Boeing has managed to put it’s Starliner capsule into orbit. For a program that started in 2010, and was supposed to be operational in 2017… it’s just a little bit overdue. The first orbital test flight occurred in December 2019 and came home after only 11 hours (after *not* docking, as planned, with the ISS) because its onboard clock was off by 11 hours. Orbital Test Flight 2, which has just now attained orbit, was supposed to fly in October 2020. The schedule slipped, obviously.
Huh. Maybe having an aggressive, conquest-driven corrupt and highly irrational nation moving a number of nuclear-capable hypersonic ballistic missiles to your border might make someone think that defending themselves is a good idea…
Iskander missiles heading towards the Finnish border. pic.twitter.com/GjOMLF7y5r
— Sentletse 🇷🇺🇿🇦 (@Sentletse) May 16, 2022
*WOW.* Not a fun day to be a tanker.
Chinese TV crew captures Russian tank turret going rocketing into the sky. A design flaw in many Russian tanks is that the ammo store is directly underneath the turret – if a hit detonates it, the turret goes straight up, sometimes reaching extremely impressive heights, like here pic.twitter.com/Flli1DK4t3
— Euan MacDonald (@Euan_MacDonald) May 11, 2022
One of the problems I harped on about Spinlaunch previously was the fact that their projectile tumbled, which is of course a very bad thing. They seem to be getting a handle on that issue.
Rocket Lab launched an Electron space launcher today… and caught the booster with a helicopter. The recovery did not go to plan however; reportedly the dynamics of the helicopter/rocket system was unusual and the pilot of the helicopter released the rocket. It seems he must have done so from a low altitude, as the booster survived splashdown and is being recovered and returned.
As elegant as a SpaceX landing? Nope. Better than anything else out there? Yup. The more the merrier when it comes to recoverable rockets. I’m sure Rocket Lab will figure out the problem and work to correct it. That’s how *good* engineering is done. The payload was apparently successfully delivered to orbit.
HOTOL was a 1980’s/90’s British Aerospace idea for an airbreathing SSTO spaceplane. As with all such designs to date, it came equipped with a heavy load of optimism; physics, however, does not care about your sunny worldview, and like all other airbreathing SSTOs to date, the design simply could not be made to work with existing materials, propulsion systems, politics and economics.
Video of Dragon’s Draco thrusters moving the spacecraft closer to the @Space_Station pic.twitter.com/0zBNYgAcDb
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 28, 2022
Well, not *that* Moscow, it’s at the bottom of the sea. And not quite *that* Moscow, but the city of Tver, a few miles to the north west. It’s *probably* not related to Ukrainian sabotage, but… who knows? It’d be a dandy target and a propaganda coup if this fire was started by some Ukrainian Doolitle raider.
Reportedly this facility develops missiles of kinds used in Ukraine, and space weapons. The claim is that the fire is due to old wiring, and looking at that ancient building, I can believe it. But that’s not a whole lot better of an explanation for losing a “space weapon” laboratory than enemy action, any more than “it just caught fire” was a better, more comforting explanation than “It caught a couple anti-ship missiles.” If their work was related to weapon systems currently being expended, perhaps they had ramped-up work hours and an increased demand on the power and other systems.
This view of Phobos crossing the face of the sun has been brought to you by western civilization, engineering rigor and a determination to place objective facts over feelings. No other system ever dreamed up by Man could have come anywhere close to letting us see this. or, indeed, even imagining it: Phobos would ahve been forever unknown to mankind if not for western civilization.
The Smithsonian kindly provided a convenient fact sheet to help you make your culture capable of this sort of thing.
The large format rocket & submarine scans I mentioned HERE are starting to come in. The first ~60 scans clock in at a total of about 1 gigabyte… the remaining forty – scanned, but not yet sent to me – total something like 23 gigabytes. Giant full-color blueprints. Woo.
For a limited time, if you would like copies of these scans, the whole batch is $175. If interested, send me an email:
