Here’s something interesting on eBay:
The AQM-37 used a hypergolic liquid rocket motor, which I would imagine isn’t included here. With some effort I imagine it could be replaced with a hybrid rocket motor and turned into the most badass RC airplane around.
Over the last week or so there have been a whole lot of stories about Elon Musks plans for colonization of Mars. Good, great, fine. But some stories are better than others. And one way to get into the “others” category is to have some factual error or just plain bad writing. For example:
Out of all the options currently open to us, Venus is a cooking pot of pressure and acid, Mercury is too close to the sun and the planet’s moons are difficult to reach…
The moons of Mercury are hard to reach? Yeah, I imagine they are. They’re as hard to reach as Alderaan, Dune and The Land Of Honest Politicians.
It is estimated that sending a single person to Mars could cost up to $10 billion at the moment. … Therefore, Musk wants to eventually reduce the cost to the average price of a house in the US — roughly $200,000 — but in order to reach this goal and slash the expense by five million percent, a number of steps will need to be taken.
Errrrrmmmm… cutting a price tag from $10,000,000,000 to $200,000 is cutting the cost by 99.998%, not “five million percent.” If you cut the cost of something by 100%, you make it free. If you cut it by *more* than 100%, you actually get paid.
Here’s an interesting one: a detailed large-format diagram of the US Space Shuttle orbiter… as drawn up by Soviet draftsmen in 1976. Interestingly, the top view includes, in red, the basic outline of the Soviet “Buran” shuttle orbiter. A surprisingly high-rez version of this diagram can be FOUND HERE.
The diagram is not entirely accurate, especially with regards to the OMS pod. The rear end of the pod in the side view is distinctly inaccurate. But note the faint lines just ahead of the OMS pods in the top and side views. One of the last noticeable changes to the Orbiters configuration was the change to the forward end of the OMS pod; originally, the pods continued forward onto the cargo bay doors. This continuation was just an aerodynamic fairing; all the equipment an tanks were in the pod aft of the doors.
Dating from about 1963-63, this is a depiction of a high-altitude research aircraft equipped with “composite air-augmented turbo-jets” for launch and rockets for “near-space operations.” The general configuration was used many times over the decade, typically for scramjet powered aircraft. This was painted by Pat Shealy, chief of the Presentations Division, Air For Office of Scientific Research at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
An old (1962 or before) piece of concept art from Kaman illustrating their “ROMAR,” a helicopter meant for Mars exploration. It appears to be powered by rotortip rockets, a decent enough approach for this sort of thing. However, this was before Mariner mars ’64, when the understood density of the Martian atmosphere dropped by more than a factor of ten. As a result, a helicopter like this would need to be made fabulously low-weight in order to fly, something improbable given the needs of a manned vehicle.
A nifty piece of NASA art showing a cutaway of the Orion capsule atop the SLS.
… that I mastered for Fantastic Plastic.
Horten XVIII-B flying wing, German WWII bomber project.
Rocky Jones Orbit Jet
Space.com has a few really nice photos from the recent launch & landing. Especially nifty is a close-up shot showing the booster shortly after launch.
Fantastic Plastic has released the 1/200 scale model of the Deep Impact “Messiah” spacecraft that I mastered for them in CAD a few years ago. Took a long time to get here, but it looks like a really spiffy model. At 27 inches long and 200+ pieces including photoetch, it’s kind of a beast.
Probable correction:
Color me stunned, but the article is written in a way that seems to exaggerate the actual claims. For the moment I assume that the stage didn’t so much “splash down softly” as “plummet from the sky at terminal velocity.”
——
Bwuh?
SpaceX has also had success recently in recovering Falcon 9 second stages and payload fairings, the nose cones that protect satellites and other spacecraft during launch. After its work was done on Saturday, for example, the Falcon 9 second stage apparently splashed down softly in the ocean southwest of Australia, Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability, said during Saturday’s press conference.
Hold up. The second stage soft-landed in the ocean??? Way to bury the lede, guys.