Neat:
J. Michael Straczynski To Write Spike TV’s ‘Red Mars’ Drama Series Project
“Red Mars” is quality science fiction literature. Let’s hope it translates into quality science fiction television.
Jan 222015
Jan 212015
Now available: US Spacecraft Projects #02, the “Spaceplane Special.” This is done in the same style as the other US Aerospace Projects publications, but this issue is focused specifically on lifting spacecraft… and is more than twice as long as usual with more data and more diagrams.
USSP #02 includes:
- Boeing Personnel/Cargo Glider: When you have space industry, you need a space bus
- Convair Manned Orbiting Reconnaissance System: A 1958 concept for a recon spaceplane
- North American D435-1-4: The delta winged X-15A-3 (not a true spaceplane… but still, relevant)
- General Electric R-3 Lenticular Apollo: A 1962 Apollo concept for a lifting body lunar ship
- General Dynamics VL-3A: a 1966 space station logistics transport
- SRI Space Cruiser: An early 1980’s minimum manned spacecraft for the military
- Boeing Model 844-2050E Dyna Soar: The almost-built spaceplane from 1963
- Rockwell MRCC Orbiter: the do-everything concept, modified with additional rockets and propellant
USSP #02 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $6:
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Jan 162015
The publishing industry goes through fads. UFO abduction stories are popular for a while. Then sparkly teen vampire stories. And then starting few years ago, yarns claiming to be non-fictional biographies of people who died, went and saw Heaven, then came back. Many people have seized on these books to back up their religious beliefs.
Whoops:
“The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven” Recants Story, Rebukes Christian Retailers
In short: in 2004 a six-year-old (with the unfortunate name “Alex Malarkey”) was in a car crash, seriously injured and pounded into a coma. Two months later he woke up and began to regale with tales of being shown around Heaven. Small problem: he now says that he made it all up as a way to get attention.
Amusingly, he apparently tried to tell the world of this fraud a while back, by posting message saying as much on the “Alex Malarkey Facebook fan page.” The moderators there deleted his message and banned him.
Jan 152015
The bulk of the drafting is done. A few more minor bits, some cleanup and annotations, and the drafting portion of the exercise will be completed.
Jan 122015
I have been plugging away on USSP#2, pretty much to the exclusion of all else, for a little while now. Shown below is the current status of the diagrams. USSP#2 has substantially more diagrams than the usual US Aerospace Projects publication. The empty spots are for two further spaceplanes. I really wish I was a faster draftsman, but there it is.
Generally I release these sort of things two at a time, but this might be released on its own.
Jan 092015
Jan 022015
A nice writeup of some of my Orion drafting & scribbling here:
Hard SF Feature 04: Scott Lowther
Some of my Orion diagrams:
I suppose I really do need to finish that book some day. Having the publisher vanish on me kinda sucked the joy out of it, though. You’d think I’d be used to that sort of thing by now… I guess that there just might not be a maximum level of disappointment. You can always be more disappointed.
Dec 272014
“Ignition! An informal history of liquid rocket propellants” was written by John D. Clark and published by Rutgers University in 1972. It is a classic text on the subject… a text which has not been reprinted since except by some print-on-demand types. If you find a copy of this book for less than several hundred dollars, you’ve lucked out. It’s a good read, both informative and entertaining.
Fortunately, someone went to the bother of scanning the whole thing and posting it as a PDF. I’m honestly unclear about the copyright implications, if any… but the scan has been openly and freely available for some years, so…
http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf
Hmmm. It seems that I’ve completely flaked out on the PDF reviews for quite a while. And nobody said anything. Makes me wonder if maybe there’s just no interest in these? Shrug, oh well, moving on…
As always: check out the APR Patreon for info on how to help, and how to get rewards.
Dec 272014
Here’s how Space Station V can service an Orion and an Aries simultaneously. The manipulators arm that reaches out from the Station and grabs the Aries has to be not only nimble, but pretty strong; the boarding deck is under 0.02 G’s. Not a whole lot, but for a vehicle massing (handwave) a hundred thousand pounds, it’s a fair weight to be cantilevered out like that. The arm grasps of one the landing legs, roughly swings the ship into position, and then an arm from the “top” of the lander projects and grabs an extendable structure that projects from the bay. This second arm stabilizes the lander and precisely orients it for the dock that projects from the face of the station and fits over the boarding door. A third, smaller arm snakes out from the lander and mates with the extendable structure. Both of the landers arms contain umbilicals to transfer consumables and propellants and such.
Why not dock it in the bay?
The Aries does not fit in the bay. It just doesn’t. Parsecs are not a unit of time and the Aries Ib doesn’t fit in the Space Station V docking bay. And even if you scale up the SSV so that the Aries does fit… you won’t be able to service both an Aries and an Orion at the same time unless the station is so vast that you’ve got room to move a ship in, then shove it over to one side of the bay and bring in another along the centerline.
Dec 242014
It’s very much still a work in progress, but the long-promised Space Station V project is far from dead. This shows a portion of the plan.
