Full transparency: I visited Blue Origins office in Seattle a while back and dropped off my resume, aiming to be a conceptual designer. That was… 2003, I think? I’m sure they’ll get back to me on that any day now.
Anyway, tomorrow (Tuesday) morning the plan is for Jeff Bezos and three other passengers to ride the New Shepard rocket to the edge of space at 6:30 AM central time.
At the same time that Certain People want the citizenry to set their horizons low and small and accept Tiny Homes, high-density urban housing and public transport… I want me one of these. I’d prefer if it was out in the mountains, but if someone wanted to give me this out out in the middle of No and Where, I’d take it.
Finally enough shelf space!
They say they’re going to fly passengers to space today. Livestream:
UPDATE 1: Stephen Colbert is hosting. It’s cringe. *Really* cringe. Oh-God-Make-It-Stop cringe. But the aircraft seems to be in flight anyway…
UPDATE 2: Successful launch, they’ve reached apogee. The rather chipper talking head is not as cringeworthy as Colbert, but she’s still cringey in a “Dear Leader” sort of way.
UPDATE 3: Landed safely. This would be the best space story of the year… if this was 2015 or so. As it is, “SpaceX launches it’s bajillionth re-flight of a Falcon 9 booster” or “SpaceX sends yet more people to the ISS” kinda has “a few people got a few minutes of microgravity” beat.
Back when NASA dreamed big (the early 1960’s), there were many ideas for how to make really, REALLY big space launch systems. Solid rocket motors had a place at the time serving as either the first stage, or strap-on boosters for the first stage, for Saturn-class boosters. Most solid rocket production facilities are far from Cape Canaveral, so getting rockets from the manufacturer to the launch site could be a problem. Due to rail line restrictions, a case diameter of 156 inches was the limit: anything bigger wouldn’t fit through existing tunnels. But Aerojet and other companies had ideas for even bigger solids… I’ve seen drawings for boosters up to 396 inches in diameter, though 260 inches seems to be the largest given serious engineering.
In order to conveniently manufacture and transport these giants, Aerojet set up a manufacturing plant and static test site in Florida. Aerojet built several half-length versions of the 260-inch-diameter boosters, dug a hole in the ground, upended the rockets and fired them towards the center of the Earth, with the results being a small earthquake, a gigantic brown plume of solid rocket exhaust shooting into the sky and no production contract. The first test firing was in September, 1966, by which time NASA’s horizons had contracted substantially.
Solid rockets as an economical way to get to space, especially as a way to launch humans, is a technology whose day has passed. As military technology they remain as valid as ever; unlike liquid rockets, you can stuff a solid rocket into a silo and somewhat ignore it for years and then launch it on a moments notice. Having ICBM-sized boosters stocked up and stored away ready to launch a fleet of replacement GPS, communication and spy satellites when the Chinese swat our current fleet from the sky makes a lot of sense… but using solids to launch missions to the Moon or Mars is now a rather silly notion.
The full rez scan of the photo (and 4 others) has been made available at 300 DPI to all $4/month patrons/subscribers in the 2021-07 APR Extras folder at Dropbox. 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.
SpaceX Launch Pad cam caught sight of the Superheavy booster being moved to the pad. Since it’s a live stream it may no longer be available depending on when you see this, but it at 12:29:30 to about 1:35:30 on the on-screen clock.
Photo at the link:
You can tell without even touching the link that this is the BBc because they insist on spelling “NASA” as “Nasa,” event though everyone else on the planet uses “NASA.” I imagine that the BbC has rules in place that they are supposed to use the preferred personal pronouns of everyone they report on, but for some reason they insist upon insulting NASA.
Bah.
And, oh, yeah, giant obsolete rocket.
