August 2010 – Page 4 – The Unwanted Blog

Now available for download is a large-format layout drawing of the McDonnell F-101. Drawing 20-00001, dated 3-24-52. Two versions of the drawing are included… the original drawing as-scanned, which includes some pencil sketches (source unknown) showing different inlets and aft fuselage contours, and a “cleaned” version with the sketches, specks and other imperfections removed. Both versions of the drawing come in three sizes: 29,485 pixels wide, a halfsize version and a quartersize version.

Air Drawing 49 can be downloaded for $5.50.

Now available: three brochures circa 1968 describing three Sikorsky helicopters:

1) S-65 Compound, a concept design for a large passenger helicopter equipped withwings and turboprops for high speed

2) SH-3D: Describes a number of roles for this amphibious military chopper

3) S-61N: Describes commercial passenger services for the civilian version of the SH-3

Air Doc 18 can be downloaded for $3.50.

A slightly later, slightly less colorful illustration of the VAB than This One.

A bit more newspaper-friendly, though, I suppose.

From NASA-KSC, via Dennis R. Jenkins.

As might be expected, one thing that grates on me is when aerospace data, experience and history vanishes. This happens entirely too often… mostly in the form of documentation being fed into shredders, incinerators or landfill. But it also happens with events. Events that should have been documented, but appear not to have been. One such event was the 4th Conference on Planetology and Space Mission Planning.

The first three of these conferences were held in the late 60’s/early 70’s, and are documented in densely packed proceedings published by the New York Academy of Science. The 4th Conference was different. Instead of being held in a hotel or a conference center, the 4th Conference was held on the Holland America cruise ship S.S. Statendam. The cruise was from December 4 through 13, 1972, left from New York, and lurked seven miles off the coast of Cape Canaveral… where the lucky passengers got to watch the launch of Apollo 17.

The list of presenters/speakers at the conference is fairly spectacular. I’ve got a list of who was supposed to speak on what topic… and nothing else. Unlike the first three Conferences, no proceedings seems to have been published. According to one source, a book was put together… but never released. There was some sort of problem between the Conference organizers and the cruise line, but exactly what, and what happened with the proceedings, I’ve not yet been able to determine. The closest I’ve come to a possible hypothesis: as a financial enterprise, the conference was apparently a disaster of epic proportions. From Time magazine, December 25, 1972:

The problem: only about 40 people bought the premium tickets; the remainder were various “guests,” including travel agents, some Philadelphia clothing-store executives and 15 fashion editors. Estimated loss on the great idea: $250,000.

According to the book Katherine Anne Porter: the life of an artist by Darlene Harbour Unrue (found in fragments on Google Books), only 100 people in total paid for the cruise, and those 40 “premium tickets” were the tickets to the conference itself. It seems that staggeringly few people wanted to pay the $400 for the conference on top of the $400-$900 for the cruise itself.

I don’t know who ate those losses. I expect that there were probably lawsuits… there’s always a lawsuit when a business venture tanks. Lawsuits might have interfered with any planned Proceedings. Or the financial disaster might have drained whatever budget there may have been for such a thing. Additionally, the brochure advertising the cruise listed as speakers Arthur C. Clarke and Werner von Braun, both of whom failed to appear (cause unknown to me).

Here’s what I know about the conference, how it was broken down into seminars and who was to speak on what (and, yes, I’ll probably make some spelling errors). I got this years ago from one of the presenters; I have been unable to determine if the pages these lists came from were just a brochure themselves, or part of the full Proceedings. Note that while the first three Conferences were pretty dry, technical stuff, the bulk of these presentations seem to have been highly steeped in the philosophical:

CORNUCOPIA OF SPACE (1st seminar 6th December)

Bruce Hunt: Co-Chairman

Donald Banks: Co-Chairman

Isaac Asimov: What is a Cornucopia

Norman Mailer: Is there a Cornucopia out there?

