Landing maneuvers look… thrilling.
Apr 152015
Apr 152015
Taken from a bit of a distance, this seems to show the vehicle leaning pretty substantially as it lands. Looks a lot like the first landing attempt. Balancing that pencil seems to be a bit of a challenge.
I wonder if a wider, shorter, *squatter* booster would have made sense. Shape it like the old Phoenix design, the ROMBUS, the Nexus. Then tipping over wouldn’t be nearly the concern, though drag would be much higher.
Apr 142015
Launch was great, landing was great. *Sticking* the landing… well, not so great.
Looks like Falcon landed fine, but excess lateral velocity caused it to tip over post landing pic.twitter.com/eJWzN6KSJa
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 14, 2015
Well, I guess now the program will be put on hold, Congress will get involved, there’ll be years of hearings and political posturing before another attempt is made… oh, wait. No, this is a private effort. Never mind, they’ll fly again in a month.
Here’s the cool thing: Unless the barge was trashed (I have no data on that)… NOTHING WAS LOST. It was an entirely successful launch! Even though the first stage booster was destroyed on landing… it was gonna get lost *anyway* if they didn’t try to recover it. So…w ell, ok, maybe they lost the cost of the landing gear, but that’s not exactly a lot.
Were this a NASA vehicle, the *landing* would have been the metric by which the launch was measured. Like if a VentureStar went into orbit, delivered its payload to the ISS, re-entered, and then pancaked onto the runway when the landing gear failed to lock. And then the program would be terminated.
Apr 132015
SpaceX was going to try to launch a Falcon 9 today with payload for the ISS, but weather forced an abort. So they’re going to try again tomorrow at 4:33 PM ET/1:33 PM PT.
Should be live webcast here: http://www.spacex.com/webcast/
Apr 112015
Great footage. Irritating soundtrack.
Apr 102015
I’m going to be selling off a bunch of stuff… blueprints, books, large format prints, that sort of thing, that have been sitting around gathering dust. I’ve slapped together a first catalog covering a dozen large format prints – Dyna Soar, V-2, X-1, others – and have posted it as a PDF right over HERE.
APR Patreon patrons get first dibs.
Apr 102015
When I was a horrible little brat I had a plastic toy of the Saturn V. I recall it being pretty big… but I was also 6, so the scale of things gets a little muddled. The stages could separate; I do not recall if there were engines on the 2nd and 3rd stage. I’ve been looking for photos of this particular toy for a while, with only one hit HERE, which shows a package of small toys meant for cake decoration. Included was an Apollo CSM, that I’m *pretty* *sure* was also included with the Saturn V toy.
Apr 102015
I saw this on ebay. Thought it might be of interest to some…
EVEL KNIEVEL ORIGINAL X-1 SKYCYCLE PLAN TRUAX SNAKE RIVER ROCKET RARE X-2
The Skycycle was about the oddest manned vehicle to ever take flight. This is not at overall vehicle design blueprint, but instead a description of the pilot extraction and parachute system. Still, I’d plunk down 20 bucks for it, maybe even $50…
Ah. Nevermind.
Apr 042015
Every now and then you stumble across something that provides tantalizing yet nonchalant hints to something amazing. Recently this occurred while perusing a Boeing report on closed life support systems for spacecraft. One concept mentioned and minimally described was a previous 1981 study of a spacecraft meant to transport crew to the asteroid belt for the purpose of mining asteroids for their resources. Just the basic concept was fairly amazing on its own, especially all the way back in 1981. Second: the propulsion system was vaguely described as a nuclear fusion system. Third: well, here’s the disappointingly small diagram that was included for illustration purposes. See if you can see what makes the design especially interesting…
What can be seen: three arms that rotate for artificial gravity; three vast radiator fins and a relatively tiny fusion engine in the tail. But what makes the design amazing: just in front of the spacecraft is a Space Shuttle Orbiter, giving a sense of scale to the vehicle. It’s *vast.* And it would have to be… the cargo transported to the asteroid was 150 metric tons. Plus the passengers, all 1,250 of them. All ONE THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY of them.
The vehicle massed 10,000 tons; the powerplant (two 6 GW fusion reactors, spitting out 4.8 GW of thrust power, 2.8 GW of heat needing radiating and 4.4 GW of high energy neutron) massed 2000 tons; 4000 tons of hydrogen fuel; and 4000 tons of spacecraft/payload/passengers. The vehicle would boost for 11 days, coast for 226 days and brake for 13 days to rendezvous.
That, sadly, is all that’s available in the report I have. A FOIA request has been made for the reference that *seems* like might describe this further.
I hope to be able to define this vehicle further. As it is I can only guesstimate sizes; the habitation modules at the ends of the arms appear to be repurposed Shuttle External Tanks. But even nine of them would seem to be kinda cramped for 1250 people for two-thirds of a year… nearly 140 passengers per tank.
Mar 282015
I’ve had a stack of fiche and a number of rolls of microfilms sitting around doing nothing for a decade and more due to a lack of ability to get good images off ’em. Every scanner I came across out in the wild would only do two-bit black-and-white scans, which turned the already dubious image quality into useless mush; efforts to capture the images via photography were roughly equally useless. Fortunately, at long last, I found that the University library up in Logan has microform scanners that do proper grayscale. So today I blew a number of hours digging through some old periodicals (“Space World”) and making scans. At last I can get half-ass decent copies of a whole bunch of German V-2 diagrams, among other things.
The image quality still kinda blows compared to good scans taken directly off the documents, but this is about as good as it’ll get for microfiche.
For those of you too young to remember microfiche and microfilm: these technologies were… you know, screw it. If you’re too young to remember these, get off my damn lawn. You’re probably like all those college-goin’ youngsters at the library today who were wondering “what’s that creepy old guy was doing at that mysterious machine that none of us ever use?”