During the development of the Saturn I, a full scale developmental unit was suspended from wires within a special facility at NASA-Marshall and subjected to mechanical shaking to see if the vehicle could withstand the vibrations expected during launch. The first stage was an actual Saturn I first stage, while the second and third stages were water-ballasted simplified versions.
I’ve started posting my diagrams created for APR, USBP, etc. over on “Deviantart.” Unless I get bored and wander away (gosh, what are the chances of *that*), the plan is to eventually post virtually *all* of my diagrams, at a rate of about one a day.
Check it out:
Feel free to tell anyone you care to tell.
I’ve been tinkering with Pax Orionis since the release of US Spacecraft Projects #2. I’m still roughing out the historical outline from Then to Now; I have 16,000+ words, or roughly 50+ paperback pages. While I know the general thrust of the overall story, I’m still kinda torn on *how* to approach parts of it. Parts of it I want to do like a dry government history report, or perhaps something like a PhD dissertation. Other parts like a technical manual. Other parts like standard third person narrative. Any of these would be fine on their own, but it seems like it might be odd to do all three. But would it? Would a book that alternates – a history chapter, a fiction chapter, a tech chapter, rinse and repeat – be a sensible way to go, or would it just annoy the hell out of people? I’ve seen a number of books (Lord of the Rings springs to mind) that have a long unified fictional yarn that ends with a dry factual Appendix, so I know that at least that approach makes some sort of sense.
One of the closest analogies to what I’m hoping to accomplish is World War Z (book, not movie), where tales are told covering many years and many people across the planet. Most of the characters would come in, play their role, then fade away rather than run through the whole narrative. Look at the last 50 years of *actual* history… any novel-length history of that period would either have to be an actual biography, or very few historical figures would carry all the way through from beginning to end.
The purpose of the historical dissertation would be for the fictional author to try to understand the world of alternate 2010 (plus or minus a few years). Because that world is not only *massively* different from ours, it’s also *massively* trashed. Very, very bad things have happened and a whole lot has been lost, including historical records. Just *how* did the world come to this?
Any suggestions or critiques of the idea welcomed.
Coming soon to a sky near you, hopefully:
It turns out that dunes can form on comets. Seems unlikely for a worldlet with such low gravity, but there it is.
and
Now available: US Spacecraft Projects #02, the “Spaceplane Special.” This is done in the same style as the other US Aerospace Projects publications, but this issue is focused specifically on lifting spacecraft… and is more than twice as long as usual with more data and more diagrams.
USSP #02 includes:
USSP #02 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $6:
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Illustrations of a Martin concept from 1961 called “DEIMOS” (Development and Investigation of a Military Orbital System). Pitched to the Air Force, this entailed a modified Titan II launch vehicle, a standard cargo hauler and a scaled-up two-man Mercury capsule (this was before Gemini was finalized). The result was something akin to a smaller version of the later MOL (Manned Orbiting Laboratory). The Titan II described here (modifications unknown) could put a 10,000 pound payload into a 300 nautical mile orbit.
Capabilities and roles of DEIMOS were not provided, but it would presumably serve much the same role as MOL, though simpler and lighter weight: basic science as well as reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. The claim as of August 1961 was that if work began soon DEIMOS could begin flying in 1963.
The Dawn spacecraft is approaching Ceres, and for the first time we’re starting to get images of the “dwarf planet” that begin to show it as a distinct world. It is really quite round, and appears to have some unusual features.
An hours worth of images taken on January 13 from a distance of 238,000 miles… roughly the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Dawn won’t go into orbit around Ceres until March 6. The rather creakingly slow approach is due to Dawns low-thrust ion engines.
More info HERE.
Project Blue Book was the US Air Force project to study UFO reports and try to make sense of them and determine if there was any sort of threat to the security of the US. In 1969 the project wrapped up with a “nope” and a shrug, but nevertheless kept a whole bunch of stuff classified. A lot of researchers have been driven to distraction by the classified status of the documentation and have spent years making FOIA requests. The National Archives has made a whole lot of these documents available on microfilm, but one feller went ahead and scanned them and has made them available as 130,000 pages of searchable PDFs.
The files are supposedly available on the website “The Black Vault,” but right now all I’m getting is a “this page cannot be loaded” message. I’d bet good money that the site simply got swamped with an exceedingly large number of people who want to download the docs. Or, you know, reptillian overlords. Whichever.