BFR looks more SF now

 art, awesomeness, Hmm..., news, projects, rockets, science fiction, spacecraft  No Responses »
Sep 142018
 

The SpaceX BFR is looking more and more like it’s straight out of 1950’s sci-fi…

 

Up until now, renderings of the BFR had always been sort of a lifting body. Two main iterations had been shown… the first was a cylinder with an ogival nose and three equally separated long fairings covering the landing legs. The fairings served as aerodynamic strakes, and the whole vehicle was essentially radially symmetrical. The second version had more or less the same body but with a distinct belly formed by two small wings at the rear for control and gliding and a flattened surface between the wings on the windward of “bottom” surface, faired into the main cylinder of the body. It also had two even smaller stubs on the leeward or “top” side of the fuselage. In this design, there were four landing legs contained in the wings and stubs.

The latest version goes back to the pure cylinder and back to three landing legs. However, instead of stubby strakes, it has three distinct tailfins, with the landing legs in wingtip fairings. There appear to be canards up front. There is also something odd going on around the engines. There are a dozen “flaps” surrounding the seven engines, purpose unclear. Perhaps these are meant to extend in some way to produce a single larger nozzle for vacuum performance, or perhaps they are meant to provide protection for the engines during long duration spaceflight or during entry. Presumably we’ll find out soon.

 

 Posted by at 9:53 am

USGS and Asteroids

 awesomeness, Hmm..., news, politics, spacecraft  No Responses »
Sep 042018
 

The US Geological Survey Is Getting Serious About Space Resources and Mining

The director of the USGS is a former NASA scientist who flew on the Shuttle 3 times. This bodes well. Getting the USGS to begin characterizing the natural resources of the asteroids available for commercial exploitation is not only useful for the pure data of it, it also indicates that the US Federal Government is finally starting to accept that commercial exploitation of the heavens is not only probably inevitable, it’s also something that the US should be deeply involved with.

Of course, if the US or American corporations begin harvesting asteroids and collecting billions or even trillions of dollars worth of resources (anything from water to be used in space, to rare elements to be used in Earthly manufacturing to energy collection and transmission), then it’s a safe bet that other nations will try to get in on it. And when you have people competing for resources, you’ll have conflicts. It would thus be in Americas best interests to create a force capable of keeping the peace and enforcing the rule of law. A “space force,” if you will. And once that is created, a good use of that force would be to head out to the frontier and set up advance bases.

If Trump gets all this to happen, then all his idiot-child tweets are forgiven.

 Posted by at 11:47 pm

Pro Tip: don’t drill extra holes in space capsules

 AARRRGH, dumbassery, Gah., rockets, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Sep 032018
 

Sure, the source of this article is RT, so I now doubt the existence of drills, the vacuum of space and epoxy, but still…

So no meteorite? Reports say Russian Soyuz spacecraft depressurization caused by drilled hole

In short: it seems that a worker on the ground mistakenly drilled a hole through a Soyuz capsules pressure vessel and rather than reporting the error, he patched it. With something not much better than bubblegum, from the sounds of it.

 Posted by at 3:27 pm

Sigh. SJWs on the Moon.

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Meh., politics, rockets, spacecraft, THIS is why Trump won, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Sep 012018
 

‘First Man’ Director Damien Chazelle Defends Omitting American Flag Planted on the Moon

“First Man,” the forthcoming biopic about Neil Armstrong, *had* looked like a good movie. But even though it covers Armstrong walking on the Moon, the director and the actor portraying Armstrong felt that showing the American flag being planted on the Moon was somehow inappropriate.

The director once posted this to Twitter:

 

The director is a loon.

Hollywood is all about the dollar. So even though the place is swarming with leftists, you’d *think* at some point they’d get it through their skulls that offending half the potential audience is a bad idea. In this case, the movie is almost certain to have a potential audience that’s mostly American… I can’t see the Chinese market being all that excited to see a flick about an American historical figure. Or the Europeans for that matter. It *should* do well in the US… but not if it sets out to annoy not just half the American market, but the half of the market that was probably going to be most interested in this movie. Because it certainly seems to me that a movie about an American war and space hero would probably appeal more to people who actually feel positively about American patriotism than those who don’t.

