Fish And Wildlife Service: enemy of progress?

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., news, politics, rockets, spacecraft, Worldwreckers, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jan 182022
 

Not hyperbole. A serious question.

Report: SpaceX’s Boca Chica Plans Face Serious Objections from FWS, NPS

The Fish and Wildlife Service is trying to make it so that SpaceX can’t use their Boca Chica launch facility for a “Starbase.”

Not only are FAA’s hands tied on the EIS front, a full Section 4(f) Evaluation is a potential nightmare. This evaluation requires the identification of a suitable alternative that is both “Feasible and Prudent.” If this Feasible and Prudent alternative site will have a lower Section 4(f) impact, the FAA is prohibited from giving the Green Light to Starbase. At all. This is outside of NEPA as well. So if, for example, the Cape Canaveral LC 39 pad that SpaceX is developing is determined to be a feasible and prudent alternative, Starbase is dead. Dead Dead.

 Posted by at 5:54 am

Early Aerojet Sea Dragon

 art, awesomeness, history, projects, rockets  No Responses »
Jan 172022
 

The “Sea Dragon” launch vehicle concept is reasonably well known: a giant “dumb” booster, using two pressurized stages built massively heavy using shipyard tolerances. it would be floated out to sea and fueled while in the water. Everything about it was meant to be simple. However, this was the *final* Sea Dragon design; earlier iterations had some different configuration details. Unfortunately, while the final design is well known (detailed diagrams of it are often shown, usually reproductions of the diagram I posted on my site way back in 2005), the evolution of the design from initial concepts is not well documented. And thus I have artwork depicting a rather different version that used a conical first stage tucked into a giant fixed conical nozzle of the second stage. It *appears* to be substantially more complex than the later version, possible pump fed with lighter structures. Sadly, art is all I have. If anyone has *anything* on this design – data, diagrams, descriptions, etc. – I’d love to see it.

 Posted by at 8:13 pm

B-47/B-52: Signed copies!

 aircraft, art, awesomeness, B-47 and B-52 Origins and Evolution, blather, Book 3, Book X, books, drawings, history, Hmm..., new products, news, projects, rockets, secrets, spacecraft  No Responses »
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.

 Posted by at 1:57 am

Coyote Awesome

 aircraft, awesomeness, Hmm..., news, rockets, weapons, youtube  No Responses »
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

 Posted by at 11:56 am

Lockheed AP-12

 aircraft, awesomeness, Book X, books, drawings, history, Hmm..., Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird Origins and Evolution, projects, rockets, spacecraft, SR-71 Origins and Evolution  No Responses »
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.

 Posted by at 3:14 am

3D printed solid rocket propellant

 awesomeness, Hmm..., rockets, science, youtube  No Responses »
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.

 Posted by at 11:20 am

James Webb has launched

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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.

 Posted by at 8:17 am
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