Well, this blows.
Apparently this has something to do with the distribution rights. The possibility exists that the show will be picked up by the likes of Amazon or Netflix.
Great. Just great. Lemme guess: it’ll be replaced with ghost hunters and rasslin’.
This is the first launch attempt of a Block 5 Falcon 9. Assuming SpaceX gets a few of these safely under their belt, they can use them to launch NASA crews to the ISS, finally putting the US back into the manned space launch business again. This launch is sending up the first Bangladeshi geosynchronous comsat. Launch is current scheduled for 3:47 PM, Mountain time, followed by a planned recovery of the first stage on a barge.
The Convair VL-3A was a 1966 concept for a space station logistics spacecraft. It was a sleek, flat-bottomed lifting body featuring a twin tail and flip-out wings that would deploy shortly before landing to reduce the landing speed. It would be fitted with flip-out turbofan engines for range extension, self-ferry and control during landing. General Dynamics released sizable “educational” cards with information and photos of models of the spaceplane showing how the wings would deploy from within the lower fuselage.
I have uploaded righ-rez scans of both sides of this poster-sized card to the 2018-05 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for APR Patrons at the $4 level and up.
I also wrote about and illustrated the VL-3A in US Spacecraft Projects #2, showing the general arrangement of the design along with the disposable propulsion stage and the launch configuration atop the Titan III.
USSP #02 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $6:
If you are interested in thes VL-3A model images and a great many other “extras” and monthly aerospace history rewards, please sign up for the APR Patreon. What else are you going to spend $4 a month on?
Kinda in a bit of a financial bind here, so I’m going to sell off some stuff. The first thing up: a large format print of a scan of Model 2050E X-20 Dyna Soar in the final, as-almost-built configuration. This was printed off some years ago on good quality heavy glossy photo paper; I’d always wanted to have it framed and on my wall, but never got around to it. Plus, framing it properly would be a a bit of an effort due to the size of the print, but if it was done it’d look *great.* Waste not, want not: the full rez scan didn’t quite fill out the 24-inch-wide paper, so I added in some of my Utah panoramic photos to take up some of the excess space. So with a bit of trimming, if you buy this you not only get the Dyna Soar, but some Utah as well. The whole print is I think six feet long.
UPDATE: didn’t really seem to fly off the shelves, so I’m going to slice this up and put it on ebay at some point.
Photos:
With recent hair-pulling issues, other things have fallen by the wayside of have been forgotten, ignored, etc. But this morning I noticed something vaguely interesting, if not terribly exciting.
A week-ish ago I bought a document off of eBay. Normally I wouldn’t have bought this *specific* document, because it’s available on the NASA tech report server. No point in spending money on something that’s available for free. But I bought it because the NASA PDF is, like a lot of them, scanned rather poorly, especially the art and diagrams. The intent is to scan the graphics from this and make it available to APR Patrons. The document is a 1980 DOE/NASA conference proceedings on the solar power satellite program.
The document is in fairly good shape except for a torn-off corner on the aft cover:
I saw the mailing label on the aft cover. The conference proceedings were originally mailed to one Peter Glaser of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Something about the name seemed familiar, so off to Wikipedia. Turns out he has his own entry:
Peter Edward Glaser (September 5, 1923 – May 29, 2014) was a Czechoslovakian-born American scientist and aerospace engineer. He served as Vice President, Advanced Technology (1985–94), was employed at Arthur D. Little, Inc., Cambridge, MA (1955–94); subsequently he served as a consultant to the company (1994–2005). He was president of Power from Space Consultants (1994–2005). Glaser retired in 2005.[1]
OK, not too surprisng that the guy who originally owned this conference proceedings on the Solar Power Satellite program back in 1980 would ahve been an aerospace engineer. but here’s the one kinda interesting bit:
In 1968 he presented the concept for,[6] and in 1973 was granted the US patent on,[7] the Solar Power Satellite to supply power from space for use on the Earth.
Huh. Turns out the SPS document I just bought was originally owned by the guy who patented the SPS.
Not world shatteringly important, just kinda spiffy.
Rewards have been issued to APR Patreon patrons for April, 2018. This month, the “Diagram” is a Sikorsky lithograph of a Heavy Lift Helicopter concept. The Documents include a US Army catalog of airborne weaponry; a paper describing possible additional missions for the Saturn launch vehicles, and BOAC brochure extolling the virtues of the Comet 4 jetliner. The CAD diagram is of the British Interplanetary Society’s “Deadalus” starship design.
If you are interested in helping to preserve (and get copies of) this sort of thing, consider signing up for the APR Patreon.
Artists are forever getting documentaries and biopics and all the rest. The problem is, it’s almost always the *crappy* artists, the ones who think that being “edgy” is more important than any actual artistic talent or skill; that offending people for political purposes is better than creating something that people will actually *like.*
Huzzah! “Artist Depiction” aims to be a series of documentaries about artists who worked for NASA during the heyday of the space colonies. These are the guys – Don Davis, Charles Lindsay, and Rick Guidice – who painted Bernal spheres, the Stanford torus, Gerard O’Neills colonies for NASA. This is being crowdfunded on Indiegogo; as I type this, it’s currently funded at $3,691 of $5,000, with 17 days to go. It certainly seems like a worthy venture.
US Bomber Projects #21 and Spacecraft Projects #05 are now available.
Cover art was provided by Rob Parthoens, www.baroba.be
US Bomber Projects #21 is now available (see HERE for the entire series). Issue #21 includes:
USBP #21 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $4.25:
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US Spacecraft Projects #05 is now available (see HERE for the entire series). Issue #05 includes:
USSP #05 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $5.25:
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The previous releases of US Aerospace Projects:
USVP #2 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $4.25:
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USRP #2 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $4.25:
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A question has popped up from time to time about that Orville model I’m working on for Fantastic Plastic: can it be lit internally? It’s a fair question since the Orville is a brightly lit ship. But with those relatively thin and long loops, making a resin kit hollow seemed like a nightmare, especially since it would have to be cast in very difficult transparent resin. But as the photos show, an alternate approach is possible. This is the result of a few minutes tinkering, a half-assed effort with a spare 3D printed engine loop and one of those really nice but really small Bandai Star Destroyer models.
Precisely zero points for guessing the system used, because, c’mon, it’s pretty obvious. But if you’re thinking “Photoshop,” no, that’s not it… this is the real lighting, simple flash-less camera phone photos, no trickery.
Processed Rosetta imagery from 2016. The dots going “down” in the background are stars. The rest… some may be cosmic rays playing hell with the CCD imaging sensor, but note that there certainly seems to be preferential directionality to the streaks, indicating that the spacecraft was flying through a cloud of cometary bits.
#ROSETTA 😍 OSIRIS #67P/CHURYUMOV-GERASIMENKO new albums 😍–ROSETTA EXTENSION 2 MTP030– Miércoles 1 Junio 2016 all filters stacked pic.twitter.com/Bf173Z5g79
— landru79 (@landru79) April 23, 2018