Oh, god! Break out the insulin!
Jul 082010
Jul 072010
This does not surprise me. It started out as a good idea with a lot of promise, but due to some “unpleasantness” it lost its best shot (a teaming with Northrop-Grumman) and eventually just faded away over an excessively long period of time.
Well, there goes *that* investment. Perhaps the stock certificates might be worth something on eBay some day.
http://www.okgazette.com/p/12776/a/6691/Default.aspx
What started out as a dream of rockets in the Oklahoma sky and money flowing from space enthusiasts has finally ended.
George French Jr., owner of Rocketplane Global, decided a mountain of debt and expectations of the same altitude were too much to burden and filed for bankruptcy. He filed the Chapter 7 bankruptcy papers in his home state of Wisconsin, but Oklahomans are suffering the loss.
Rocketplane grew out of Pioneer Rocketplane, formed by Mitchell Burnside-Clapp, Charles Lauer and someone I’ve done a reasonably good job of forgetting over the years. Now that Rocketplane, Ltd is no more, perhaps Mitch and Chuck can somehow take the name back and start again. It’s unlikely, I suppose, but I’d nevertheless love to see the one and only manned spacecraft I had some small part in designing take to the heavens.
Jul 072010
Neato, if true:
http://www.livescience.com/history/archimedes-set-roman-ships-afire-with-cannons-100627.html
A legend begun in the Medieval Ages tells of how Archimedes used mirrors to concentrate sunlight as a defensive weapon during the siege of Syracuse, then a Greek colony on the island of Sicily, from 214 to 212 B.C. No contemporary Roman or Greek accounts tell of such a mirror device, however.
Both engineering calculations and historical evidence support use of steam cannons as “much more reasonable than the use of burning mirrors,” said Cesare Rossi, a mechanical engineer at the University of Naples “Federico II,” in Naples, Italy, who along with colleagues analyzed evidence of both potential weapons.
The steam cannons could have fired hollow balls made of clay and filled with something similar to an incendiary chemical mixture known as Greek fire in order to set Roman ships ablaze. A heated cannon barrel would have converted barely more than a tenth of a cup of water (30 grams) into enough steam to hurl the projectiles.
As the inventions of Archimedes, Heron of Alexandria and others (especially the Antikythera Mechanism) show, the ancient Greeks were poised on the edge of the Industrial Revolution. Had history gone slightly differently, steam powered ships, land vehicles and factories could have arisen somewhere around 100 CE to 300CE, rather than after 1800 CE. So we would now be nearly two thousand years into a scientific and technological era, rather than a mere few hundred. As Carl Sagan pointed out, we could well be plying the spacelanes between the stars at this point… had history gone a little differently.
The problem is that getting history to go differently might have been virtually impossible. Sure, the technology was nearly there, and the basic principles of science were well understood; on a purely technical level, an Industrial Revolution might seem to ahve been immanent. But culturally, Europe was nowhere near ready. Slavery, for instance, was far too entrenched of an institution. Slave-powered ships were perfectly fine for the world of the Mediterranean; there wasn’t a globe-spanning British Empire in need of a faster mode of transport than sail-powered ships, nor was there an American West needing to be opened. So it might have seemed difficult to imagine what practical value a steam-powered ship would offer. Worse, what would ahppened with the slaves? What would happen to the fortunes of those in the slave trade?
More, this was an era of absolute monarchs and deep mysticism. Both of these concepts are great evils that have done little but retard progress. Overthrowing the mystics – the mystery religions, the Pythagoreans, the Church, and so on – and watering down the power of the monarchs may well have been absolute requirements for an Industrial Revolution to occur. Any sci-fi author contemplating an alternate history where the ancient Greek scientific tradition takes off and leads to a world nearly two millenia more advanced, take note of the cultural issues involved.
Not entirely true, but it gets the idea across:
Jul 072010
Or maybe best. Discuss.
Tired Gay succumbs to Dix in 200 meters
Oregon (Reuters) – Olympic bronze medalist Walter Dix edged out Tyson Gay in the former world champion’s hotly-anticipated return to the 200 meters at the Prefontaine Classic Diamond League meeting on Saturday.
Ummm. My guess: soon-to-be-unemployed editor gets bored.
Jul 062010
One can certainly argue with much of Griffin’s approach… choosing a specific launch architecture before the mission to the Moon and Mars was really worked out was not a spectacular strategy. But he did at least have the vision to push for such missions… a vision obviously lacking in the current NASA/White House administration. Plus, he’s capable of seeing the obvious:
Griffin said Tuesday that collaboration with other countries, including Muslim nations, is welcome and should be encouraged — but that it would be a mistake to prioritize that over NASA’s “fundamental mission” of space exploration.
“If by doing great things, people are inspired, well then that’s wonderful,” Griffin said. “If you get it in the wrong order … it becomes an empty shell.”
Griffin added: “That is exactly what is in danger of happening.”
He also said that while welcome, Muslim-nation cooperation is not vital for U.S. advancements in space exploration.
“There is no technology they have that we need,” Griffin said.
Got it in one.
And Bolden has uttered his rubbish before:
A Feb. 16 blog in the Orlando Sentinel reported that Bolden discussed the outreach during a lecture to engineering students. As he did in the interview with Al Jazeera last month, Bolden was quoted then saying Obama told him to “find ways to reach out to dominantly Muslim countries.”
He reportedly talked about the importance of helping countries establish space programs and pointed to the largest Muslim country in the world, Indonesia, as a possible partner.