Pandora Duncan: Planetary rover designs

Robert D Enzmann: Out of the Cornucopia

Richard Hoagland: The Space Shuttle

Ben Bova: Expanding the Cornucopia

Berguet Roberts: Last Lunar Flight Dreams

ECOLOGICAL NICHES

Krafft Ehricke: Co-Chairman Extraterrestrial Industries

Kenneth Franklin: Co-Chairman

Eric Burgess: Emerging Conscience of Man

Roger Caras: Earth the Teacher, Lessons learned from out 1st planet

Isaac Asimov: A heirarchy of niches from comets to Earthlike planets

Neil Ruzic: Development of the moon as a niche

Richard Sternbach: Experiment that failed

Don Davis: Paintings: Clones

PROPULSION INTELLIGENT MACHINES AND SOCIO-GENETIC CHANGE

Roger Caras: Co-chairman

Harry Stine: Co-chairman The Third industrial Revolution

Robert Heinlein: Genetic fitness, Social fitness, training & technology and communications
Marvin Minsky: Artificial intelligence

Sarah Meltzoff: Universals, Cultural viability, economic specialization

Janet Jepperson: Psychological barriers to full realization

Linda Sagan: Comment: Ultimate Machines

Krafft Ehricke: Comment: Ultimate Machines

ENERGY AND PROPULSION

Donald Banks: Co-Chairman Energy

Ben Bova: Co-Chairman

Werner Rambauske: Observation of the Universe

Brude hunt: Propulsion

Robin Anderson: Plowshare: Big guns for the benefit of the people

Fred Pohl: The shape of shadows from the future

Carl Sagan: Interstellar probes and Pioneer 10

Neil Ruzic: Human acquisition of Moon and its effects on war and peace

THE GRAND DESIGN

Gillet Griffin: Co-chairman

Eric Burgess: of Mankind but no longer Men

Cassandra Boell: Space states and the howling of beasts

Harry Stine: Comment: Ultimate Machine

Robert D. Enzmann: Statement of grand design, & galactic fertile crescent

Robert Heinlein: The grand design

Theodore Sturgeon: Communications, The Cold Equations, and the grand design

Fred Pohl: Star flight and relativistic twins “lost in space”

Fred Ordway: Use of satellite systems for education

Marvin Minsky: Artificial intelligence and the grand design, have we nurtured “The Descent of Machines?”

Richard Sternbach: Paintings: Mankinds’ grand design

SCIENCE, ART, COMMUNICATION, AND COSMOLOGY

Neil Ruzic: Co-chairman

Eric Burgess: Co-chairman

Donald Burgy: Order theory: an art exhibit in the clipper room

Gillett Griffin: Migrations of men and their art

Isaac Asimov: stellar types and organic evolution

Robert D Enzmann: Force= dp/dt (F=/ma) and e=hv(1-d/D) That is an intellectual revolution

Ben Bova: galaxies and quasars

Norman Mailer: Revolutionaries of science and technology

Donald Davis: Paintings: Cupules and stick charts

POST SYMPOSIUM COLLOQUIUM

REVOLUTIONARY

POST SYMPOSIUM

COLLOQUIUM

GRAND DESIGN

AND

PHYSICS

—————

Now, a lot of the topics… I don’t even know what they hell they’re talking about. Presumably the “Grand Design” was some agreed-upon concept prior to the conference, but I’ve no idea what it is other than a hundh it was something about interstellar colonization.

There were a great many events in history that I’d like to have a time machine and a video camera for (along with body armor, adequate weaponry and a complete series of vacinations). This is one of those. Not so much because we can look back on this event as one of those “and this is when it all began” moments… because it’s not. It seems to have quite effectively vanished down the memory hole, with little to no historical impact (although some references I found online suggest that this gathering was the start of the modern pro-space movement). No, I want to go back and record this… just to find out what the hell actually happened.

