A good case can be made that “The Last Starfighter” is not in need of being remade. but if it does get remade, having the original writer (Jonathan Betuel) onboard is not a bad thing. And while it would be best to brig Ron Cobb back on to do the redesign of the Gunstar, this concept art… ain’t too shabby.
Okay, probably shouldn’t show you this so early but here’s a little something I’ve been tinkering on with my co-writer Jonathan Betuel. You might recognize the ships. Thanks to the amazing Matt Allsopp (lead concept artist on ROGUE ONE) for creating these images for us. pic.twitter.com/CIobLYYRHk
“2001: A Space Odyssey” premiered fifty years ago yesterday. Who could’ve imagined at the time that the projections of a world of giant rotating space stations, space tourism, lunar colonies and manned missions to the outer solar system would have fallen so far short… not only for the year 2001, but 2018?
I’d planned on yammering forth rather more about this, both extolling the virtues of the movie and bemoaning the sad (yet recently somewhat hopeful) reality, but I hadn’t planned on my internet computer going belly up right when it did. At the moment I’m tapping away on the netbook that the now-kaput netbook replaced, and, man, is this this thing archaic. Even so, good thing I didn’t dispose of it but kept it in storage as a backup. Took this antique half an hour to decide to boot up all the way, though. Gettin’ old sucks.
In lieu of the long stream of consciousness I doubtless would have produced, I invite y’all to revist the days of yore, back in the halcyon days of 2013, when I wrote a number of blog posts describing my concept for an alternate history that could have led from the real world of April 2, 1968. The way the blog spits things out is somewhat backwards for this purpose, with more recent posts at the top rather than the bottom (useful for daily reading, a little disjointed for reading old stuff), but start here at the bottom:
Sigh. Now the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency is using it’s power to help ruin the promising future of spaceflight that SpaceX is trying to usher in.
The National and Commercial Space Program Act requires a commercial remote sensing license for companies having the capacity to take an image of Earth while on orbit.
Now that launch companies are putting video cameras on stage 2 rockets that reach an on-orbit status, all such launches will be held to the requirements of the law and its conditions.
The NOAA thinks that you need a special license to take a photo of THE EARTH. Apparently this new development is a result of the Starman videos.
Expect this sort of thing to become a *real* problem if someone looks likely to make a real go of orbital tourism. Imagine if you need a special license to take your Nikon with you… or even your cell phone.
If one was of a conspiratorial bent, one might conclude that the government is doing a “death by a thousand cuts” thing, using a mountain of seemingly small regulatory headaches to keep the private companies from getting too uppity. Just imagine what new and innovative laws will be interpreted if the BFR actually looks likely to start sending private citizens to Mars.
Here are two presumably wholly unrelated pieces of aerospace artwork. At least I *hope* they’re unrelated…
The first is an anonymous painting of a spaceplane. Doesn’t seem terribly realistic; most likely done for advertising purposes (I wonder if the “7-11” might indicate a relationship to the chain of the same name). The print arrived damaged, as you an see; the paper was thick and *really* brittle and really didn’t appreciate being rolled up. If anyone knows anything about it, feel free to comment.
The second is concept art from Bell Aerospace illustrating an amphibious troop carrier for the Marine Corps. The design of the assault vehicle is fairly ordinary as such things go, except for one detail: it could turn into a hovercraft and float across the surface of the water, rather than plowing through it. No further details provided, so I don’t know if the hover-skirts were deployable and retractable, or if they were simply dropped when the vehicle got to shore. The latter would certainly seem more economical.
I’ve uploaded the full rez scans to the 2018-03 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to all current APR Patrons at the $4 level and above. If you are interested in this and a great many other “extras” and monthly aerospace history rewards, please sign up for the APR Patreon. Chances are good that $4/month is far cheaper than your espresso/booze budget!
An old NASA video describing the HL-20 lifting body. In the 90’s NASA spent a lot of time and trouble trying to get an HL-20 built for a Personnel Launch System, a vehicle smaller than the Space Shuttle but capable of carrying as many passengers and riding a much smaller launch vehicle. For transporting passengers to and from the Space Station, it would have been much more economical and sensible than the Shuttle. And while the HL-20 was never built, the basic geometry has survived in the form of Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser, which *might* actually fly to space someday.
A piece of late 1950’s promo art from Rocketdyne illustrating a spacecraft with a solar thermodynamic powerplant. This should not be assumed to be an actual design, but much more likely just more or less pure illustrative art.