If I had $28 million to spend on an 11 minute flight to space… I wouldn’t. I’d save that money to fly to *orbit.* Or buy myself a SPECTRE-class lair somewhere in the mountains with a CIWS and a nuclear powerplant. But it is an undeniable social good that there are people rich enough to splurge on frippery like this; by blowing *vast* sums on adventures that us po foke could never dream of, the price of such ventures will come down due to increased investment. Those jackholes who want to limit income to $500K a year, or tax wealth out of existence, are working to make sure that trips to space, whether short joy-hops like this or emigrant flights to Mars or Ceres, never happen.
An interesting piece of “fan animation” depicting a test flight of a Starship/Superheavy stack with subsequent water landings. I have high hopes that a flight will look this good… but realistically, we can expect a few flights with a bit more energetic ends. And that’s ok: failure is an option here. Failure can be a fantastic teacher. Certainly a far better teach than “not trying.”
Also of note: there are some bits of the animation here that are distinctly not “Hollywood A-Game.” But compare what just a few guys managed to do with, say, the first couple seasons of Babylon 5. Technology progresses.
Hmmmmm…..
Page 215
Title: Rocket Cargo
Description: The Department of the Air Force seeks to leverage the current multi-billion dollar commercial investment to developthe largest rockets ever, and with full reusability to develop and test the capability to leverage a commercial rocket to deliver AFcargo anywhere on the Earth in less than one hour, with a 100-ton capacity. The Air Force is not investing in the commercialrocket development, but rather investing in the Science & Technology needed to interface the capability with DoD logistics needs, and extend the commercial capability to DoD-unique missions. Provides a new, faster and cheaper solution to the existing TRANSCOM Strategic Airlift mission. Enables AFSOC to perform current Rapid-Response Missions at lower cost, and meet a one-hour response requirement. Rocket Cargo uses modeling, simulation, and analysis to conduct operational analysis, verify military utility, performance, and operational cost. S&T will include novel “loadmaster” designs to quickly load/unload a rocket,rapid launch capabilities from unusual sites, characterization of potential landing surfaces and approaches to rapidly improve those surfaces, adversary detectability, new novel trajectories, and an S&T investigation of the potential ability to air drop a payload after reentry. This is not a rocket engine or launch vehicle development program. It is an S&T effort to leverage the commercial development into a novel new DoD capability.FY 2021 Plans:Utilize modeling, simulation, and analysis to conduct operational analysis of Rocket Cargo concepts, trajectories, and design considerations and verify military utility, performance, and operational cost. Gather operational data from on-going commercial large-scale, instrumented, reusable launch events.FY 2022 Plans:Mature effort in leveraging commercial space launch to create military capability in Rocket-based Cargo delivery. Complete S&T testing leveraging the current commercial prototype testing. Perform site measurements needed to integrate the capability onto DoD missions including plume-surface physics and toxicity, loads, detectability, and acoustics. Also, complete initial AFRL wind tunnel testing to assess novel trajectories needed for air-drop capability, and high-speed separation physics. Under contract and CRADA, partner with Commercial to test and demonstrate an initial one-way transport capability to an austere site. Seek to perform an early end-to-end test to fully identify the technical challenges. In addition, complete Industry outreach for load master concepts including novel container designs, load/unload concepts, and testing the compatibility of AF cargo with rocket launch and space environments. Issue solicitation and award contracts.FY 2021 to FY 2022 Increase/Decrease Statement:FY 2022 increased compared to FY 2021 by $38.169 million. Funding increased due to planned program requirements and the development and maturation activities described above.
HMMMMM….
Sounds vaguely familiar. I wonder where I’ve seen ideas kinda like that before.
Oy.
There are always people who want to trash things just because they can. Seriously: if the Air and Space Museum was left unguarded for ten minutes, do you think that the Wright Flyer would somehow escape being splashed with BLM, Antifa or gang crap? Or just simply burned to ashes?
The gene pool needs a good cleaning.
Buran was an ill-conceived notion. A bad copy of the US Space Shuttle, somehow made *worse:* it was a pointless reusable payload shroud, it didn’t even bring the main engines back. Still… leaving such things to be turned to garbage by collapsing buildings and garbage humans is just insane.
