Elon’s dreaming big

 awesomeness, Hmm..., news, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Jun 302019
 

I’ll believe it when I see it:

SpaceX targets 2021 commercial Starship launch

I suspect these are Elon-estimates, which have been notoriously optimistic in the past. Still, there’s no reason why SpaceX *can’t* pull this off. And if they can… that would be not only impressive, but world changing . Western civilization just might have a chance to survive. Not on Earth, of course… here, we’re pretty well doomed. But out in space, maybe, just maybe, there’s a possibility that people who speak English, aren’t ashamed of Washington and Jefferson and think rationally and scientifically might live on.

“The goal is to get orbital as quickly as possible, potentially even this year, with the full stack operational by the end of next year and then customers in early 2021.”

Here’s hoping.

 

 Posted by at 12:45 am

Falcon Heavy scheduled for Monday night

 news, rockets, spacecraft, youtube  No Responses »
Jun 242019
 

Launch window starts at 11:30 PM Eastern time, lasts for 4 hours. The boosters have previously flown and will attempt recovery back on land; the core, on a barge at sea. Two dozen satellites are on board, including a solar sail for the Planetary Society along with bits of 152 dead people. No cars this time. Though it would be funny if one of the small satellites turned out to be little more than a box filled with the Tesla Roadster & Starman Hot Wheels toys, used to send a cloud of little vehicles into the path of an enemy satellite like a shotgun blast.

UPDATE:  The boosters successfully landed on their pads, but the core missed the barge and went kerblooey into the ocean. however, the mission of putting satellites into their correct orbits seems to be proceeding smoothly. This was reportedly the hardest core landing yet attempted, so it’s not too surprising that it wasn’t successful… but the mission as a whole seems to be.

 

 Posted by at 12:53 am

Apollo 11 and Best Batman

 art, awesomeness, blather, history, Hmm..., rockets, science fiction, spacecraft  No Responses »
Jun 232019
 

Today (Sunday) had two things of note:

CNN ran their “Apollo 11” documentary. This originally showed in Imax theaters, and as I reported back in March, on Imax it’s freakin’ spectacular. On my TV, which is probably pretty unimpressive by current average standards, the imagery is just ok. And yet… I still lost my composure at about T Minus One Minute, and became This Guy right about T Minus Zero. The launch of Apolo 11 ranks up there with Old Yeller and Jurassic Bark and Sleeping In Light  as one of those moments when it is perfectly cromulent for even the toughest and most stoic of men to shed a tear.

Also, as I mentioned back in May, “Apollo 11” has been released on DVD and Blu Ray, but bizarrely *not* in 4K. This was a confounding decision in my view; even though I don’t have a 4K player or TV, I woulda bought one in a  heartbeat and put it right on my 4K shelf alongside my other 4K disks (currently: “2001” and “Fifth Element” and nothing else). But… in the first commercial break, I noticed the first ad was for Samsung *8K.* This makes me wonder if they’re planning on just skipping right past 4K and only releasing it on 8K (not releasing it on 4K means people who want it in ultra high def will *have* to get it in 8K). Now, I have no doubt that Apollo 11 in 8K on a 100 inch 8K screen would be utterly fantastic…but, dayum, I ain’t never gonna be able to afford me one of them.

Secondly: Today was the thirtieth anniversary of Tm Burton’s “Batman.” Holy Crap, Batman, I’m old.

I suppose “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight” are technically superior movies in pretty much every way… but in 1989, Burton made a movie that was just plain astounding. It made more than a quarter billion dollars domestically, which, adjusting for inflation, is more than a half billion in 2019 dollars. That would put it only slightly behind “The Dark Knight” in terms of gross. And it did that *without* being a sequel, or existing in a world where superhero movies regularly made money hand over fist. It was a comic book movie that wasn’t a joke, that took its source material seriously, that adults could watch with interest and without shame. I don’t recall if I saw it on opening day, but if not I saw it within a few days of opening; I recall being  impressed right off the bat with the opening sequence with Danny Elfman’s score. And the Batmobile: sure, the “Tumbler” might have been a more realistic vehicles… but, man, I still want me that ’89 Batmobile to go tearing up and down the streets in.

 Posted by at 11:45 pm

AIM-260

 aircraft, Hmm..., news, projects, rockets, weapons  No Responses »
Jun 212019
 

Another missile has been recently unveiled to a degree, the Lockheed AIM-260 air-to-air missile, a replacement for the AIM-120 AMRAAM:

Air Force Developing AMRAAM Replacement to Counter China

Not much known about it as yet, other than it will have a longer range than AMRAAM and will fit in the F-22’s missile bay. Rumors abound, including the possibility that it is two-stage, or that it may be an airbreather of some kind.

