I’ve just sent out the rewards for October, 2018, to APR Patrons. This months rewards include:
CAD diagram: 20-meter Orion spacecraft
Diagram: Genealogy of Piper aircraft
Document: “Story of the Uprated Saturn I” NASA-MSFC brochure circa 1966 describing the Saturn Ib, including future possibilities
Document: “Preliminary Design Study of a Three Stage Satellite Ferry Rocket Vehicle,” 1954 Goodyear paper describing the METEOR launch vehicle. First of a number of METEOR documents I have.
Document: “The Rocket Research Aircraft Program 1946-1962,” Edwards AFB booklet describing the various rocket aircraft tested up to the x-15
If this sort of thing is of interest, please consider signing up for the APR Patreon.
A one-man “space pod” very similar in concept to the ones in “2001,” but designed by Lockheed in 1964. This *could* perhaps have influenced the film makers and/or their designers.
A Rockwell International ad from 1984. It shows a number of Rockwell/North American Aviation products from the past, with a Space Station shown as the future. Interesting to note that the space station we actually got was the *International* space station, not the Rah-Rah-America-Is-Number-One station.
Chances are good that the SLS first launch, currently officially slated to slip to June 2020, will probably actually slip to 2021 some time. More good news: it’s fantastically over budget.
In other words, compared to Boeing’s first serious 2014 contract for the SLS Core Stages – $4.2B to complete Core Stages 1 and 2 and launch EM-1 in Nov. 2017 – the company will ultimately end up 215% over-budget ($4.2B to $8.9B) and ~40 months behind schedule (42 months to 80+ months from contract award to completion).
Ye gods.
By the time SLS actually flies, chances are pretty good that BFR will have already gone to orbit, if not the Moon or Mars. The upper stage is slated to fly in some form in 2019; and while I won’t be the slightest bit surprised if BFRs schedule slips, I’d be beyond astonished if it slips anything like SLS’s. For a company like Boeing, the SLS core should have been a snap. The engines are decades old designs, the core tankage is based on the ET, which is decades old; they’re not recovering it, it’s literally nothing special or new. It should have *easily* flown by now.
The video of the recent Soyuz in-flight failure has been tinkered with here. Some digital trickery to make things a *bit* clearer, but the original imagery is still limited due to looking up many miles into the sky.
A piece of art from 1962 depicting a Westinghouse Electric Corp. concept for a space station meant to provide servicing for nuclear powered spacecraft. it appears to be more of a space craft than a space station, since it is equipped with a substantial nuclear propulsion system of its own. It’s unclear what the set of rings at the “front” of the space station are meant to do.
An illustration from circa 1960 showing the launch of a communications satellite. Note the booster falling away in the background… unlike pretty much every booster the US actually built, this one is a slim cone. The caption very likely does not accurately describe this; it is unlikely to be a geosynchronous satellite given not only the low altitude depicted but also the fins on the booster stage.
The Soyuz booster is quite reliable, but space launch is a necessarily sporty endeavor. So it’s unfortunate bu not terribly surprising that something went wrong with todays launch. Fortunately the launch abort and recovery systems worked and the crew were safely landed. The incident occurs at about 2:45 in the video below; not clear what happened, looks like perhaps a strap-on booster underwent a flawed separation. Perhaps it impacted the core.
While I remain a fan of the Space BFR in principle, incidents like this do give me a bit of pause. In the event of a booster failure, a Soyuz/Apollo-type of system (even an SLS/Orion-type system) stands a good chance of safely separating the crew capsule, because the crew capsule is a small, dense, easily-boosted nugget. With the BFR, if something goes unintentionally energetic with the booster, accelerating the whole manned interplanetary transporter stage away fast enough would be… well, damned impressive. The answer, of course, is to make the whole BFR system so reliable that separating the passengers in the event of an emergency would seem as silly as separating the passengers from a jetliner in the event a wing fell off in flight. Given the sheer power and energy involved with space launch, that’s *always* going to be more dangerous than airliners, so the level of acceptable risk for space travelers will always have to be higher than it is for air travelers.
Additional thought: with space launch, no matter how diligent you are, things can just go wrong. But with holes being drilled into capsule and patched up with spackle by either malicious or delinquent workers, the suspicion that someone did something intentional to this booster will be inevitable.
The Aerojet M-1 rocket engine was to be a beast of an engine. Bigger than the F-1 with almost as much thrust, it differed in being fueled with hydrogen. Its intended role was to power post-Saturn “Nova” type rockets. It got as far as testing major components, but no complete engine was ever test fired. The need for such an engine went hand-in-hand with the development of very large boosters; the M-1 could have been used for either first stage or upper stages, but no booster sizable enough for such an engine survived the mid-sixties, so the M-1 died away.
