Currently scheduled for 7:27 PM eastern time, SpaceX is planning on launching a Dragon capsule to the ISS with *four* astronauts on board. This will be the first time since the Space Shuttle that more than three at a time have gone up.
UPDATE: thirteen minutes into the flight and first stage has successfully landed, capsule is in orbit and separated from the second stage. It’s dull and repetitive… Which is *exactly* what ya want to see. WoO!
A black and white bit of concept art that was sold on ebay a while back showing the Lockheed STAR (Space Transport And Recovery) Clipper space shuttle concept from the late 1960’s. This was a promising concept that used a lifting body orbiter with a wide, flattened rear fuselage that was liberally covered with rocket engines (a large range of engines and layouts were considered, including liner aerospikes). The shuttle was filled with liquid oxygen tanks and some hydrogen tanks; the bulk of the hydrogen was stored in a large V-shaped drop tank. This component would have been larger but reasonably inexpensive, jettisoned after deletion to be destroyed during re-entry or splashdown in the Indian Ocean. The vehicle would have continued on to orbit using the propellant remaining in the internal tanks.
A vast amount of information on the STAR Clipper is available HERE.
The STAR Clipper lasted a lot longer than many contemporary designs and went through a multitude of design revisions. it always seemed like it should have worked reasonably well… and it had the benefit of being aesthetically beautiful.
The Biden-Harris transition team has announced who is on the NASA agency review team. Here’s the bio for one reviewer, Dave Noble:
For the past two years, he has been consulting with national progressive groups on strategic planning, coalition building, communications, electoral engagement, and leadership development.
Prior to this work, Dave spent eight years in the Obama Administration. He was the Deputy Director and Acting Director of the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO), where among other responsibilities he oversaw teams building pipelines of diverse candidates for political appointments and teams creating leadership development programming for all 3500 administration appointees. He also helped the First Lady organize mayors committed to ending food deserts and create safer and accessible places for kids to play as part of her “Let’s Move!” campaign, and was the White House Liaison and Deputy Chief of Staff at NASA, where he led the combined federal campaign to raise charitable donations from NASA HQ employees. He served on President Obama’s campaign in 2008 as the Director of the LGBT Vote and was deployed to Michigan to help spur voter turnout.
Yep. Good hands.
Assembly has begun… and it’s expected to only take a month or two. Woo!
It certainly doesn’t seem like it will belong to NASA:
Satellites looking down on Earth, measuring temperature and atmospheric makeup? Sure, useful. But someone PLEASE explain to me why *NASA* is meant to do this and not the NOAA.
The people who dreamed as children and struggled through college to get science and engineering degrees with the goal of working for NASA did so because they want to send Men to the Moon, Mars and beyond. It must surely be a small minority indeed who were enthralled not with visions of exploration and going out to the frontiers, but with looking at clouds.
So if the new administration does not use regulations to strangle SpaceX (including jacking up taxes so that SpaceX simply can’t afford to work here anymore), I would be utterly unsurprised to see a mass exodus of talent from NASA, heading to SpaceX.
I’d pay to watch this series. note: I recently tried watching some of the Gerry Anderson marionation series. Yeeeeesh.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CGXm0VOptgb/
The close-up of the daylit ISS crossing the lunar terminator is particularly impressive.
Scheduled for November 9 to 11, the first cosmetically-complete Starship is expected to make an attempt to reach an altitude of 15 kilometers. This isn’t very high as space launchers go – barely to the edge of the stratosphere – but it will be high enough that the Starship will attempt the “bellyflop” maneuver.
It’s probably rational to expect it to make a smoking hole in the water or the vicinity of Boca Chica. That is of course not a slam on SpaceX… they’re trying something new, and history has show that Rockets Are Hard. History has also showed that SpaceX is willing and, importantly, eager to learn from failures. So, while it is of course to be preferred that the test flight goes off without a hitch, if it doesn’t it’s just a step towards making it work.
Musk and SpaceX are laying the foundations for independent nations in space. If they can pull it off, that is of course a good thing. But will they be able to do so? Will the US government come in an stomp all over them? Worse, will the ChiComs, who will doubtless be far more powerful and influential on the world stage by the time SpaceX has anything remotely resembling a functional Mars colony, ram though international laws that allow the UN (i.e. the ChiComs and their sycophants) to take over the work done by others?
Rewards have just been posted for APR Patrons/Monthly Historical Documents Program subscribers. Included:
1: “Manned Aerodynamic Reusable Spaceship (MARS) Vehicle Design” a 1962 Douglas report covering a single stage “orbital airplane” of impressive size and design.
2: “Pretest Information 3.3 Percent 624A Aerodynamic Heating Investigation, NASA Langley Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel.” A 1963 Martin report describing a test of the Titan IIIC/Dyna Soar configuration.
3: Official XB-70 General Arrangement Diagram
4: CAD diagram: a 1974 Lockheed concept for a subscale Space Shuttle Orbiter Mach 9 flight test model, to be dragged behind a YF-12C and booster by an “Avanti” rocket (modification of the D-21B’s booster) with an internal SRAM motor in the orbiter.
If this sort of thing is of interest to you, either because you’d like to obtain these documents or you’d like to help preserve aerospace history (or both) please consider signing on to either the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.