Long time since progress shots were shown. So, enjoy.
Feb 122015
Feb 122015
New Horizons can see Pluto and Charon orbiting each other. Note that Pluto “wobbles;” this is due to the fact that Charon is fully 1/8 the mass of Pluto, thus the center of gravity of the system is not the center of Pluto… in fact it’s above the surface of Pluto.
Feb 102015
The next pair of pubs. The USLP layout shows not only most of the designs for the first issue, but also the planned format.
Feb 102015
An old, old, *old* school NASA educational film about the rockets to be used on the Saturn I booster, as seen from 1961 or so. Includes some cliched discussion of rocket thrust as being the same as recoil from a rifle… with a now-almost-certainly banned from public school film of someone shooting a gun to demonstrate the principle. It’d be interesting to see how this would go over in a modern grade school setting.
Feb 072015
Neil Armstrongs widow found a white bag in a closet, emptied it out and found it was full of clearly space-related stuff. So she asked the National Air and Space Museum for assistance in identifying it. Turns out… it’s bits and pieces of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module. Most profoundly (to me, anyway) is the little 16mm film camera that looked out the window and actually filmed the landing, as well as Armstrongs descent down the ladder.
Lunar Surface Flown Apollo 11 Artifacts From the Neil Armstrong Estate
I don’t have much use for religious icons… but damn, if any physical objects merit such veneration, it’d be these. They are now on display at the NASM. The link above has a bunch of high-rez photos.
Feb 072015
Saw it. Review: Eh, it was ok, I suppose. The movie snobs seem to hate it with a passion, but I thought it was entertaining enough.
Technical note: there are two types of science fiction moves. There’s the type like “Interstellar,” which tries to be scientifically accurate; in these cases, the engineer in me finds all the science and logic flaws in the flick, and kinda obsesses about ’em. And then there’s the type like “Jupiter Ascending” or “Star Wars” or “John Carter,” where no pretense towards scientific accuracy is made, and the engineer in me takes a little nap, and willing suspension of disbelief takes over. You need a *lot* of that here.
The short form for the world of Jupiter Ascending: Humanity did not evolve on Earth, but some other world…a *billion* years ago. Humans found Earth some 65 million years ago and apparently promptly bombed the dinosaurs into extinction; 100,000 years ago, the local pre-human species were genetically tinkered into modern humans. The reason: bajillions of worlds are seeded with humans. When the world gets populated sufficiently, the Space Humans come along and “harvest” the planet, which process was not shown but results in the complete genocide of the humans on the world. The humans are processed for a Magical Youth Serum which is a glowy liquid (100 people are needed to make about a liter) and the most valuable substance in the universe, and people fight for it and dynasties are based on it, the spice must flow, blah, blah, blah. Point is: the larger Space People Culture is a horrible stratified and ossified society of aristocratic assholes who live 90,000 or more years due to Magic Youth Serum.
Yeah, you can pick that apart a hundred different ways: any Magic Youth Serum can probably be analyzed and stamped out by the metric ton via replicators and humanity is probably going to go *way* beyond meatspace long before a billion years are two that jump out at me.
But you don’t watch a flick like this for the rational discourse of logical probabilities; you watch it for the flashing lights and pretty colors, which this has in spades. The artists went absolutely bonkers in designing the ships here; I don’t know what a billion-year-old civilization would look like (my guess: dust), but this does look like a civilization so advance as to not give a damn about energy or mass. Plus, you can see “2001’s” Space Station V in one scene…
There was one genuinely funny sequence that bore a striking resemblance to “Brazil.” The fact that it ended with an appearance by Terry Gilliam was thus rather fitting.
So, if you watch it for what it is, it’s not bad. It’s gorgeous if somewhat befuddling space opera… without the sense of fun that “Guardians of the Galaxy” had. My prediction: it’ll tank.
Feb 062015
In general, I can complete a diagram for the US Aerospace Projects series in anywhere from a handful of hours to a couple man-days, depending on detail and how much 3D work I need to do (the Space Cruiser from US Spacecraft Projects #2 was a chore because a lot of time was spent on 3D modeling). But even at the long end of the bell curve, this would seem to indicate that I should be able to finish a full set of 8 vehicle diagrams in a week or less. But it hasn’t worked out that way; it’s usually quite a bit longer. Why? Because the diagramming is pretty much the *last* stage in the process.
In order to come up with 8 diagrams, I have to decide on 8 vehicles. Sometimes that’s easy, like when I have a known design series that I’m working on (the B-52 & B-59 series in USBP, for example). Sometimes I get obsessed that I have to do some particular design… the Space Cruiser was one such. And then the next step after deciding on which vehicle is collecting the info needed on each one.
In many cases, I have all the info I need. I have a number of Space Cruiser documents I’ve collected over the years, enough to do the project justice. But just because I have a document doesn’t necessarily mean I *remember* that I have the document… or when I do remember it, remember where I put it. I spend quite a while digging for a document on SC that I only halfway vaguely remembered that I had.
And then when I find the documents, there’s the going through them, looking for the relevant and useful bits. Sometimes that’s easy: the whole thing is described in a single AIAA paper that has four pages and one diagram. Limited data means a limited diagram and description on my part. But sometimes the design is buried in *vast* reports, or scattered across a number of presentations. And while there might be thousands of pages, there are only a few pages that are directly valuable. Such as a design I’m digging up now for US Launch Vehicle Projects #1, for which the research stack is the entire box you see here:
FYI: the cardboard box under the plastic box contains a series of GD SSTO reports for future use; the half-filled box behind is a small fraction of my wholly uncatalogued Saturn/Apollo collection.
So if you see me flacking a US “X” P publication and think that I’m just slapping these things together… ah… no. Simple though they may look, they are each the result of a *lot* of work, often based on reports that I gathered ten, fifteen years ago hoping to *someday* find some use for.
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Feb 052015
Granted, as photos go they’re not spectacular…
NASA Spacecraft Returns New Images of Pluto En Route to Historic Encounter
Also visible: Charon.
Feb 052015
A Ryan concept for recovery of the Saturn I first stage. Somewhere around here I have a report on using such a system to recover a Saturn I used to launch a Dyna Soar…
The idea was that the stage could glide back to a runway landing in Florida. As memory serves, in order to pull that off some propulsive capability was needed, such as restarting the engines and doing a retro-burn while still above the sensible atmosphere. The stage would return unmanned.
Feb 042015
In this case, “flight” being a pad abort test, previously scheduled to occur in January (clearly a bit delayed). SpaceX is saying that the new Dragon should fly to space in 2017. They’ve posted a new photo on their Twitter page.
