Some remarkable imagery of the recent SpaceX Falcon 9 launch, with several telescopic views of the booster from launch to landing. It’s *gorgeous,* and as you can see from the thumbnail, at times kinda haunting.
Jan 162022
Jan 142022
A few boxes of books finally showed up, shipped from Britain. Not as many as I’d planned on getting; with luck, one or two more boxes are simply working their way through the system slower than the others. UPDATE: the rest showed up. However, I can only make firm plans for the books I actually have on hand.
I plan on selling signed, numbered and dated copies for $55 each plus shipping (cheap in the US, but doubtless ridiculously expensive elsewhere… international postage is nuts these days). To sweeten the deal, these will all come with three 18X24 signed, numbered and dated prints of the B-47 and B-52.
To start off, I will auction off the first five copies. To sweeten *that* deal, numbers 3,4 and 5 will have a fourth 18X24 print… from the currently in-progress Book 3. Numbers 1 and 2 will have an additional 18X24, also from Book 3. The subject of Book 3 has not been made public yet, but I trust that it and the diagrams will be of considerable interest to anyone who has purchased “SR-71” and “B-47/B-52.”
The auction will be simple: send me your bid (in excess of $55) and the highest bid gets #1, second highest gets #2, and so on. Send your bid to scottlowther@up-ship.com before the end of the day Sunday.
After that I will sell off the other signed copies, starting with those who signed up. Hopefully more will arrive by that point, but for right now it looks like There will be a grand total of only 18 23 signed and numbered copies on the entire planet. So… who knows. Collectors items.
Jan 122022
Might be of some interest to some… a forthcoming 1/48 scale model of the 1962 Grumman take on the LEM. Lots of details to add, but these get the idea across.
Jan 092022
Recently released footage of the Raytheon “Coyote” missile blasting the bejeebers out of a series of unmanned small aircraft. It’s certainly impressive, and certainly very effective, but it seems perhaps a bit excessive for the task. A warhead a fraction of the size would seem able to do the job. If they could scale this thing down to manpad size, so that a launch system with the size and user-friendliness of a Stinger could be employed,that would make this concept dandy for taking out quadcopters and the like. If they were *really* good… rounds launchable from a standard 40 mm grenade launcher, with an ejectable warhead, so the missile itself could be recovered, refurbished and reused.
The Coyote uses small solid rocket motors for initial boost, with a jet engine for a sustainer.
image source: Janes
Jan 042022
The Lockheed Skunk Works A-12 was the immediate predecessor of the SR-71, a single seat recon vehicle in some ways a bit superior to the SR-71, in others not as good. One of the odder ideas put forward was to use the A-12 to carry a modified Polaris missile with a recon satellite on a once-around mission… a way to turn the Mach 3+ A-12 into a global range hypersonic, nearly orbit-capable recon platform. It was bonkers, but the math checked out; nevertheless it was not built. It is described in greater detail in:
Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird – Origins & Evolution
Available either directly through the publisher or through Amazon.
Dec 312021
The results this guy got are… well, “meh.” But it’s a first stab at it. If he, or anybody, got the process nailed down, the potential exists for making proper star-grain solid propellant just the right size for gyrojet-style miniature rockets. An idea to improve on the gyrojet might be to make a star grain using a normal-ish solid propellant, and fill the empty volume with a high burn rate, high surface area propellant like nitrocellulose. On ignition you’d get a burst of high thrust, like the booster charge on an RPG, followed by a slower burning sustainer. For something like a gyrojet, that “slower burn” would still need to be pretty damn quick; ideally, you’d want the rocket to burn out within just a few feet. Better still, while still within the barrel. Not sure how good a printable resin-based propellant would be if filled with powdered nitrocellulose, but it might be worth some experimenting.
Dec 302021
At the National Museum of the USAF:
Also: a fly-around of the SR-71. A bit zippier than I’d like, and it’d be nice if the drone would look *down* from time to time…
Dec 252021
The James Webb Space Telescohas successfully launched
There will be no Hubble-like servicing of this when things go wrong. Much of that is due to the fact that it is being launched towards the Earth-Sun L2 LaGrange point, about 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth (further out from the sun). NASA currently has no manned spacecraft that can reach L2. Eventually such spacecraft will become available… modified Dragon capsules, Starship or even the laughably over budget and behind schedule Orion and Starliner capsules should be able to get there. But even when such spacecraft become available, Webb wasn’t designed to be maintained, so when a part breaks and needs replacement it likely won’t actually be replacable. Consequently, much of the mission risk for Webb remains even though the launch was successful.
It will take about a month to reach the L2 point. While l2 is a stable position, it will still require perhaps 4 meters per second of station keeping per year. Total delta V budget is 150 meter per second, so if all goes well lifespan could still be as short as 37.5 years. Development began in 1996, with an initially planed launch of 2007, so it took a quarter century to actually design, build and launch; any conceivable improvement/replacement using the same bureaucracy could *easily* take far longer than Webb’s actual lifespan. There is cause to hope that if Starship is successful that the whole paradigm that resulted in Webb taking 14 or so extra years could be replaced by a much more rational world of spacecraft development. If it really does become possible to launch large and heavy spacecraft quickly and orders of magnitude more cheaply, then it will be possible to design and build spacecraft more capable than Webb, much cheaper than Webb, because they won’t need to shave off every last milligram like Webb.
Dec 212021
Little known today is the Northrop MX-334 rocket powered flying wing. Originally designed (circa 1942) without a vertical tail, wind tunnel testing showed that such a tail was needed. Three aircraft were built and flown at Muroc dry lake bed (later known as Edwards Air Force Base), towed into the air behind a Cadillac and then a P-38; once in flight a liquid propellant Aerojet rocket engine would provide thrust.
The MX-334 (as it was known as a glider… when rocket powered, it was known as the MX-324) was intended as a technology testbed and proof of concept vehicle for the Northrop XP-79. This was, like the MX-324/334, a smallish flying wing with a prone pilot. As originally designed the XP-79 was to have a liquid rocket engine; it was eventually built with two turbojets. Unfortunately the single XP-79 crashed on its first flight.
The MX-324/334 was painted in high visibility colors and must have made a striking sight at the time.
The much larger full rez scan of this photo has been made available to $4 and up patrons/subscribers in the 2021-12 APR Extras Dropbox folder. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Dec 192021
A ca. 1966 promotional film for NASA, describing the events of 1965 and planned future events.
Man, I’m jealous: for a brief time in the early/mid 1960’s, the future for space exploration looked spectacular. And then…
Now NASA seems wholly directionless. There’s SLS, a massively over budget, massively behind schedule rocket that has no program to support. the US can’t even make adequate quantities of plutonium to support a decent production run of RTGs for unmanned probes.
It’s not impossible that days like this could come again; SpaceX and Starship could make it happen. But while Apollo relied on a base of hundreds of thousands of employees and contractors, SpaceX relies on *one* *guy* to maintain focus. Something happens to Elon Musk, and it’s entirely possible that SpaceX will fall into the hands of suits who decide that wasting all that money on risky and seemingly unprofitable “advancement” ain’t worth doing.