When it comes to suborbital space tourism, Virgin Galactic/SpaceShip Two gets all the press. But XCOR Aerospace and their Lynx spaceplane seems to be making good progress as well. And they just got some sales:
Tickets – 305 of them – costing $96,000 (about half of the SS2 ticket price) were sold.
Neat.
Very early. I would be entirely unsurprised if this has no basis in engineering, just artistic license. The “descent stage/ascent stage” ratio seems really, really off. Comes from a NASA PR brochure, date unclear.
See high-rez HERE.
In the runup to the Saturn program, American aerospace companies studied every possible variation on large launch vehicles. One idea that seemed promising was the use of large solid rocket motors, singly or in clusters, to form large booster stages. It was sensible enough… in the late 1950s large solid rockets were better developed than large liquid rockets. Solids can put out truly monstrous levels of thrust, and reasonably reliably; and they require minimal preparation once stacked up and ready to go. In contrast, liquid rockets are complex and finicky, but with the advantage of substantially higher specific impulse.
In 1959 Lockheed released the results of an early study for NASA on a series of large boosters using solid rocket motors. They studied a range of vehicles, with 2, 3 and 4 stages; 300,000, 1,000,000 and 5,000,000 pound gross weights, and targeting 300 nautical mile circular orbits, geosynchronous, escape and soft lunar landings.
Shown below are diagrams of 1,000,000-pound gross weight boosters using 180-inch diameter solid first stages (440,000 pounds of propellant) and liquid upper stages (LOX/RP-1 or LOX/LH2 for the second stage and LOX/LH2 for the third). Payload weights were given for representative vehicles rather than specific designs.
Payload: 39,800 pounds to 300 n.m.; 9,400 pounds to geosynchronous; 12,400 to escape; 3,900 pounds to soft lunar landing
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Payload: 51,500 pounds to 300 n.m.
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Payload: 39,800 pounds to 300 n.m.; 9,400 pounds to geosynchronous; 12,400 to escape; 3,900 pounds to soft lunar landing
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Payload: 15,000 pounds to geosynchronous; 18,400 pounds to escape; 5,600 pounds to soft lunar landings
A 1960 USAF film describing testing being done in support of space biomedicine. Included are early vomit comet flights with kittens and pigeons… they don’t really seem to be able to get a grip on just what’s going on. But then, they didn’t exactly have the situation explained to them, and only had zero-g in fifteen second chunks to learn.
[youtube mI4ZHSd5vNs]
It may look kinda cruel to do this to cats and the like, but it’s necessary. not to learn about how humans are going to handle zero g… we’ve got that. No, we need to put critters in zero g because we’re going to be taking them with us when we finally get up and head out. Of course, when we finally have family-sized colony ships heading out to stake claims in the asteroid belt they will almost certainly rotate for artificial gravity, but zero-g will be something that everyone will have to learn to deal with. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty sure that in a zero g environment cats can probably learn to get around, so long as the walls are covered in burlap and they have their claws. Dogs, I’m not so sure. They’ll have to have velcro booties, I think. Monkeys will almost certainly figure it out, but they’re horrible dangerous little beasts you’ve probably have to be insane to take with you on a space ship.
Also note the Moment Of Extreme Mad Men Fiftiesismocity at about 10:22: a guy is in a Mercury capsule-like impact couch and dropped a few years to WHAM onto the ground. Within mere feet is an Air Force office in full regalia… smoking a pipe like Bob Dobbs. Something about that strikes me funny.
I’m getting close to being done with this one. The main article, clearly, is the one on the Model 2050E Dyna Soar, the second far smaller article is on the McDonnell F-4(FVS) and derivatives, the third is the old Bill Slayton CL-295 article from the original version of APR. There will be a few more small pieces, not shown here.
Issue V3N5 will almost certainly be smaller than this. Apart from the Lunar Gemini article, it will likely be composed of a number of all-new smaller articles. I’d like to move forward a short article from further down the run to this one, due to having some new info, but that info is embargoed by the source till later in the year. It’d be nice to get back on the two-month schedule for APR, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that.
She’s apparently a singe of some note:
“Whenever people bring up feminism, I’m like, god. I’m just not really that interested … I’m more interested in, you know, SpaceX and Tesla, what’s going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities.”
Way to step off the reservation, Lana. Get ready for some tolerance for your diversity of opinion!
Every now and then the notion of a modern version of the Saturn V pops up. It’s a silly idea; even if NASA decided that they needed a functional replica of the Saturn V, they couldn’t afford it. Not because the blueprints are missing; they can be obtained from several sources on microfilm. But the tooling to build a Saturn V is all gone. Many of the materials called for no longer exist. Many of the sub-components come from catalogs that no longer carry them, from companies that folded decades ago. To rebuild the Saturn V would be every bit as hard as building a brand-new vehicle along the same lines, but with modern materials, components and design/manufacturing practices.
Still, the idea of a modern Saturn V seems to appeal to many, including many at NASA. Below is a page from a 2011 Space Launch System presentation showing some of the concepts batted around regarding a modernized Saturn V. Note that the designs shown here were probably not designed in any real fidelity… spreadsheets and Powerpoint is likely as far as most of them got.
There are apparently still a whole lot of regulatory hurdles to jump. But the further VG gets with the FAA, the better, even if VG itself doesn’t quite work out.
The unveiling of the manned version of the Dragon capsule is being live-blogged here:
The Dragon V2 will have room for seven astronauts, and will be able to replace American dependence upon Russian Soyuz launches once and for all.
UPDATE: it’s certainly a smooth looking ship, and suprisingly vast on the inside.
[youtube FZJLAo6VRtA]
It looks vaguely familiar.
The Revell plastic model kit company is soliciting ideas for new models they’ll produce. You can vote and submit new ideas here:
Some of the ideas include (remember, these are just suggestions from the peanut gallery, and Revell is under no compulsion to actually produce them… however, higher vote counts just might help):