Eleven and a half years ago I reviewed “The Happening” (holy crap that sound like a long time ago…). It was in fact one of the first posts on this sad excuse for a blog. Anyway… long story short, I hated it.
Imagine my shock when this guy posts a video that links “Signs” (which I liked but had problems with) with “The Happening” and “After Earth” (which I absolutely loathed) in a way that actually winds up making them all better and *kinda* making sense now…
So, SpaceX lobbed a Dragon into the sky, willingly destroying a Falcon 9 booster system to prove out the abort capability of their capsule. This was a ballsy move; had anything gone wrong, their opponents in government, industry and media would have pounced, likely causing SpaceX to have to delay for months or years before daring to risk an actual astronaut. Boeing, in contrast, opted to replace a very visible, very public flight test of their capsules abort system with a mountain of paperwork that, if printed out, very likely would have massed more than the capsule if not the whole booster.
And so I was reminded of this old, old TV ad for the financial firm AIG. I’ve posted this video before (going on two years, also referencing SpaceX), but damn if it just doesn’t seem relevant.
Every time I watch this the room somehow gets dusty.
In the 1980’s, military spaceplanes were all the rage… at least on paper. In 1985 Rockwell International considered the possibility that there would be a profitable business case for a relatively small manned spaceplane that could serve as a rapid-reaction launch system for missions such as recon. Thirty years later the X-37 finally accomplished something sorta along those lines, though without the crew and rapid reaction.
Well, here they go (hopefully):
UPDATE: the flight seemed to go entirely successfully, from launch to engine shutdown, capsule abort, trunk jettison, re-orientation, re-entry, drogue chutes, main chutes, splashdown. The videos cut off prior to the rescue boats getting to the capsule, but at this stage I image everything is hunky dory within the capsule. As expected, the booster tumbled and kerploded quite spectacualrly.
While I want this, there are two things I want more:
1: Enough money to actually *run* one of these things
2: A change in the ridiculous laws that prevent me from owning one of these things.
German MEP Gunnar Beck sounds German neither through his accent nor through accepted current ideology…
An update: the contract has been signed. I now have until July to turn in my book. Until the publisher starts advertising it, I’ll shut the frak up about the details except to say that it’s along the lines of USXP, but on a tighter than usual focus… and a hell of a lot bigger. Currently have just shy of 70 diagrams finished for it (which explains the dry spell of aerospace on the blogs… I’ve been up to my eyeballs in aerospace, I just haven’t been sharing), and the spreadsheet lists just short of *200* diagrams.
A little while back I was contacted by someone who had an old display model of a Boeing Controlled Configured Vehicle bomber and wondered if I was interested in buying it. Interested? Yes. Able? No. But I was able to put the seller in contact with someone else who was able to procure it, so this Boeing CCV-100-2 wound up in a good home. More on the CCV-100-2 is HERE. Still no confirmation of the scale of the vehicle, sadly.
It’s a mystery.
SpaceX is doing an abort test of their Dragon 2 capsule tomorrow. All goes according to schedule, the Falcon 9 will launch normally at 8 AM eastern time tomorrow and 84 seconds later the capsules abort motors will fire. The Falcon 9 first and second stages will be destroyed, but the capsule will – hopefully – be successfully recovered. With that success and a few more tests, SpaceX could be ready to send astronauts to the ISS in March.
The US hasn’t launched a human into space since 2011. A good argument can be made that the US ceased to be a superpower at the point, since it was now dependent upon another nation for vital functions. Falcon and Dragon sending crews to the ISS would be a good *start* at returning the US to superpower status, though to really deserve that title the US will need to resume the project of advancement into space. And that means doing something better than simply going in circles.