A scale comparison between the Saturn V and Sea Dragon CD models I’m working on for a 1/7o0 scale kit for Fantastic Plastic. The Sea Dragon would have had about four times the payload of the Saturn V, despite being *gigantic* compared to the Saturn V. This was due to the fact that the Sea Dragon was, by design, a *low* performance vehicle, using simple pressure feed. the result was that everything was necessarily gigantic… giant engines, tanks, wall thicknesses, plumbing lines, etc. While the main propellant feed lines for most rockets are measured in inches, up to a foot or two, in diameter, the LOX and RP-1 lines at the base of the Sea Dragon were about ten *feet* in diameter.
The SpaceX Demo crew Dragon has docked with the ISS. This is the first flight of the capsule that SpaceX and NASA plan to use later this year (hopefully July) to send actual living human astronauts to the ISS, returning to the US the ability to launch our own people. This capability was lost for at least eight years when the Shuttle last flew in July 2011; in comparison, the loss of human launch capability that existed between Apollo (last flight: July 1975) and Shuttle (first flight; April 1981) was less than six years.
The video below shows the unmanned demo capsule approaching and docking with the ISS. It just *looks* like a spaceship. Some interesting shots of it rapidly firing it’s thrusters, showing what those plumes look like in a vacuum.
After the capsule is done at ISS (should be there for five days), it will separate and re-enter. All goes well, it will land back at the Cape using a combo of rocket thrusters and parachutes. It was originally planned for the Crew Dragon to use just the thrusters, a capability SpaceX has demonstrated with their boosters, but for safety reason chutes were added. Assuming it is successful, this very same capsule will be refurbished and, in June, used for an In Flight Abort test, which should be interesting.
The launch and successful booster landing were conducted at night, so the relevant videos are less impressive than they might otherwise have been.
Note: people get attacked for wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, and sometimes they are asked to explain just when America was great. Well, I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but America was certainly greatER when we had AN ACTUAL GOT-DAMNED MANNED SPACE PROGRAM. One that can launch and recover our own people.
I put a few hundred miles on the ol’ odometer today for one specific purpose: to see “Apollo 11” on an Imax screen.
Short review: if it opens on a good Imax screen near-ish you… run, don’t walk. More likely, drive, don’t run. I recommend it on about the same level I recommended “2001” on Imax.
There is no narration. The story of Apollo 11 is allowed to play out using film footage and audio recorded at the time, with some modern animation inserted to explain trajectories and whatnot. The animation, perhaps surprisingly, is not whiz-bang CGI, but simple line schematics showing simplified Apollo CSM and LM “icons” doing their thing.
Most of the movies features film which is really well short of Imax quality… it’s not like they had a 70mm camera in the capsule. But the first two minutes of the movie are worth the price of admission: it starts out with the crawler slooooowly making it’s way to the pad. It’s FREAKIN’ AWESOME.
I don’t have a 4K TV, nor a 4K player, but when this comes out on home media I’m getting the 4K version in the hopes that someday I’ll upgrade. It will sit on a small shelf along with my “2001” 4K set and gather dust until that day comes.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—A new environmental proposal would have the US replace all public and private spacecraft with high-speed trains by the year 2030, reports confirmed Thursday.
“We are wasting so much rocket fuel to generate the thrust necessary to leave Earth’s orbit when we could just build a train track all the way to Mars or Jupiter,” said a lobbyist for the train industry. “And just think about how pleasant a ride from Earth to Mars would be, coasting along the space tracks at 200 miles per hour for the next 193 years.”
The initial proposal would only cost approximately $10,000 trillion, according to a representative of one environmental think tank in D.C. “This is really a bargain when you think about it,” she said, pointing to a complex series of calculations she had performed on a LeapFrog laptop. “Besides, we can just print money to pay for it. Or maybe have a bake sale or something.”
Now, can you think of anyone dimwitted enough to actually suggest anything like this? Hmmm…
While it’s an achievement worthy of note, the SpaceShip program has taken so long to get here (and “here” is a Virgin Galactic employee, not a group of paying customers) that I wonder if SpaceX’s orbital plans might wipe out the market for SS2 before they can really start operations.
An illustration from 1984 showing the main features of an orbital railgun for the Strategic Defense Initiative program. While the design looks reasonable enough, almost certainly this is either missing a whole lot of important details or has changed them into unrecognizability. Scale is impossible to determine, but a practical space-based railgun capable of generating the projectile velocities needed (typically 10 km/sec) would have been an impressive structure indeed.
Under this directive, the USSF would initially be a part of the USAF. The exact cost of creating the USSF is unclear, with estimates ranging from $5 billion to $13 billion. That’s sure a lot of money. Gosh, I wonder if we could afford to spend that much on space…
Seems so. Heck, this is money spent without a single space launch so far. Thirteen billion dollars to create a Space Force seems damned cheap in comparison.
It seems to be a day for high dollar amounts. Such as this:
While the facts seem certain that the WaPo slandered the kid and deserves to pay through the nose, $250 Million is how much Bezos paid for the company. it’s unlikely that a lawsuit would score $250 million. But chances seem fair that a fat, hefty settlement should be in the offing. A settlement big enough to not only set up the kid for life, but to put the scare into a whole bunch of those media and celebrity vampires who jumped on the hatred bandwagon.
I doubt that Nic Sandmann will end up a billionaire out of all this, but it’s an amusing thought. When you go through the tweets of twits like these, who, based on the manufactured hate that the media invented, called for Nick Sandmann’s mother to be fired from her job… well, some accountability seems to be called for. Perhaps Nick can invest his multimillions wisely, become and actual billionaire, and help fund some colonization missions to Mars and the asteroids. A good bit of synergy between a wealth transfer from the racist left to reasonable people, and a leftist-rage-inducing Space Force.
Another early look at US Spacecraft Projects #6, this time showing one of the more unusual space vehicles ever seriously contemplated… a single stage to orbit space station. This one would seem to be especially vulnerable to thrust imbalance, but at least it had enough engines (11,520) so that if one went out, the lack of thrust wouldn’t be *too* hard to counter.
