Just about done with this one. I’m hoping to have the Word document version of the issue finished up around this weekend. Not quite sure when it’ll be released. My laptop is giving me difficulties in converting Word documents to PDF… I always did this step on my PC, which is now far, far away. Maybe the local Staples can do it for me, dunno….
From The Telegraph:
An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph found that three quarters of local authorities have used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000 over the past year.
The Act gives councils the right to place residents and businesses under surveillance, trace telephone and email accounts and even send staff on undercover missions.
Yikes.
Wandered to the PA Ren Fest today. I’ve been to several over the years, including the one at Larkspur, CO and near Fruita, CA. They are all remarkably similar in general appearance and feel, although the one in Colorado beat the crap out of the other two in terms of availability of hand-made sharp pointy metal things.
Ifyou’ve never been to aRen Fest, they’re like this: several acres of bad acting, horrid fake accents, bad food and cheap (but expensive) entirely useless products for sale. In other words, they’re fricken’ *great.* Entertaining as all get out. This one had a group of Taiko drummers plying their trade; something to see and hear if you get the chance.
There is, of course, the primary reason to go to a Ren Fest: the women’s fashions.I’m sure they’re historically innacurate as all get out, but on occasion… dayum.
I would have taken more photos detailing exactly the aspect of Ren Fest women’s fashion I’m on about, but my interest in getting my ass handed to me by angry boyfriends wearing kilts and carrying zinc flails was minimal. A Google search can give you a good idea of what to expect at a Ren Fest.
The Ren Fests I’ve seen are all semi-permanent facilities. The CO and CA ones were out in the middle of nowhere in forested areas; the PA one is also in a forested area, but located on the grounds of a winery. Probably a good financial decision for the winery… likely some rent or lease money, and everyone who goes to the fest is a likely customer for their boozey wares.
The winery is located north of Lancaster, PA, in semi-famed Lancaster county. Gotta admit, the area is beautiful. And, yes, there are the Amish…
Nothing especially interesting occurred… gray overcast and a lot of rain, a bit of wind. Meh. Nothing I couldn’t have gotten in a standard midwestern storm. The clouds broke just about sundown.
Founs at the NASA HQ archive were four pages from a McDonnell Aircraft presentation on an idea for a small space station that would be launched by an Atlas with a Mercury capsule. Two ideas were shown for how the astronaut would get from the Mercury to the space station; in one, an inflatable tunnel would connect the two externally; in the other, the Mercury capsule would tilt up and its hatch would mate with a hatch on the side of the station.
The similarity to the later MOL are readily apparent. McDonnell studied the same means of getting the Gemini crew to the MOL as were examined here; the difference was that in the case of MOL, the end result was a third option, that of a tunnel from the MOL straight into the aft of the Gemini capsule through the heat shield. That was not an option with this design, however, as the Mercy capsule was both too small for such tinkering… and the Mercury’s retro pack was in the way.
Martin designed this spaceplane for the Dyna Soar program in 1959. The head designer was Hans Multhopp, formerly of Focke-Wulf.
Huh.
California and Utah gave me earthquakes. Maryland looks to be giving me cheap-ass huricanes.
UPDATE:
A visit to the archive at NASA Headquarters today netted a goodly pile of information, largely on Dyna Soar, Nova and MOL. Below are just a small fraction of the images obtained on the MOL (Manned Orbiting lab); I’ll be posting more.
The first job I had that lasted more than a blink of an eye (my first “real” job got yanked out from under me at Orbital Sciences… got hired to work on the X-34B, damn thing got cancelled the week after I got there) was for Pioneer Rocketplane, where I was the first employee (much to the surprise of two of the companies three founders, who had not authorized such a hiring… but hey, there were NASA SBIRs to pay me from, so there ya go).
<> One of the first things I did there was preliminary design of the Pioneer “Pathfinder” suborbital spaceplane. The idea was that this aircraft would lift off under turbojet power with full fuel (kerosene) tanks, but an effectively empty liquid oxygen tank (actually carried a small quantity on board in order to pre-chill the LOX tank). It would quickly rendezvous with a tanker aircraft which would then transfer a large qauntity of LOX to the Pathfinder. Pathfinder would then separate from the tanker, fire up its rocket engine, pop above the sensible atmosphere, open cargo bay doors, and toss overboard a satellite with an attached upper stage. Satellite goes to orbit, Pathfinder comes back down for refurb and reflight. Easy!
<> This was the mid/late 1990’s, when every Tom, Dick and Bill Gates was planning on launching constellations of thousands of satellites. Consequently a great need was foreseen for dirt-cheap space launch, which Pioneer Rocketplane intended to provide. With the collapse of the dot-com boom, and aided immensely by the bizarre behavior of a certain sociopath, Pioneer never got the chance to build the Pathfinder. Pioneer Rocketplane surives, sorta, to this day in the form of Rocketplane Ltd., about which I know almost none at all. Not sure if they’re even really a going concern anymore. Sad.
<> Still, it was my first chance to design stuff For Real. Pathfinder was a fairly dull design, to be sure… looks a whole lot like the Shuttle. But the propulsion system was not some neato whiz-bang system that required lots of funky vehicle integration; it was two turbojets and a rocket engine. Going bizzarre for the sake of going bizzarre is a tad pointless. To help sell the concept to investors, the company cooked up brochures and the like. And for the brochures, Pioneer had space artist Michael Carroll paint a series of illustrations. Paint. Not render on a computer, but honest-to-Odin paint. I recently found glossies of them, and reproduce them below.
See if you can spot the Babylon 5 reference subtlely hidden within one of them….
