Just in from ebay, a vintage black & white cutaway illustration of the Apollo CSM. The original has been scanned at 600 dpi (it’s clear enough for that high of a resolution) and made available to subscribers of the APR Patreon and the Monthly Historical Documents Program at above $10/month as an “extra.”
If this sort of thing is of interest, sign up either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
In 1969, Maxime Faget of NASA-Manned Spacecraft Center (later renamed Johnson Space Center) produced a concept for a simplified version of the Space Shuttles then being designed. The idea at the time was that the Shuttle would be a two-stage vehicle, both being fully reusable manned flyback vehicles. The Orbiter would be much larger than the Orbiter that actually got built because it included substantial hydrogen/oxygen tankage. The boosters were generally *vast* vehicles larger than the C-5 Galaxy meant to fly higher and faster than the X-15. Optimistic to be sure. Faget’s “DC-3” design had the same basic architecture but attempted to produce a smaller, cheaper, less complex and more realistic design. The design, produced in-house at NASA, was picked up by both North American and McDonnell Douglas, who designed their own variations on the theme.
Here is the basic configuration of the NASA-MSC “DC-3:”
A photo montage of Boeing display models showing a range of launch vehicles intended to put the early (1959) Dyna Soar into orbit. The three at left are clusters of Minuteman ICBM boosters; the next two are larger solid rocket motor clusters. The next is a Saturn I booster, followed by an all-new recoverable liquid rocket booster, the Titan II and the Atlas/Centaur. The Titan II design was chosen, though it could not actually get the Dyna Soar into a true orbit. To do that, solid rocket boosters needed to be strapped to the sides of the Titan II… leading to the creation of the Titan III.
I thought sure I’d posted this before but… shrug. If’n yer interested in the manned Orbiting Laboratory program of the mid-1960’s, you’ll want to take a gander at the website for the National Reconnaissance Office, which has 825 documents with a total of 20,861 pages on the MOL project:
SpaceX has successfully not only launched Americans into orbit from American soil with an American rocket topped with an American capsule, they have also successfully recovered the first stage booster. Woo!
Now if they could lob those rioters to the Moon, that would be great.
Also: they included a zero-g indicator in the capsule:
That’s cool and all, but something more active would seem to be called for. And now that capsules are spacious and need not be nightmarishly cramped, it might be time to consider launching a kitten:
This could be the crowning achievement in the history of human spaceflight, or it could be a blood-soaked disaster. Either’s good, so long as it’s adequately live streamed. But I expect that a cat will be able to accept freefall… maybe not instantly, but eventually. Cover the inside of the capsule with something like burlap and the cat will be able to hang on and move around. I’ve designed, over the years, a couple different “zero g litterboxes” that cats would *hopefully* be able to accept and use. Thing is, we won’t know any of this for certain until someone actually tries. Now that Dragon is up and running, the cost of spaceflight just might drop enough that we can finally, at overly long last, try this necessary step on the road to conquering space.
SpaceX is not having the best luck with their Starship prototypes. Number 4 spectacularly exploded after a successful engine test yesterday; this seems to not necessarily be a problem with the Starship itself or its engine, but with either the plumbing, the procedures or maybe even jsut a manual mistake. Scott Manley goes through the available videos.
Unrelated, SpaceX will try – weather permitting – to launch their Crew Dragon again today at 3:22 PM eastern time. At this writing there doesn;t yet seem to be a live stream set up on YouTube.
UPDATE: here ya go…
With any luck at all, the United States will return to first-world status at 4:33 PM eastern time. Watch live:
UPDATE: Nope. Weather socked ’em in. Trying again on the 30th.
Huh.
The company is targeting Sunday (May 24) for its Launch Demo mission, with a backup opportunity on Monday (May 25). The four-hour window will open each day at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT), Virgin Orbit representatives announced today (May 20).
The 747 “Cosmic Girl” will be used to haul to 35,000 feet the seventy-foot-long LauncherOne rocket, lifting off from the Mojave desert. The rocket will, if it all works out, be dropped, fire its main engine and blast off into orbit.
Good luck to ’em, but it seems like Virgin Orbit has a hell of a task in competing with SpaceX. Speaking of which…
Discovery and Science Channel will be sharing live coverage of NASA’s launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon Capsule on May 27. The launch will mark the United States’ first time sending astronauts into space in nine years.
The multi-platform “Space Launch Live: America Returns to Space” television event will be simulcast at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT
SpaceX will doubtless also live stream the launch on YouTube, and I gotta believe that NASA TV will also carry it. That said:
The United States Space Force has released their first recruitment commercial:
It looks reasonably inspiring.
On the other hand, also just released is the first trailer for Netflix’s “Space Force” show, due to premiere May 29th.
It looks like it *might* be funny. It also looks like it might mock the whole concept, which is kinda like mocking the need for a Navy or an Air Force or a fire department. I suppose that *could* be funny, but it’d probably come off as insane gibberish.
I believe the proper response to these numbers is akin to “Yikes.”
Knowing what we now know about RS-25 engine costs ($146 million each); using Tory’s formula below, the true cost of an SLS launch is about $3.5 billion. I would not doubt it. https://t.co/qhxCrJse1I
— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) May 4, 2020
A single RS-25 engine – of which each SLS will expend five – costs $146 million. Ummmmmm… the SpaceX Falcon 9 Heavy costs, lemme see, $90 million. You could buy 1.61 F9H’s for the cost of one SLS *engine.* A single complete SLS launch would buy you almost 39 F9H’s.