EM drive vacuum tested

 blather, Hmm..., news, rockets, science, spacecraft  17 Responses »
May 012015
 

I’m still skeptical, but testing is testing:

New Test Suggests NASA’s “Impossible” EM Drive Will Work In Space

The electromagnetic drive works – if it works – by rattling microwaves around inside a metal can. Through the magic of… well, magic, I guess, the vanishingly tiny thrust developed by the microwaves as a pure photon rocket gets magnified into a measurable but still tiny level of thrust. How does this happen?

[T]he EM Drive’s thrust was due to the Quantum Vacuum (the quantum state with the lowest possible energy) behaving like propellant ions behave in a MagnetoHydroDynamics drive (a method electrifying propellant and then directing it with magnetic fields to push a spacecraft in the opposite direction) for spacecraft propulsion.

Whenever anyone starts yammering about quantum this or that or harnessing the vacuum, I have flashbacks to Deepak Chopra and start tuning them out. Still, NASA Eagleworks at Johnson Space Center is not known for a whole lot of crackpottery, so *maybe* they’ve stumbled across something. Or maybe they’re working on the newest Dean Drive.

Electromagnetics ain’t my schtick, so all I can say is that whenever anyone else has thought that they were getting a free lunch out of the universe, they found out that such a thing don’t happen. Superluminal neutrinos, anyone?

 Posted by at 10:22 pm

“New Shepard” first flight

 awesomeness, history, news, rockets, spacecraft, youtube  2 Responses »
Apr 302015
 

Blue Origin, the much-more-secretive version of SpaceX, launched their “New Shepard” spacecraft for the first time in west Texas yesterday. The launch vehicle, sure to be popular with sixth-graders everywhere, featured a large booster stage and a dummy capsule; after boosting to an apogee of 58 miles, the capsule was successfully recovered via parachutes. The booster was intended for a vertical recovery a la the Falcon 9R, but that was  *not* a success.  Given the amount of effort SpaceX has put into booster recovery, a recovery failure first time out of the gate for Blue Origin is not unexpected. but unlike SpaceX, booster recovery is *not* a nice bonus at the end of the flight; they’ll really have to make this reliable, or otherwise their costs will be prohibitive.

Bezos’ Blue Origin completes first test flight of ‘New Shepard’ spacecraft

A long way to go yet, but three cheers for progress in developing another manned spacecraft. The New Shepard is *not* a direct competitor against the Falcon 9/Dragon for the simple reason that this vehicle is intended to be a suborbital tourist vehicle, not an orbital transport.

 Posted by at 12:30 pm

Shuttle Tile Maps

 aircraft, art, awesomeness, cyanotype blueprints, drawings, history, rockets, spacecraft  3 Responses »
Apr 282015
 

I’m currently working on a series of Shuttle Orbiter tile “maps” to massage them into a form where they’d look good as cyanotype blueprints. Two are shown below; what I have on hand are about a dozen, covering every surface of the Orbiter. The centerline diagram is sized for 40 inches wide by 160 inches long; this is *way* beyond reasonable size for cyanotyping. But at 18 inches wide, it’d be 72 inches long… just about what I can handle.

tiletest

Another option might be to stitch the separate views together, rather than two wings and a centerline. Printed out B&W on paper, it’d be pretty durned impressive.

 

 Posted by at 4:56 pm

US Bomber Projects 6-11 now available on Amazon for Kindle

 aircraft, blather, new products, projects, rockets, spacecraft, US Bomber Projects  No Responses »
Apr 272015
 

Just added five more issues to Amazon for $2.99 each. These are Kindle-fied versions of the issues otherwise available as PDFs here.

There aren’t a whole lot of reviews… seven in total, I think. Six on one issue… and three are 5 out of 5, while three are 1 out of 5. It seems that those who went to the effort of reviewing either loved them or hated them. The negative reviews are at least honest – although I can’t makes heads or tails out of one of them. One of the complaints is that the drawings are too small, but I’m thinking that that might be an issue with the reader, dunno.

 Posted by at 6:10 pm

Russian rocket launch: not *quite* to plan

 AARRRGH, humor, news, rockets, russian empire, weapons, youtube  18 Responses »
Apr 222015
 

Appears to be an S-300 (NATO: SA-10 “Grumble”) surface-to-air missile demonstrating what happens when the pneumatic launch system poots the rocket out of the launch tube, but the main rocket motor fails to ignite.

This is not exactly an unprecedented event:

If only *all* the Russian anti-aircraft missiles worked this way, maybe there’d be one more Malaysian 777 in the world…

Of course, it’s difficult to beat *THIS* classic:

 Posted by at 9:23 am

NASA 3D prints a sizable copper combustion chamber

 awesomeness, Hmm..., news, rockets, science, spacecraft  4 Responses »
Apr 212015
 

Neato:

NASA 3-D Prints First Full-Scale Copper Rocket Engine Part

elg39671

It’s come equipped with internal cooling channels; this sort of thing is kind of the dream of rocket designers. A thin-walled highly thermally conductive combustion chamber with built in regen cooling? Sign me up! But don’t start planning on your rocket powered cars just yet; neat as it is, there are still some problems. First: cost.

A selective laser melting machine in Marshall’s Materials and Processing Laboratory fused 8,255 layers of copper powder to make the chamber in 10 days and 18 hours.

A terribly expensive machine ran (presumably non-stop) for a week and a half to make one part. The direct cost of the part wasn’t given but I’d guesstimate somewhere between “A Lot” and “A Whole Lot.”

Second: quality. If you look closely, you’ll find not only the rough surface standard with 3D printed parts, but also some spots that look like something went a little off, like the part slumped locally:

blips

With all the nitpicks, though, the importance of the piece isn;t the piece itself, but what it represents. A combustion chamber like this would be essentially *impossible* just a few years ago. In a few years more, the quality of this sort of chamber will be much improved, while cost will go down.

 Posted by at 4:32 pm

Trouble over Vulcan

 Hmm..., news, projects, rockets, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ  4 Responses »
Apr 182015
 

Earlier this week, the United Launch Alliance announced the development of the semi-reusable “Vulcan” launcher meant to replace the likes of the Delta IV. vulcan1Regardless of the merits or problems with this new design, there’s one issue that may cause prompt legal trouble:

Paul Allen Launches ‘Vulcan Aerospace’ to Boost Private Space Travel

vulcan2

Vulcan Aerospace will operate the “Stratolaunch” booster system now being built in California. vulcan3Vulcan Aerospace, it turns out, is part of Vulcan, Inc., which was formed in 1986 and has a trademark on the “Vulcan” name. vulcan4And Vulcan, Inc, seems like it wants to enforce that.vulcan5

Ooops.vulcan6

You’d think ULA would have checked on that. vulcan7 The article says that ULA looked into the name and found no legal issues… but that seems to perhaps be not entirely correct.vulcan8

 

 Posted by at 3:03 am

Messiah: Halleluiah!!

 art, awesomeness, models, news, Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, nukes, rockets, science fiction, spacecraft  6 Responses »
Apr 172015
 

Finally done modelling this thing. Took long enough!

2015-04-17d 2015-04-17c 2015-04-17b 2015-04-17a

The multiview layout drawing generated from the model would take a good deal of effort to clean up proper, but it’s needed for the “Nuclear Pulse Propulsion” book. Now that the model is very nearly complete (I need to convert each part, individually, into a separate STL file… bleah), I can devote more time to other stuff, including potentially getting back to work on NPP. But before I let the Messiah go entirely… anyone interested in large format blueprints based on the layout drawings?2015-04-17h

 Posted by at 1:34 am
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