ExoMars on its way

 news, rockets, science, spacecraft  8 Responses »
Mar 142016
 

A Russian Proton rocket has successfully launched the ESA/Roscosmos ExoMars spacecraft. ExoMars – an orbiter and a lander – is specifically designed to look for signs of life on Mars. It’ll be a while before results can come back. The lander will separate from the spacecraft in October and is to land on October 19.

Orbiter aerobraking into a circular Mars orbit will take place between January 2017 and November 2017, with science operations starting in December 2017. This of course assumes success… the Europeans and the Russians don’t exactly have a spectacular record with Mars landers.

 Posted by at 2:16 pm

Gyrojet Carbine

 awesomeness, history, rockets, weapons, youtube  10 Responses »
Mar 132016
 

And here’s the carbine version of the Gyrojet rocket gun (previously shown in pistol form). It’s one of those great ideas that really just didn’t work all that well. I still think a modernized version could be made into a practical and entertaining weapon, but as pointed out in the video the original Gyrojet carbine, if made today, would instantly get you in trouble with the feds. The rounds were 13 millimeters in diameter… 0.3 mm greater than anti-firearms laws passed in 1968 would allow (anything above 50 caliber is considered a “destructive device, except, somehow, shotguns).

A modernized Gyrojet in carbine form could probably be made to burn propellant fast enough to burn out just before the end of the barrel, so that it would have full velocity right at the muzzle. Or at least have a boost/sustain rocket grain to get a sizable fraction of the energy at the muzzle. And give it a decent replaceable magazine, for frak’s sake. And a solid-fuel ramjet sustainer…

 Posted by at 4:19 pm

No. He wasn’t.

 AARRRGH, dumbassery, Gah., history, rockets, science, science fiction, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ  7 Responses »
Mar 102016
 

Adolf Hitler first man on the Moon? Nazi Germany’s ‘secret space missions’ revealed

What we have here is one of the all-time *worst*articles from a “news” site. Not just the inane topic, but the rambling, incoherent way it’s written, bobbing and weaving from one hand-wavey notion to another like a drunk howler monkey looking for it’s car keys, little realizing that since it’s a monkey, it doesn’t actually have car keys.

 Posted by at 3:51 am

So who got a Sanger report…?

 aircraft, awesomeness, books, history, Hmm..., projects, rockets, science, science fiction, spacecraft, weapons  No Responses »
Mar 092016
 

Still slowly slogging through the process of cleaning up the Sanger “A Rocket Drive for Long Range Bombers” report scans. Some pages are easy… a few minutes and done. Other pages, specifically the ones from the middle of the book, can take well in excess of an hour. The problem is that the Sanger report is hard-bound, and the feller who scanned it didn’t want to break the spine. As a consequence, near the middle of the book, the inboard bits of text are smooshed and blurred. The only way to digitally restore these is to copy/paste bits of text and individual letters to replace the bad bits. *These* pages can take a lot longer.

Fortunately the whole book isn’t like this. Near the front and back, the scans are quite good and easy to deal with. This includes the last two pages… pages that list where copies of the report were to be sent. there are some *very* interesting names in this list…

S2 (128) S2 (129)

 Posted by at 4:09 pm

Project Horizon on TV

 art, awesomeness, blather, history, Hmm..., projects, rockets, science, spacecraft  4 Responses »
Mar 072016
 

Project Horizon was a late 1950’s US Army study for a military lunar base. It’s hardly a secret at this point… it has been written about for decades, and several volumes of the report have been available online as generally “meh”-quality PDFs for years. Still, as well known as Horizon is to the space-history community, I imagine it’s pretty much unknown to the general population. So imagine my modest surprise when I halfway caught a commercial for a special on Project Horizon to air tomorrow (Tuesday) night on the Science Channel, on an episode of “NASA’s Unexplained Files.”

From the bit I caught, it seems like the show will probably slant the story not as “hey, look as this neato-wacky concept the Army looked at sixty years ago,” but more as “what is the Army hiding on the moon, look, BEHOLD, for we have found Secret Plans.” In general this would be a turnoff, but it’s not like Horizon gets a lot of press. And from the brief glimpse, it *looks* like someone got hold of Project Horizon color artwork. So this might be one of those things where the show is spectacular if you simply put the sound on “mute.” Consequently, it might be worth digitally recording if anyone has the ability. And who knows… *maybe* they’ll actually produce something new, or give hints as to where a complete original *color* version of the reports might be found.

UPDATE: Bleurrrrgh. Good and shallow, added nothing new. The color artwork shown is *modern* lunar base artwork, from the 90’s or later.

 Posted by at 12:00 pm

Zielpunkt: NYC

 aircraft, drawings, history, projects, rockets, spacecraft  8 Responses »
Mar 052016
 

I managed to finagle a complete full-color scan of an original copy of Eugen Sanger’s 1944 report, Uber einen Raketenantrieb fur Fernbomber (A Rocket Drive for Long Range Bombers). A “meh” quality B&W PDF of an English-language translation of the report has been available online for a while, but it seems to me that the world needs a proper high-rez version of the original, in color where appropriate.

One of the pages I’ve cleaned up from the new scan shows the statistical damage potential if New York City was regularly targeted by a very large number of bombs. This image, at least a black-and-white English-translated version, several generations removed from the original, is reasonably well-known and commonly reproduced… and as described a few years back, is generally described wrong.

Sanger (1) S2 (101)

 Posted by at 6:03 pm

Falcon 9: hard landing

 news, rockets, spacecraft  7 Responses »
Mar 042016
 

SpaceX finally got their latest rocket into the sky, but it looks like it didn’t survive landing on the barge. As this one was pretty much expected to fail – due to being a very high energy mission, with the barge much further out to sea – it’s not really considered a failure.

 Posted by at 7:46 pm

Cat (Grade 1)

 blather, cats, history, photography, rockets  4 Responses »
Feb 282016
 

A little snippet from a 1967 issue of Interavia magazine, showing the type of employee every high-tech facility needs.

“An official Lockheed Propulsion Corp. Portrait of Cat (Grade 1) Tiger guarding the microphone used for rocket motor count-downs. Tiger guards the master control complex against mice which formerly caused many thousands of dollars worth of damage by chewing instrumentation wiring.”

cat grade 1

When I worked at United Tech in California, there was the main plant, overrun with the Union, where things got done real, real slow (and where things getting done *wrong* led to the destruction of the place). But there was a small spur of the facility, RAT canyon (Research and Advanced Technology) which was not unionized; that’s where people tried to go if they had to get something done that was either crazy, sensitive or needed doing before the sun explodes. And RAT Canyon had a guardian, Fang. Fang was a big cat, bigger than Raedthinn, and all muscle. And he earned his name; mouth closed, his fangs stuck down below his upper lips by about 3/8″. His purpose was to control the varmints, and he did his job well. I’ve often wondered what happened to Fang when the facility folded; I hope that the manager of RAT Canyon, on his last day there, as he loaded his last box in his truck, scooped up Fang and took him to a new home. But who knows.

 Posted by at 8:36 pm
 Older Entries  Newer Entries