If you happen to know one of the speakers listed here, I’d certainly be interested in anything they have to say on this topic. I’d be thrilled if they say somethign like “Yeah, I got a copy of the Proceedings, let me dig it up.”

I’m looking for a copy of this magazine. In good shape, not bound. Actually… I’m looking for some good *scans* from this particular issue. So if you have a copy of this magazine in good shape (with the article “Journey to the Stars” complete) and would be willing to scan, rent, sell or loan the issue, please let me know.

Now that an amateur with some spare change and the willingness to spend time and money can produce better astronomical observations than most professional astronomers of only a few years ago, it seems like people are seeing Jupiter get whacked by asteroids and comets on a monthly basis. An amateur in Japan just caught an impact flash, posted it to Youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/user/planetsocblog#p/a/u/0/jIkr86xKcwQ

http://www.universetoday.com/71835/jupiter-gets-smacked-yet-again/

While it’s true that Jupiter is big and massive, it still seems that it’s gettign hit a lot.

Now being discussed with Fantastic Plastic is a scale model of the 2001 Space Station V. How big to make it is the main question. Several SSV models seem to be in works, but they seem to be LARGE (30 or more inches diameter) and thus expensive. The goal here is something affordable and in the 7 to 10 inch diameter range, to be determined in part by being of a recognizable scale. But the question is… just how big was SSV?

Many long years ago, I had the hare-brained notion that what the world needed was a 1/288 scale model of the SSV. So I worked out its dimensions, based in part on size comparisons with the Orion III spaceplane. I went with the assumption that Aurora got their model right when they said it was 1/144 scale. That makes the spaceplane 165 feet long, and based on some kinda handwavy comparisons with screencaptures, I figured the station was 1200 feet in diameter. Stargazer models, however, cranked out their own new, high-quality 1/144 Orion III about that time, and showed reasonably convincingly that the Orion was larger than 165… Stargazer settled on 213 feet long. This would jack up my estimate of the SSV diameter to 1550 feet. But Stargazer estimated a diameter at over 1800 feet.

Since there are no clear scale references in the movie or in any of the official dosumentation that has come to light, it can be argued that any diameter that’s not outright stupid is as good as any other. However, I’d prefer to get it as close to right as I can… both for reasons of professional pride, and to minimize the fanboy attacks if I get it wrong.

So… 1550 feet? 1800 feet? Something else?

Now that I’ve got my files back, I pulled up a few things to do some fact-checks. One of the first up was the report dealing with the Apollo/Titan IIIK that I mentioned HERE.

Here’s a hint, kids: work from memory as little as possible. The report clearly refers to it as a Titan IIIM, not Titan IIIK. I can find no reference to the “K” designation. I don’t know where that came from. Brain fart at best. Possibly a typo.

This sort of error is embarassing, but I’d rather own up to screwing up than contribute to the bullcrapification of aerospace history. There’s entirely too damned much of that as it is.

A few years ago, I heard a snippet of music somewhere and it drove me buggo… I could recall hearing it years before, but couldn’t quite recall the context. It was right on the tip of my brain, shall we say. When, some time later, I found this commercial on Youtube, it was like a giant weight wasn’t just lifted from my brain, but leaped off of it.

Imagine my horror in noting that this commerical is more than a quarter century old.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqhUuH43LNM

And for those of you reading along who are too young ro remember this, perhaps not even having been born yet, a few things:

1) Shut up. Just shut the hell up, and git off ma lawn.

2) No, it didn’t make any more damned sense then than it does now. It was, I think, meant to be eye candy that caused you to turn to whoever was nearby and ask “Just what the hell was that about?” The result being that while the commercial didn’t make you want to buy any Chanel No. 5, the increased yappage about the commercial just might make you go buy some of that liquid stinkpretty anyway.

A rather nifty piece of artwork depicting the title, on the date. This was of course long before the era of computer rendered art; all this was done by hand.

Note that the work shown being done is being done at night.