It *seems* that the US is starting to crank up new weapons systems. Which, if true… ABOUT DAMN TIME. But the real test will be not just ‘weapons in development,” but “weapons in mass production and put into service.”

 Posted by at 4:54 pm

AGM-183A ARRW test flight

 Hmm..., news, nukes, rockets, weapons, youtube  No Responses »
Jun 172019
 

The USAF is already flying bits of the AGM-183A ARRW.

Air Force conducts successful hypersonic weapon flight test

This was a “sensor only” captive carry, which presumably means something along the lines of a wholly non-functional mass/aerodynamics simulator. It doesn’t really look like the sort of thing that could get to Mach 20 with a meaningful payload.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 10:27 pm

A Mach 20 Arrow

 aircraft, art, history, Hmm..., news, nukes, projects, rockets, weapons  No Responses »
Jun 162019
 

In response to both Russia and China claiming to have develop hypersonic weapons, the USAF has awarded contracts to Lockheed for two new hypersonic missile systems: the AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW: “arrow”) and the Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon (HCSW: “hacksaw”). Little info is publicly available about them just yet (though it’s a safe bet that the Chinese have a complete set of plans; I’d be unsurprised if they had real-time access to the workstations being used to design them), but the ARRW is a boost-glide system that uses a rocket motor to launch a hypersonic glider to around Mach 20. This is not a particularly new idea; ground launched ideas like this go back more than fifty years, with air-launched versions seriously considered at least as far back as the 1980’s. The image below, taken from the SDASM Flickr page, shows a (presumably 1980s) General Dynamics design for an air to surface missile using a twin-engined rocket booster (presumably solid fuel) with a hypersonic glider.

The Lockheed ARRW is likely similar in concept if not detail. The basic idea of a rocket-booted glider is the most practical approach to long-range hypersonic strike weapons, though it’s not as flashy or trendy as airbreathing system such as scramjets. but while rocket systems would weigh more than an air breather, quite possibly by a lot, they would be much more reliable, cheaper to develop and capable of *far* greater speed. The ARRW, after all, is supposed to reach Mach 20. A scramjet would be damned lucky to exceed Mach 10, and testing has shown that a scramjet would but damned lucky to maintain that speed for long.

The heavier gross weight of a rocket system compared to an airbreather means that an aircraft could carry fewer weapons. The obvious solution is to build more carrier aircraft. While there will be no more B-1B’s or B-2’s, the B-21 *may* be built, though unlikely in any real numbers. A more practical solution might be to build specialized carrier aircraft, perhaps based on modified jetliners, perhaps even made unmanned, designed to fly in massed armadas with one or two manned control planes.

 

 

 Posted by at 4:06 pm

PDF Review: Chance-Vought Apollo Lunar Lander design

 art, drawings, Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Jun 142019
 

One of the documents lost from the NASA Technical Report Server when NASA gutted it in 2013 was a Chance Vought corporation report on a simulator for their lunar lander. The “Apollo Rendezvous Simulator Study” from July 1962 focuses of course on a ground-based simulator, not on a detailed design of their lunar lander… but fortunately the documents do show art and diagrams of the lander. It is an odd looking little bug, with giant windows and a configuration similar to the Soviet LK in that there were no distinct descent and ascent stages, but a single manned vehicle that would leave the landing legs and some tanks behind when it lifted off.

Fortunately, even though it was scraped from the NTRS it can still be found on the Internet Archice/Wayback Machine. Huzzah!

Support the APR Patreon to help bring more of this sort of thing to light! Alternatively, you can support through the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.

 Posted by at 12:42 am

Forthcoming updated

 aircraft, APR, awesomeness, blather, drawings, history, Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, projects, rockets, spacecraft, US Launch Vehicle Projects  No Responses »
Jun 082019
 

Some further tinkering to the USLP06 diagrams. There will be further revisions (especially with Star Raker), but I believe this will be the complete set of vehicles shown. I had to split the set up into two separate files; the unified diagram set was causing my computer headaches. You might not think that 2D diagrams can overload computers that can render things in 3D, but you’d be wrong.

This latest effort has taken a *really* long time. Lots of work involved with this. As a result, it has been a long time since I’ve published anything else, and since my income is based on getting stuff published… yay, welcome to poverty. If you want to help out, consider Buying Stuff or subscribing to the Monthly Historical Documents Program. Even a buck fifty a month helps out.

 Posted by at 10:43 pm

Ad Astra

 art, Hmm..., rockets, science fiction, spacecraft, youtube  No Responses »
Jun 052019
 

This looks…interesting. There seems to be a whole lot in here, and a lot of it doesn’t seem to make sense. It’s clearly set a good deal of time in the future, but a lot of the engineering looks like it’s from the 60’s. The “space station” at the beginning is either hanging at the end of a space elevator at the upper reaches of the atmosphere or it’s violating the laws of physics.

 Posted by at 12:03 pm
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