The video of the recent Soyuz in-flight failure has been tinkered with here. Some digital trickery to make things a *bit* clearer, but the original imagery is still limited due to looking up many miles into the sky.
Oct 152018
Oct 142018
A piece of art from 1962 depicting a Westinghouse Electric Corp. concept for a space station meant to provide servicing for nuclear powered spacecraft. it appears to be more of a space craft than a space station, since it is equipped with a substantial nuclear propulsion system of its own. It’s unclear what the set of rings at the “front” of the space station are meant to do.
Oct 122018
An illustration from circa 1960 showing the launch of a communications satellite. Note the booster falling away in the background… unlike pretty much every booster the US actually built, this one is a slim cone. The caption very likely does not accurately describe this; it is unlikely to be a geosynchronous satellite given not only the low altitude depicted but also the fins on the booster stage.
Oct 112018
Soyuz Rocket Launch Failure Forces Emergency Landing for US-Russian Space Station Crew
The Soyuz booster is quite reliable, but space launch is a necessarily sporty endeavor. So it’s unfortunate bu not terribly surprising that something went wrong with todays launch. Fortunately the launch abort and recovery systems worked and the crew were safely landed. The incident occurs at about 2:45 in the video below; not clear what happened, looks like perhaps a strap-on booster underwent a flawed separation. Perhaps it impacted the core.
While I remain a fan of the Space BFR in principle, incidents like this do give me a bit of pause. In the event of a booster failure, a Soyuz/Apollo-type of system (even an SLS/Orion-type system) stands a good chance of safely separating the crew capsule, because the crew capsule is a small, dense, easily-boosted nugget. With the BFR, if something goes unintentionally energetic with the booster, accelerating the whole manned interplanetary transporter stage away fast enough would be… well, damned impressive. The answer, of course, is to make the whole BFR system so reliable that separating the passengers in the event of an emergency would seem as silly as separating the passengers from a jetliner in the event a wing fell off in flight. Given the sheer power and energy involved with space launch, that’s *always* going to be more dangerous than airliners, so the level of acceptable risk for space travelers will always have to be higher than it is for air travelers.
Additional thought: with space launch, no matter how diligent you are, things can just go wrong. But with holes being drilled into capsule and patched up with spackle by either malicious or delinquent workers, the suspicion that someone did something intentional to this booster will be inevitable.
Oct 092018
The Aerojet M-1 rocket engine was to be a beast of an engine. Bigger than the F-1 with almost as much thrust, it differed in being fueled with hydrogen. Its intended role was to power post-Saturn “Nova” type rockets. It got as far as testing major components, but no complete engine was ever test fired. The need for such an engine went hand-in-hand with the development of very large boosters; the M-1 could have been used for either first stage or upper stages, but no booster sizable enough for such an engine survived the mid-sixties, so the M-1 died away.
Oct 082018
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg last night and landed the first stage back there again. The video is on the one hand just more of the same; on the other hand, the launch was at night, so there are some interesting sights with vapor plumes and such at high altitude that you normally can’t see with daytime launches. And while the landing was successful, as you can see from the last seconds of the video (and in the thumbnail image below), it wasn’t *perfect.* Looks like one of the landing legs came this close to buckling. I don’t know if it’s because the stage came in at a harsh angle (hard to see in the dark), or if the oleo struts on one leg were a little weak. In either case the landing was a success, but SpaceX is definitely going to want to take a look at that.
Oct 072018
Hmmm…
Look at this mysterious object that washed ashore on Seabrook Island today! What do you think it is?
Posted by Lowcountry Marine Mammal Network on Thursday, October 4, 2018
Looks reasonably sizable. What looks like concrete is said to be a soft foam-like material, presumably an insulation of some kind…. but then since this was found in the sea, perhaps it’s a flotation material. It does somewhat look like the throat of a solid propellant rocket nozzle embedded within the foam, but I can’t immediately place what sort of rocket would put a relatively thin metal and/or fiber throat within a fat mass of low density foam like this. But it does have that burnt look that comes from either re-entry or combustion…
Oct 042018
An advertisement from 1963 illustrating a quite-possibly artistic license nuclear powered space probe heading towards Jupiter. The probe was to use the SNAP-50/SPUR powerplant (300 to 1200 kilowatts of electricity) to power a circular bank of ion engines. The realistic nature of the design should be questioned due to the lack of any apparent communication system… no great big radio dish, in other words.
Oct 022018
Patrons of the Aerospace Projects Review Patreon received last month:
Diagram: A foldout diagram of an Apollo-derived logistics spacecraft
Document: “The Piasecki Story,” an illustrated history of the company and its products
Document: “The N.S. Savannah,” a brochure about the sole nuclear powered merchant vessel
Document: “Lunar Spacecraft Design” A paper describing the evolution of the General Electric Apollo design, quite similar to the later Soyuz spacecraft
CAD diagram: 1985 design of the British HOTOL spaceplane
If this sort of thing is of interest, please consider signing up for the APR Patreon.
Sep 292018
Circa 1960, courtesy Douglas Missile and Space Systems. Both the “flying saucer” and the lunar lander in the background are actually familiar designs, each having appeared from time to time in various media outlets. it’s unclear how *serious* either of these designs were, however. I do know that United Technologies, where I worked from 2000-2004, had an old model of a similar flying saucer on non-display in one of the shops. It was something like 3 to 4 feet in diameter and actually semi-functonal: it was mounted on a gimbal and fitted with a number of small plexiglas-fueled hybrid rocket motors. For displays the motors could be fired up and the saucer would, I believe, rotate and tilt and whatnot, responding to inputs from joysticks on the display stand.That always seemed a terrible idea: not due to the risk of fire or explosion, but because of the brain-melting screech those little rockets would put out.
I have no idea what happened to that display piece. Might’ve wandered home with someone. Might’ve moved on to another company. And chances are quite good that, like a whole lot of United Tech, it was simply trashed.