X-34 proposals

 aircraft, drawings, history, projects, rockets  No Responses »
Mar 272020
 

The X-34 was the first aerospace project I worked on after graduation. Sadly, one week after I was hired to work on the X-34 the whole program was cancelled. “Welcome to aerospace, kid. Here’s your layoff… last one in, first one out.” Feh. Anyway, Orbital Sc iences proposed two vehicles:

1: The X-34A was a small-ish vehicle carried under the same Lockheed L-1011 jetliner that OSC used to launch the Pegasus. The X-34 needed greater volume than the Pegasus, but since there was limited clearance under the L-1011, the X-34A had a wide lifting body-like fuselage.

2: The X-34B was a larger, better optimized vehicle to be launched from atop a Shuttle-carrying 747.

Both the A and B models had payload bays that would contain an upper stage and an orbital payload. Neither was built (apart from a full scale mockup of the A); after the program was cancelled it came back as the X-34C. the C model *was* built, but it never flew.

 Posted by at 10:20 am

We’re Number One!

 AARRRGH, awesomeness, blather, Hmm..., news, THIS is why Trump won, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 262020
 

Coronavirus: US overtakes China with most cases

Woooo hoooooooooooo……….

On the other hand:

Truckers are saying "fuck the log rules, I'm hauling" and they're getting supplies to the stores. People are stocking…

Posted by Bart Hall on Wednesday, March 25, 2020

I am a naturally pessimistic feller. I prefer to think of it as holding to proper engineering standards: engineering tells you with certainty that some things WILL fail, some things WON’T work… what it won’t tell you is that something is assured of success, but only “probably.” When you can see a hundred ways in which a situation cannot work and only a few ways in which it might, this makes you a good engineer, but also someone that other people find kind of a bummer to hang around. Still, while I’m focusing on the worst case projections and looking forward to a likelihood of a dim personal future (because failure to recognize how things can go terribly wrong leads you to walking directly into terrible things), I expect the American people to be able to deal with this problem the way we’ve dealt with so many others. Yes, the government can certainly help, but as with FDR’s Depression Extension Programs and LBJ’s Eternal War To Perpetuate Poverty, the government is a dubious ally at best. But when the entrepreneurial spirit of the American people is unleashed, there are few things we cannot tackle.

 Posted by at 5:59 pm

Another Kung Flu data visualization

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Gah., history, Hmm..., news, science, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 252020
 

91-DIVOC

An interactive visualization of the exponential spread of COVID-19

See how the US infection rate looks like a fairly straight line? Yeah…. that ain’t good. On a logarithmic chart like this, “straight line” means “incoming ᛋᚺᛁᛏᛋᛏᛟᚱᛗ thanks to the magic of compound interest.” A daily growth factor of 1.35 works out to a factor of 8.17 per week, or 8,129 in thirty days. There are currently about a thousand dead in the US. What’s one thousand times eight thousand?

In a month, we should be in an interesting new era. Hopefully it’s one where testing and isolation has flattened the growth rate enough that the death rate drops substantially… but given how freakin’ stupid so many people are, holding “COVID Parties” and the like, I wouldn’t bet large sums on the optimistic outcome. That said, the pessimistic outlook will probably mean the death of somewhere around one to two percent of the population. Heartless though it may be to say, most of those lost will likely be of the “economically unproductive” classes, and the country should be able to pick itself back up. But as the Black Death resulted in societal upheaval due to the survivors tossing the prior institutions and partying themselves into the Renaissance, and the Spanish Flu walled the west into the Roaring Twenties, our own Roaring Twenties could be interesting. With luck people will realize the value of self reliance. Concepts such as mass transit, high population density urban centers, gun control, celebrity worship, dependence upon the government will, if there is any wisdom in mankind and justice in the universe, fade away as the bad ideas that they are.

 

 Posted by at 11:45 pm

Celebrities in Crisis

 humor, youtube  No Responses »
Mar 252020
 

If there’s one thing that celebrities seem to need, it’s the spotlight. And thus when there’s a crisis like the Wuhan Coronavius Kung Flu Chinese Communist Attempt To Kill Us All, the celebrity class can be relied upon to crank out self-aggrandizing pap in an effort to stay in the public eye. The vast majority of such can be either ignored or paid attention to solely to be laughed at… and not because those making it are trying to make it funny.

But then you get the rare celebrity like Ryan Reynolds who has an *actual* sense of both humor and proportion, while still maintaining that urge to publicize himself.

 Posted by at 5:57 pm

Advanced Ballistic Reentry vehicle

 art, history, nukes, weapons  No Responses »
Mar 252020
 

The re-entry vehicle used on the Peacekeeper and Trident missiles. The slim conical shape meant that it would lose minimal velocity as it plunged through the atmosphere; note that it has a contact sensor near the nose to permit it to detonate on impact.

 Posted by at 10:07 am

American Ingenuity

 awesomeness, humor, news, youtube  No Responses »
Mar 242020
 

Oddly, strip clubs are not considered “essential businesses,” so they’re getting shut down. What do?

Why, create a food delivery service complete with two scantily clad women, one burly bodyguard and a sense of humor: Boober Eats. Video below might or might not be visible due to age restrictions.

The dancers are going from making more money in a day than lot of people might make in a month to making little more than minimum wage. But they’re making *something* rather than nothing… and likely building up good public relations.

Socialists don’t bring you things like this. *Capitalists* do.

 Posted by at 9:29 pm

The end of Bigelow Aerospace?

 AARRRGH, news, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 242020
 

Uh-oh…

Bigelow Aerospace lays off all employees: Report

The manufacturer of expandable/inflatable space station habitats has laid off the entire workforce, in part due to the Kung Flu. They claim they’ll rehire everyone once the current crisis is over, but people involved seem unconvinced.

A damned shame if this is the end. While their progress has been creakingly slow (I flew to Vegas for an interview with Robert Bigelow his own self well over twenty years ago), they have nonetheless orbited three inflatable habs that have seemed to be pretty successful.

 Posted by at 9:06 pm

Bring Out Your Dumb

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 242020
 

Pandemics make people panic. Panic makes people dumb. Behold:

A man thought aquarium cleaner with the same name as the anti-viral drug chloroquine would prevent coronavirus. It killed him.

Basically this is resulting in a “dihydrogen monoxide” freakout. I am personally unconvinced of the utility of chloroquine in treating the virus, because I SIMPLY DON’T KNOW. It’s outside my area of expertise, and studies are fantastically preliminary. But I *do* know that taking a substance that *contains* the chemical in question and then keeling over says *nothing* about either the efficacy or safety of the chemical in question. But this simple fact is beyond ability of much of the media to either recognize or understand:

Arizona man drinks poison and dies. Media blame Trump

I’m leery of any claims of “miracle cures.” Hell, every time I hear someone go on about how great chloroquine is, I flash back to the “forsythia” quack cure in the movie “Contagion.” Still, Trump is not out of line, at least with what seems to be known about chloroquine. But the media freakout is either a transparently obvious attempt to spin the story into a dishonest political attack, or evidence that the reporters are as equally stupid as the people who saw a bottle that said “not for human consumption” and swallowed it anyway… or both.

And in other “morons self-selection for gene pool editing” news…

Florida college students test positive for coronavirus after going on spring break

If it was just them… good. But they’ll spread the disease to people who *aren’t* as stupid and selfish. That’s what makes this disease worse than AIDS, which is largely restricted to people who choose to not behave in a basically intelligent manner.

 Posted by at 7:53 pm
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