The craft is shown with a great parabolic solar reflector, the sunlight heating an element at the focus. In an actual design, most likely a working fluid would be pumped through this and boiled, the resulting high pressure gas blowing past a turbogenerator and then into a heat exchanger or directly into a relatively vast radiator. The gas would be cooled back to liquid and recirculated. Note that no such radiator is in evidence. Sometimes early designs utilized radiators built onto the shadow side of the reflectors. The craft appears to be over Mars, based on the hints of canals that are kinda visible. The ship has a parabolic radio dish on a boom below; the upper boom would seem to hold a trough, likely a launching platform for a small probe rocket (another cliche in early spacecraft art). At the rear is a boom that appears to hold two banks of ion engines or some other electrical propulsion system. Oddly, the thrusters would seem to be held off well to the side of the craft, rather than actually firing through the centerline (unless that boom is supposed to be projected straight aft and mounted at one end of the bar holding the thrusters, thus putting the centerline of thrust back through the CG of the craft).
The video below explains why the original starship Enterprise design looks great, using a few bits of art-math.
To my eye, the TOS Enterprise is the pinnacle of sci-fi spectacle. No other spaceship design comes close in terms of just being plain beautiful… sure the XD-1 has sorta-realism going for it, the Millenium Falcon and the Star Destroyer have their charms, the Gunstar and Starfury are utter badassery. But the NCC-1701? Just gorgeous.
What’s sad is that with such a fantastic basis, Star Trek ship design has kinda cratered. The refit Enterprise from the movies? A worthy successor to be sure, and a number of the other movie-era ships are up there: the Grissom is good, the Excelsior and Reliant are awesome. And even though the actual *show* is something I’ve completely lost interest in, the NCC-1701D from TNG has grown on me, as hav a number of other TNG/DS9/Voy ships. But the 1701E from the movies? Meh. The Enterprise was always *elegant,* be it 1701, 1701A or 1701D, it was just a slick design. But the 1701E started the trend of making Trek ships… well, not quite sure what the word I’m looking for is, so I’ll go with “shardy.” The NX-01 from “Enterprise” left me cold, which, actually, was kinda fine since it was supposed to be a technology prototype built by people who didn’t really know what they were doing yet. The Enterprise from the nuTrek movies? Bleah. And the “Discovery” ships took “shardy” to whole new levels of excess. The brief glimpse of the TOS 1701 from the last scene of the season finale of “Discovery” (plastered all over youtube) just looks sucko. It’s a mishmash of TOS and movie era with a whole lot of needless excess CGI’ed onto it.
The “Discovery” take on the 1701:
Bleah. Details and greeblies just for the sake of tacking them on.
The Mirror Universe episode of “Enterprise” included a faithful CGI 1701-type ship. That, along with a number of fan-created CG Enterprises, show that the design *still* works just fine, no need for a bunch of Just Cuz design changes or revisions to jazz the thing up.
With the rapid advance in CGI, there’s no good *technical* reason (though some powerful legal reasons – the rights are all over the place) why a movie or series couldn’t feature not just *a* 1701-type ship, but *the* TOS-era Enterprise, complete with Tarkinized 60’s-era Kirk and Spock & Co. I suppose someone could even write some bloated crossover event flick where the nuTrek Enterprise goes through a spatial anomaly into a parallel reality, runs into the Discovery, they start comparing notes, rejigger the anomaly to send the nuEnterprise home and whoopsie, end up bumping up against the *real* Enterprise. Do it right, and it might even redeem Discovery and nuTrek. If nothing else, it’d be worth the price of admission to see the Karl Urban and Deforrest Kelly McCoys making life hell for the two Spocks, and the Chris Pine Kirk putting the moves on the Grace Lee Whitney Yeoman Rand. Maybe use *that* as the excuse for why she left the show: she left her Enterprise to be with PineKirk. And there’s even a good way to explain why TOS didn’t suddenly get a bump up in technology levels: they wanted to adopt the nuTrek technologies, like interstellar transporters, but the cost would have been prohibitive. The new technologies would have introduced lens flares all over, and no sane civilization wanted to put up with that.
After a criminal lapse in judgement allowed the US RTG manufacture capability to decline, it seems NASA is finally getting back to the stage where they can proposed future space probes with that very basic, reliable and *good* power source:
Even so, the projections are for a production of only 1.5 kilograms of PU-238 per year by 2022. Even though this is a great improvement, production of three and a third pounds of this strategically vital material per year seems pretty anemic to me. A better world would see NASA doing its job of exploration and science by launching a few *dozen* long range probes every year.
