Say what you will about Disney…

 art, awesomeness, blather, youtube  No Responses »
Aug 292019
 

… and there is much to say about how decisions the Disney corporation has made has squandered the legacy of Star Wars that they spent four billion dollars to acquire. But the *people* who work in the trenches at the Disney parks seem to be something quite a bit different. A while back I pointed out the fantastic “Evil Queen” they’ve got who brings the snark with verve and talent, but then there are these two incidents of the “talent” being *waaaaay* better people than those who decided to turn Han Solo into a bad joke and Luke Skywalker into a worthless dirtbag.

 

First: a non-verbal autistic kid went into sensory overload and started melting down. “Snow White” was on the job, it seems, and took care of the situation.

I am so emotional with these pictures !! Brody was having a meltdown . It was our turn to take pictures with her and he…

Posted by Lauren Bergner on Sunday, August 25, 2019

 

And then they’ve got a “Mary Poppins” who interacted with a blind girl. The blind girl, being blind and all, could not see “Mary Poppins” or her outfit… but “Mary Poppins” let the girl “see” her via touch. I would be large sums of someone else’s money that Disney has standing orders with the talent along the lines of “don’t let the plebes touch you or your costumes,” along with orders to the security to prevent the dirty, dirty masses from touching the talent. yet everyone involved here, from the “Mary Poppins” to the guards doubtless watching from the bushes, to the bored drone a thousand feet under the park watching the event via cameras hidden in “Mary Poppins'” hat, decided to let it play out.

 

I’m honestly stumped what a blind person would get out of most of an amusement park, but she seems happy, so who am I to argue?

 

I do wonder if there’s something wrong with *me* or something wrong with *society* that I’m frankly surprised to see basic decency out of people who are doubtless underpaid, overworked and subject to daily indignities from horrible, horrible park proles.

 Posted by at 10:43 pm

Possibilities of New Business Growth: Aft Cargo Carrier

 drawings&documents, history, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 292019
 

In 1985 Rockwell pondered the business possibility of an “Aft Cargo Carrier” for the Shuttle. This idea, which received a fair amount of study by Martin Marietta, installed a payload shroud to the *rear* of the external tank. Doing this would allow the Shuttle to carry payloads too large in diameter to fit in the Shuttle bay; if the STS system was overall improved, this would allow the vehicle to carry payloads heavier than the Shuttle itself would be allowed to carry (the Orbiter has to *land* with whatever payload might be in the cargo bay; by moving the cargo away from the Orbiter, in an abort situation the orbit can land light and just let the aft payload go into the drink). The cargo carrier has to be insulated from a *lot* of heat, radiant energy coming from the solid and liquid rockets.

A common idea was that the Orbiter would carry some sort of satellite or other payload not capable of much self-propulsion, while an orbital tug would be carried in the ACC. The tug would be fueled with light & fluffy liquid hydrogen, which not only would be challenging to fit into the Orbiter cargo bay, it would also require new fuel line pass-throughs in either the cargo bay doors or the sides of the cargo bay… along with boiloff vents. Much preferable, went the argument, to put the LH2 in an ACC that you could poke whatever holes you want to in.

The configuration of the ACC shown in the sketch is noticeably different from all other ACC designs I’ve seen elsewhere. I don’t know if this is because Rockwell designed a rather ellipsoidal carrier, or the artist just sorta dashed this one out.

Next time: boosting the boosters

Continue reading »

 Posted by at 10:07 pm

Starship Mk1: Real soon now??

 awesomeness, Hmm..., news, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 292019
 

Bah-bwuuuuuhhh?

That’s rather remarkable. It’s miraculously fast by NASA standards.

Also of note: Musk is saying the vehicle *after* Starship/Super Heavy will be 18 meters in diameter, twice that of SH. This would seem to put it well beyond Saturn v and into the Nova/Post-Saturn scale of booster. One might wonder if they’re thinking about a sizable SSTO vehicle that can serve as a boost-back booster for heavier upper stages.

 

 Posted by at 9:33 pm

It can’t happen here?

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., I'm from the government, Meh., news, politics, THIS is why Trump won, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Aug 292019
 

From Ol’ Blighted, the latest innovation in political correctness: banning depictions of people being people.

Volkswagen and Philadelphia cream cheese ads banned over gender stereotypes

A lot of Americans think of Britain as a slightly eccentric yet still free country. But… it’s not, really. They do not have a written constitution as such; the government can basically do whatever they feel like doing, and they’ve made the ultimately suicidal mistake of assuming that Parliament will always come down on the side of sense and reason. But Britain has themselves an “Advertising Standards Agency” that feels it can ban commercials that show stereotypically (i.e. historically and biologically and culturally accurate) gendered activities. In this case, a commercial that shows a woman in a park with a baby carriage “engaged in a stereotypical care-giving role.”

One would hope that this sort of thing, like the despicable Canadian “Human Rights Tribunals” would be impossible in the United States. But don’t bet on it. The Chinese “social credit” system would be illegal for the government to enact, but it’s something definitely to watch out for among major financial and communications companies. I can see American broadcasters enacting such restrictions themselves just to keep the shrieking harpies of social justice conformity off their backs for ten seconds until the next outrage.

 Posted by at 2:46 am

Possibilities of New Business Growth: Unmanned Orbiter

 history, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 282019
 

Continuing…

In 1985 Rockwell pondered the idea of an unmanned Orbiter. The US did not proceed with that concept, while the Soviets did with their Buran. It was an interesting notion and for the time reasonably advanced tech… but it’s clearly a very silly idea (even more so with Buran). The whole purpose of the Orbiter as compared to any other launch vehicle is to *return* stuff. With the Space Shuttle, the stuff it returned was sometimes payload, always avionics, engines and crew. Making the Orbiter unmanned means… why the hell are you launching a crew cabin? Buran was even worse; it didn’t even bring back the main engines.

 Posted by at 11:08 pm

Let it be known…

 blather  No Responses »
Aug 282019
 

… that as of today things out here are gonna get kinda weird. More details in the future, but for now it looks as if productivity on a lot of things is going to drop off sharply.

 

If anyone had a hankering to donate a hundred grand to me, now would be the time.

 Posted by at 5:46 pm

CAVE

 art, awesomeness, humor, news, politics  No Responses »
Aug 282019
 

Around a week ago the nightly local news had a piece on a major police action in Salt Lake City. The event involved a response to a protest, then a shooting and a traffic accident. As it turns out… it was all a training exercise. However, one thing caught my eye and made me laugh: the “protestors” were all actors, of course, holding up pretty generic protest signs. But there was one that pretty effectively summed up current outrage/protest/mob culture:

 

 Posted by at 12:27 am
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