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:

North American X-15A-2

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…

After LM: NASA Lunar Lander Concepts Beyond Apollo

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.

DARPA Funded Researchers Accidentally Create The World’s First Warp Bubble

China’s Yutu 2 rover spots cube-shaped ‘mystery hut’ on far side of the moon

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?

If you look back to NASA in the mid-1960’s, it certainly seems like it was an organization filled with people who thought that the future was wide open. Apollo was merely going to be the first step; after some landings would come longer-term “camps” on the moon, with stays of a few weeks in temporary habitats; then would come bases that could be visited by multiple crews. Nuclear powered space stations with artificial gravity. There would be manned flyby missions to Venus and eventually manned landings on Mars; as propulsion systems inevitably grew vastly more capable, manned missions to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn would follow in due course.

By the time Apollo 11 actually landed on the moon, though, it was becoming clear that the future was not going to be what it should have been. As noted previously, the production line of the Saturn V was shut down a year before Apollo 11, not only limiting the possible missions of the Apollo program but ending hope for missions that would expand upon Apollo. Shortly after Apollo 11, it seems that morale at NASA was already in decline as the engineers, scientists, technicians and so on could see the writing on the wall. Not only was Saturn dead, but funding was in decline and it was becoming clear that there was minimal political interest in carrying Apollo forward… the job of beating the Soviets to the Moon was done, and the important scientific work, not to mention the prospect of carrying western civilization to the stars, was not that important to the political class who were far more interested in the “Great Society” spending programs. So in September of 1969 a “Seminar on Manned Flight Awareness” was held at the Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, to deal with the issue:

The successful lunar landing and completion of the flight of Apollo 11 achieved a national objective in this decade and is a significant milestone in man’s continuing progress in space exploration. Historically, achievements of such magnitude, requiring concentrated efforts over an appreciable time period, are followed by a letdown and general relaxation of the personnel involved. In addition, this letdown may be amplified by a serious morale problem when funding cutbacks are experienced. The result is n decline in the required attention to detailed workmanship which can cause a rise in accident rates and potential loss of life.

To counter these potential morale and complacency problems in the spaceflight program, this Government/Industry Manned Flight Awareness Seminar is being conducted. The objective of this seminar is the maintenance of high quality workmanship through effective awareness and motivational programs. We intend to do this by outlining NASA’s plans for future programs and the resources being made available to successfully conclude these programs. In addition, executives of various industrial firms deeply involved in space work will present their views of the future. In this way we can get the message from NASA Management to the individuals responsible for doing the work that is vital to assuring a high quality of workmanship in the aerospace force.

Not having been born yet, I don’t have any firsthand information on just what was going on at the time in NASA. However, one thing I *do* have firsthand information on was the end of the United Technologies Center/Chemical System Division facility south of San Jose, California, circa 2003-2004. That company was a manufacturer of solid rockets such as the booster separation motors for the Space Shuttle, booster rockets for the Tomahawk cruise missile, Minuteman ICBM stages and so on. It was a vital part of the rocket industry of the United States. And in 2003-2004, it was *obvious* to everyone there that the company was doomed. Things were going wrong left and right to the point that a lot of us were wondering if it was active sabotage; in reality it was merely management and unions working together to make things as ridiculous as possible. Coupled with the fact that the company could, at best, turn in a profit measured at a handful of millions of dollars a year while sitting on *billions* of dollars of prime Silicon Valley real estate, everyone there knew that the companies time was strictly limited. So, what did the USAF and NASA do about it?

The USAF/NASA told the rest of the United States aerospace industry to *not* hire any of us. We were embargoed from seeking employment elsewhere, at least at companies that received federal contracts. So we stayed on the job. Until, of course, the embargoes were lifted, then we fled like rats fleeing a sinking ship.

It seems that NASA in September 1969 was facing a similar predicament. Everyone there – scientists, engineers, technicians and subcontractors of all kinds – could see the writing on the wall. And when you know that the project you’re working on has a near-term end date, you look for somewhere else to be, preferably before all your co-workers get the same idea. This is sensible, but it’s also a problem. Yes, Apollo/Saturn had a distinctly limited lifespan. But the program still had a number of years left, and it would need the bulk of the staff to stay on the job to make sure that the spacecraft and launch vehicles were finished, maintained and prepared for their missions. If everyone at NASA fled for brighter opportunities elsewhere, the missions still funded would be unable to be completed. So NASA held a seminar that seemed to have the singular goal of convincing people just how bright NASA’s future really was. A space shuttle would be available by 1976 and a space station by 1979… as well as a polar orbit station and one in geosynchronous. A lunar orbiting station around 1976. Nuclear powered inter-orbital shuttles. Manned missions back to the Moon and on to Mars.

It was all wrong. Yes, the Shuttle finally arrived in the early 1980’s, greatly delayed and vastly and permanently over budget, each flight costing one to two orders of magnitude more than originally projected. yes, a space station did eventually arrive… in the 1990’s, handicapped by international politics, small, undermanned, under-capable. None of the rest of it even *tried* to happen. The seminar reads like desperation, or a rah-rah session at some multi-level marketing scheme; I had flashes to scenes in the recent Hulu series “Dopesick” where Oxycontin sales reps are getting the latest BS about how great the next dosage of the pill will be, so go out there and sell more.