“First Man” opens October 12. I expect I’ll have other plans that day.

UPDATE:

Possible hint as to what Buzz Aldrin thinks about this.

 Posted by at 6:56 pm

Time to fire up the Dragons

 Hmm..., news, politics, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 312018
 

NASA needs to get on the horn to Elon Musk and start playing nice.

Russia Cuts Off U.S. Access to ISS, Pledges to Stop Ferrying American Astronauts in 2019

Short form: Russia has a contract with NASA to launch astronauts, and the contract ends in April, 2019. This is nothing particularly startling, and it’s entirely possible (probably probable) that NASA and Russia will sign a new contract and flights will continue uninterrupted. That said… BRING ON THE DRAGONS. It’s *long* past time that the US was back in the business of launching our own people into space. SpaceX is supposed to fly an unmanned-but-man-rated Dragon in November and an actually manned capsule in April of next year. Boeing is supposed to fly their capsule a few months later.

 Posted by at 8:15 pm

Rotating space station art

 art, history, Patreon, projects, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 282018
 

An artists concept of a rotating space station circa 1962. It has a NASA ID number but it *may* be North American Aviation, as they designed a space station essentially identical to this, as described and illustrated in an article written by Dennis R. Jenkins for Aerospace Projects Review issue V1N6. This space station was designed to be launched as a single payload atop a two-stage Saturn V; it would unfold once in orbit to form the pseudo-toroidal shape. This piece of art depicts a central docking hub that must have been intended to be rotationally decoupled from the station. The space station must have been non-rotating at the point in time illustrated, or those spacewalking astronauts are going to have an interesting time doing their job.

A high-rez scan of this piece of art has been uploaded to the 2018-08 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for APR Patreon patrons at the $4 level and above. If this sort of thing is of interest, please consider signing up for the APR Patreon.

patreon-200

 

 Posted by at 11:17 pm

Solar Power Satellite Art

 art, projects, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 272018
 

A scan of a black and white PR glossy sold on ebay depicting a Boeing concept for a solar power satellite from the 1970’s. Most SPS concept were for Manhattan-sized slabs of aluminum trusswork, holding vast fields of photovoltaic cells. This design, though, was different in that it was a Manhattan-sized collection of vast reflectors concentrating sunlight onto relatively small targets. There a working fluid would be super-heated and the resulting high pressure gas blown through turbogenerators. The gas would be cooled and condensed in the radiators. Note that the artist took some liberties with the orientation: a setup like this would only work if the reflectors were reasonably precisely aligned with the sun. That would only occur when the shadow of the solar collector at the focal point fell onto the center of the concentrating mirror assembly; the radiators would cast almost no shadow, just a razor-thin line bisecting the mirrors.

 Posted by at 10:34 pm

Rocketdyne nuclear-electric spacecraft art

 APR, nukes, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 252018
 

A piece of 1960’s (published in a book in 1967, but it looks older than that) artwork depicting a five-man nuclear-electric spacecraft. heading to Mars. The spacecraft is long for radiation shielding purposes; at the far distant forward end is the reactor, with the crew and ion engines in the conical section in the tail. Between the ends is a long boom attached to which are the propellant tanks and two large radiators. This is more or less the propulsion system and layout originally planned for the spaceship “Discovery” from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” with the difference that the ion engines were on the other side of the crew module, and the spacecraft “towed” the reactor and radiators, rather than pushing them.

 Posted by at 11:44 pm

Early Saturn V art

 art, history, nukes, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 222018
 

Found on ebay: a piece of B&W art depicting the Saturn V. The provenance is uncertain… unknown where this art originated. There are some unusual details; the tailfins are clocked 45 degrees off, moved from the outer diameter of the engine firings to between them, an odd choice to say the least. The third stage is larger in diameter than the S-IVb with a very long interstage between the S-II and the S-IVb; this *may* indicate that the third stage was meant to be a nuclear stage, with a single NERVA engine attached to the rear of the S-N third stage. The payload is also different: it appears to be a direct lander… no LEM, the Apollo vehicle landed directly on the lunar surface.

 Posted by at 11:34 pm
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