a pure photon rocket gets magnified into a measurable but still tiny level of thrust. How does this happen?

[T]he EM Drive’s thrust was due to the Quantum Vacuum (the quantum state with the lowest possible energy) behaving like propellant ions behave in a MagnetoHydroDynamics drive (a method electrifying propellant and then directing it with magnetic fields to push a spacecraft in the opposite direction) for spacecraft propulsion.

Whenever anyone starts yammering about quantum this or that or harnessing the vacuum, I have flashbacks to Deepak Chopra and start tuning them out. Still, NASA Eagleworks at Johnson Space Center is not known for a whole lot of crackpottery, so *maybe* they’ve stumbled across something. Or maybe they’re working on the newest Dean Drive.

Electromagnetics ain’t my schtick, so all I can say is that whenever anyone else has thought that they were getting a free lunch out of the universe, they found out that such a thing don’t happen. Superluminal neutrinos, anyone?

 Posted by at 10:22 pm

“New Shepard” first flight

 awesomeness, history, news, rockets, spacecraft, youtube  2 Responses »
Apr 302015
 

Blue Origin, the much-more-secretive version of SpaceX, launched their “New Shepard” spacecraft for the first time in west Texas yesterday. The launch vehicle, sure to be popular with sixth-graders everywhere, featured a large booster stage and a dummy capsule; after boosting to an apogee of 58 miles, the capsule was successfully recovered via parachutes. The booster was intended for a vertical recovery a la the Falcon 9R, but that was  *not* a success.  Given the amount of effort SpaceX has put into booster recovery, a recovery failure first time out of the gate for Blue Origin is not unexpected. but unlike SpaceX, booster recovery is *not* a nice bonus at the end of the flight; they’ll really have to make this reliable, or otherwise their costs will be prohibitive.

Bezos’ Blue Origin completes first test flight of ‘New Shepard’ spacecraft

A long way to go yet, but three cheers for progress in developing another manned spacecraft. The New Shepard is *not* a direct competitor against the Falcon 9/Dragon for the simple reason that this vehicle is intended to be a suborbital tourist vehicle, not an orbital transport.

 Posted by at 12:30 pm
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