Indonesia? INDO-FRIKKEN’-NESIA?!?!?! What can they possibly have that we need… or that would make the sending of Americans to Mars substantially easier?
Jul 062010
Finally got the fridge repairman out here today. I figured it was a problem with the coolant… he popped off one panel and showed me the real problem:
Part of the motherboard fried itself, likely during a power surge. Well, at least it wasn’t *my* fault…
Jul 052010
I spent a whole lotta years and a whole lotta my parents money getting an aerospace engineering degree in the first half of the 1990’s, because for some reason I was just sure that we were going to go off into space and people like myself would be needed to design the numerous manned spacecraft that would be required. Little did I know that the American aerospace engineering industry had no interest in designing any such thing (much less building such things). And little could I have imagined that fifteen years after getting my degree, the American government would essentially abandon manned spaceflight. With the mind-boggling damage that the FedGov has done to the American economy, they’ve also done a most effective job at wiping out any real prospects for private spaceflight to take up the slack.
So, imagine my irritation upon reading that not only has NASA been neutered and gutted, it’s being turned into yet another arm of the government meant for little more than surrendering to our enemies:
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a recent interview that his “foremost” mission as the head of America’s space exploration agency is to improve relations with the Muslim world. … “When I became the NASA administrator — or before I became the NASA administrator — he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering,” Bolden said in the interview.
First and foremost, Chuck, it’s not the role of the US Government, never mind NASA, to make people in other nations “feel good” about something their ancestors may or may not have done the better part of a millenium ago. Second, if you want to inspire the kiddies… wiping out manned spaceflight is not the way to do it.
He said the United States is not going to travel beyond low-Earth orbit on its own
Grrrrrrrrrraaaaaauuuuck.
I cannot express just how much this Royally Pisses Me Off.
The United States travelled beyond low Earth orbit on its own forty fricken’ years ago. it is perfectly capable of doing so again. But *not* when it’s being run by incompetant jackasses like Bolden and whatever MORON installed him in that position. Telling Americans that we are incapable of doing what our ancestors did, and begging for help from those who would see us destroyed, is not the job of the NASA administrator.
The NASA administrator should be out there beating the drums for American exceptionalism. Telling us not that our time is over, but that the future is limitless, and that we should be grabbing for it.
Jul 052010
The last one was blessedly straightforward. The one before that was something of a nightmare. THIS one looks ready to put them all to shame with respect to complexity and hair-pulling.
Go on, guess what this is. I dare ya.
UPDATE: Help any?
Update (y’all ain’t even close yet):
UPDATE: Y’all are off by a metric mile so far…
UPDATE:
UPDATE: IMO, progressing to *awesome*
UPDATE: Almost done with the basic shape.
UPDATE: Basic hull is done. Has been done for a while, actually. But when it came time to join all the little panels into one contiguous sheet…. there were annoying, virtually microscopic mismatches between edges that caused considerable headache. But nevertheless, it got hammered into shape. Now I get to start working on the engines & stuff. Goodie.
UPDATE: AAAARRRRGH
This looks little different from the previous update. However, there is an important difference: instead of an infinitely thin “sheet,” the fuselage is now a solid of roughly consistent wall thickness. This is NOT something that Rhino does automatically, or even well… it was a full day of fighting and brute-forcing the thing into shape.
UPDATE: heh.
Now with forward engine modules.
UPDATE: Now with ducts.
UPDATE:
Jul 052010
A page of illustrations showing the engine operation for vertical thrust for the V-460, compared to several contemporary Chance-Vought designs with wholly different propulsion systems. Note that the V-460 used the most complex system of the bunch, including not only vectoring the thrust from the cold-gas fans, but also using ejector effect to increase thrust from the hot-gas turbojet exhaust. In the 1960’s, the ejector effect was considered very promising, with both the Lockheed “Hummingbird” and the later North American Rockwell XFV-12 built to take advantage of that. But both designs showed the serious limitatiosn of the ejector effect to produce added thrust… while it worked great in subscale models, once scaled up to full size the losses in the system were so bad that it tended to reduce total thrust, not increase it.
Jul 042010
So, what do we know about the state of immigration law today? On the one hand, we have millions (somewhere between 11 and 30 million) of people who came here illegally and are draining the economy dry. So what is the Presidents response to this?
if the majority of Americans are skeptical of a blanket amnesty, they are also skeptical that it is possible to round up and deport 11 million people. They know it’s not possible. Such an effort would be logistically impossible and wildly expensive. Moreover, it would tear at the very fabric of this nation -– because immigrants who are here illegally are now intricately woven into that fabric.
OK, so deporting *criminals* is apparently a bad idea. How about *legal* immigrants, here workign within the system and running a successful, popular business? Oh, hell yeah, lets deport THEM!
Established Maine couple kicked out of US
A York county couple, originally from England, is about to be kicked out of the country.
For a decade, Dean and Laura frank built up “Laura’s Kitchen,” a small, but popular local restaurant in Wells, now shuttered and for sale.
That’s because the “E-2” visa they’d legally had for years — twice renewed with no problem– was suddenly denied last year.
The reason — an immigration case worker in California reviewing their numbers declared their business “marginal,” not profitable enough, even though they made enough to run the business, live virtually debt free and employ local people part-time.
Ye gods. How’s about we deport the illegals *and* the bureaucrats? We could use immigrants who want to come here and run good businesses. We have much less need of the millions of illegals who are doign jobs that would be better done by high school dropouts and criminals.