SpaceX has recently released a video summary of their May, 2021, launch of the SN15 Starship test vehicle. it’s real, real pretty.
Giggitty!
UPDATE: huh, the video got yoinked. Looking at the SpaceX YouTube video library, it looks like it, might have been just a repost of this video from May:
Their live stream of the launch was buggy due to difficulties in sending the video down live:
The Parker Solar Probe passed close enough to the Sun back in April to arguably be said to have “touched” the sun by zipping through the outermost layers of the solar atmosphere. It took months to get all the collected data back, and John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab has just released the video below of the passage. The video quality is pretty potato, but it looks like it was a hell of a ride.
Once again, this moment of unutterable awesomeness has been brought to you by hard-nosed engineering rigor. STEM for the won… once again.
As a followup to the large-scale Tirpitz model, if you want a 1/20 scale X-15A-2, these folks can hook you up:
It looks nice, it’s certainly detailed (I haven’t rivet-counted to assure that it’s *accurately* detailed). It’s just… a little pricey.
If they sell out, I might reconsider my abandoned 1/24 X-20 Dyna Soar…
As this document is being compiled in 2019, NASA is once again planning a return to the Moon, and new lunar lander designs are being generated. Compared to Apollo, crews are projected to be larger (at least four per mission) and stay times longer (beginning at 6.5 days). However, it is expected that the landers will look much like the designs in this document because, as stated in the introduction, lunar lander design is a response to the simple physics that governs the tasks they are asked to perform. Design is also a living thing. New crewed lander designs will continue to emerge up until the point that humans return to the Moon, and even beyond. New players from different countries and commercial providers will create new designs based on new technologies and new requirements. Until some breakthrough technology or new physics principle is created, each lander will respond to the current physics of lunar landing. There may come a time, generations from now, when future engineers are paging through a digital copy of this catalog and reflecting on the early work of lunar lander designers. “Those Apollo guys were really smart, given that they started with nothing as a reference. The Lunar Module – now THAT was a great lunar lander design.”
It’s an interesting, illustrated catalog of many lunar lander concepts, but it’s hardly comprehensive; it largely starts with the Space Exploration Initiative, largely ignoring concepts from the 70’s and 80’s, and of course focusing almost entirely on NASA_designed concepts rather than Lockheed, Boeing, Rockwell, etc.
This seems like something that *really* needs to be peer-reviewed and then replicated. The implications are pretty astounding if it’s true.
The rover spotted a blurry object on the horizon. It’s “cube shaped” only insofar as a blurry single image can depict a cube.
I feel confident in stating “it’s a rock.” Still, go take a look. The moon is rocks. You went to the moon to look at rocks; that one is as good as any other. One likely blasted out of the ground by a meteorite impact is likely to be fairly interesting.
I coulda *swore* I posted a link to this video *years* ago, but a cursory search did not turn it up. Maybe I didn’t mention the band name or song title, dunno. But if you want a succinct, tight little effective sci-fi story starring YoSaffBrig, “The Ghost Inside” by Broken Bells will hook you right up.
One might argue that it’s a bit heartbreaking.
The rewards for November, 2021, have been sent out. Patrons should have received a notification message through Patreon linking to the rewards; subscribers should have received a notification from Dropbox linking to the rewards. If you did not, let me know.
Document: “Galactic-Jupiter Probe Program Concept:” 1967 NASA-Goddard brochure describing a Pioneer/Voyager type of space probe
Document: “Mixed Mode Rocket Vehicles for International Space Transportation Systems,” 1973 paper describing modified Shuttles and other launch vehicles
Document: “Nuclear Physics Made Very, Very Easy,”1968 NASA NERVA test operation publication that summarizes nuclear physics
Diagram: Navalized Advanced tactical Fighter (Northrop NF-23) general arrangement
CAD Diagram ($5 and up): “Disney Bomb,” British designed and built, American dropped rocket-boosted submarine pen penetrating bomb from the end of WWII
If this sort of thing is of interest, sign up either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. *ALL* back issues, one a month since 2014, are available for subscribers at low cost.
The scan quality is terrible. The print quality was probably mediocre. But I get the feeling that the original piece of artwork, produced at Boeing in the early/mid 1960’s to illustrate the interior structure of the Saturn V S-IC stage (built by Boeing back when Boeing could be relied upon to build things like this), was a thing to behold. It was probably in all the colors that an artist working in paint or pen or even colored pencil could produce.
If anyone knows if the original still exists… let me know, and do what you can to make sure it survives. We should do everything possible to preserve the artifacts of our culture at its peak to preserve them against the dark age to come.
An advertisement for Boeing from 1963, showing four very different products of Boeing’s inventiveness and ability to get things done: a jetliner, a hydrofoil, a rotating artificial gravity space station and a spaceplane. The spaceplane, the X-20 Dyna Soar, was cancelled the month after the ad was printed. The space station was never built. The hydrofoil was decommissioned in 1975 and never replaced with a more advanced version. The jetliner, the 727, took its last commercial passenger flight in 2019… 56 years after its first flight. The most advanced Boeing jetliner, the 787, is much more efficient than the 727, but is not a fundamentally different beast: it’s design would not have looked out of place in the design process for the 727, though the materials would have impressed the 727’s designers.
Sixty years ago, Boeing could bang out not only some amazing idea, but some amazing actual vehicles. and they could do so somewhere near the budget and somewhat resembling the schedule. Today? The SLS and the Starliner capsule are *how* many billions of dollars over budget and how many years behind schedule? How badly managed has the 737 max program been? Does anyone expect to see a “797” jetliner from Boeing anytime in the next twenty years?
