Cute, but I suspect it’s kinda preachin’ to the choir.
Jan 032015
Jan 022015
A nice writeup of some of my Orion drafting & scribbling here:
Hard SF Feature 04: Scott Lowther
Some of my Orion diagrams:
I suppose I really do need to finish that book some day. Having the publisher vanish on me kinda sucked the joy out of it, though. You’d think I’d be used to that sort of thing by now… I guess that there just might not be a maximum level of disappointment. You can always be more disappointed.
Dec 302014
Ah, back in the days when rocket manufacturers proudly advertised their wares… 
Dec 292014
Still plugging away at this. The forward “Shuttle” is just about done… some tinkering in the bay and with the forward landing gear, and it’ll be there. At 1/200 scale, the landing gear components are really small, so the decision has been made to mold this with the landing gear fixed in the stowed position, tucked up against the main body. It would look spiffy as a stand-alone kit at 1/72 scale, but I doubt there’s a market for that.
Dec 272014
Here’s how Space Station V can service an Orion and an Aries simultaneously. The manipulators arm that reaches out from the Station and grabs the Aries has to be not only nimble, but pretty strong; the boarding deck is under 0.02 G’s. Not a whole lot, but for a vehicle massing (handwave) a hundred thousand pounds, it’s a fair weight to be cantilevered out like that. The arm grasps of one the landing legs, roughly swings the ship into position, and then an arm from the “top” of the lander projects and grabs an extendable structure that projects from the bay. This second arm stabilizes the lander and precisely orients it for the dock that projects from the face of the station and fits over the boarding door. A third, smaller arm snakes out from the lander and mates with the extendable structure. Both of the landers arms contain umbilicals to transfer consumables and propellants and such.
Why not dock it in the bay?
The Aries does not fit in the bay. It just doesn’t. Parsecs are not a unit of time and the Aries Ib doesn’t fit in the Space Station V docking bay. And even if you scale up the SSV so that the Aries does fit… you won’t be able to service both an Aries and an Orion at the same time unless the station is so vast that you’ve got room to move a ship in, then shove it over to one side of the bay and bring in another along the centerline.
Dec 262014
There was a delay getting the December rewards out, and a further delay in putting this notification together that the rewards are available… so it might be only a short-ish time before these are gone, replaced by the *January* rewards. So if these look of interest… act fast!
PDF Document: “Design Study for an Air Force Model F-82E Airplane Modified to a Ground Attack Aircraft with Allison XT-38 Turbo Prop Engine,” a North American Aviation report from 1948. This was not for a simple engine swap-out… the cockpits were moved forward and the engines located behind them, driving the props with long shafts.
PDF Document: “SAM-D Air Defense Weapon System,” a 1973 US Army description document of what would become the Patriot missile system.
Large Format Diagram: a large-format full-color (w/bonus grayscale versions) diagram of the X-20 Dyna Soar. Very detailed and clear. Looks great on a wall (believe me on that!)
CAD Diagram: Boeing Model 853-21 “Quiet Bird” a 1961 design study for a low radar cross section (i.e. stealthy) research aircraft.
If you would like to access these items and support the cause of acquiring and sharing these pieces of aerospace history, please visit my Patreon page and consider contributing.
Dec 212014
A camera mounted in the “nose” of the Orion capsule. On the way up, it would look forward, but on the way down, as here, it looks back. And here it sees the limb of the Earth, the plasma tail during re-entry and the chutes.
Now, what I want to see is a joint mission, with two such capsule re-entering next to each other, maybe a few hundred yards apart. Get a view of this from the side, and you’d really have something.
[youtube MtWzuZ6WZ8E]
Dec 192014
A series of scans on Flickr showing a deck of cards illustrated, seemingly, by the General Dynamics art department sometime in the 1960s.
Space Cards
Dec 192014
It’s for sale:
$379,900
1516 Big Cove Road, Huntsville, AL 35801
4 beds | 4 baths | 2,750 square feet | Single Family
Looks like a nice enough place.
Dec 192014
CRS-5 Launch Date: NET Jan. 6
On December 16 a static test firing of a Falcon 9 engine shut down early (though not catastrophically), and SpaceX wants time to investigate the anomaly.