Space.com has a number of photos showing the Dragon capsule docked to the ISS.
and
Looks quite roomy for a capsule.
On the drive home Tuesday, I encountered a high temperature of 97 degrees. On Wednesday… snow.
Tuesday night I bunked down in Laramie, Wyoming for the night, and got up at 4:30 AM in order to be in Medicine Bow National Forest near sunrise. Sadly, the sun never rose: it was not only completely overcast, it was snowing. The photos I wanted to get – new versions of shots made in 2008 with a point-and-click – were impossible since the mountains were completely shrouded. Bleah.
Only photo worth anything is this:
Some years ago, Pegasus Hobbies released a great big 1/18 scale model kit of the Bell X-1. Always wanted one, but never bought until a few days back when I came across one for cheap. On the box, the “Glamorous Glennis” markings in the photos of the model were blotted out with a black marker. In the box, the GG references and the references to _huck _eager were blotted out of the instruction sheet. The GG decal was actually cut off the decal sheet.
Why? Well, it seems Pegasus Hobbies got a Cease and Desist order from Yeager’s people. Somehow he’s got his name and the GG name copyrighted. Even though the GG is a world-famous taxpayer-funded historically important and widely publicized vehicle – exactly the sort of thing that you’d imagine was “public domain,” it’s apparently not… or at least it’s not worth the bother of fighting.
Sad.
Good thing I never planned to build it in the GG configuration. Maybe an X-1D or E. Or even a swept-wing, V-tail proposed configuration… or even the S-1 “tactical” plane.
Some time back I came into possession of a control yoke from an F-102 Delta Dagger. It’s an interesting thing… I’ve never seen another control stick quite like it. It’s two handed; the left-hand stick can be unlocked, and used to slew the radar dish around. It looks like something that should have been used on a Colonial Viper or similar sci-fi spacecraft.
It seemed to me that there might be a market for replicas at several levels of detail. The simplest would be a basic “kit” of cast urethane resin, featuring the main stick including the right-hand control, the left-hand stick, the connecting “joint,” a few separate toggles and decals; next would be a finished & painted & decaled display piece based on the kit; next would be a kit with all the bells and whistles; and last would be a finished version of that kit. The basic kit I would guesstimate at $75 or so; the finished detailed piece at something like $350 or so.
Any interest?
Anybody know any Hollywood prop houses working sci-fi flicks who’d be interested is getting a bulk purchase???
An updated graphic has been posted… along with Earth stripped of its water, with the water rolled up into a ball, this one shows Europa with its water rolled up into a ball.
Europa, it seems, has 2 to 3 times the volume of water that Earth has.
One obvious suggestion for sci-fi: assume technology 300 years down the line… and “the line” is a nicely progressive one (based on the growth of technology that engineers and scientists can probably produce, so long as the profit motive was retained and regulators and eco-freaks were fed into phaser-based woodchippers). By that time, mankind should be practically godlike in power; moving Europa to Venus should be readily achievable. Scrape the crappy atmosphere off Venus, leave some oxygen and nitrogen, and then pour a good fraction of Europas ocean onto the surface of Venus. Take the vast amount of carbon dioxide you sucked off Venus and separate it out into oxygen and carbon; dump the carbon onto Europa, increasing its mass and volume, and use the oxygen to give it an atmosphere. Dump the excess oxygen onto the Moon and Mars to terraform them as well.
Take the sulfur from the sulfuric acid clouds you’ve removed from Venus, and use it to form a ring around Venus. Because that would be awesome.
While I was traveling, I found in an art store a pack of 8X10 photo-sensitive cyanotype “blueprint” sheets. They are being sold as something you can put flowers, knick-knacks and photos on, leave in the sun, wash off with water and then you have a permanent “sun print.” “Meh” on the fru-fru artsy aspects, but it seems that this would be a way to make *actual* blueprints. So I looked online for larger sheets, and found (IIRC) up to 20X30 sheets… for ridiculously expensive. Feh.
But I also found quite a number of youtube videos of artsy types making their own blueprint paper by adding various chemicals to various types of paper. The chemicals can be had fairly straightforwardly, as can the paper; the only challenge at that point is proper preparation… and that I can handle.
It occurs to me that I have quite a large number of large format drawings that could be converted into *real* cyanotype blueprints… white lines on a blue background. The process would be to clean up the drawings as far as possible, and make sure that they are clean black lines on a white background… much like the original hand-drafted ink-on-vellum drawings. These digital files would then be printed out full size on something mostly transparent, or at least translucent, maybe mylar. This print would then be laid over the blueprint paper, covered with a sheet of plexi to make sure it’s all flat and immovable, placed in the Utah sun for a specified time, brought in, washed off, dried off, and then done. It would be labor intensive and would require quite a bit of setup… but once finished, it would be a REAL BLUEPRINT.
The B-29 diagram I sell would be good for this. I have a high-rez Dyna Soar blueprint (so far unreleased in any form) that would be perfect for this. Heck, the Space Station V 2D CAD drawings might be turned into a damned convincing set of blueprints.
Previous efforts to sell printed blueprints – admittedly digital prints, using ink – were miserable failures. Cyanotype blueprints might be more interesting… or less. But they’d be much more difficult and expensive to get set up, and consequently probably more expensive to sell. I can buy the 8X10 sheets for something along the lines of a buck a piece; I’m thinking of using the pack I have for basic experiments… and using both old General Atomic Project Orion diagrams and my own Orion CAD diagrams as the test articles.
Is this concept of interest to anyone? Apart from the fact that the blueprints are new, and the paper may well be noticably different, these might very well easily pass as actual blueprints, made Back In The Day. Fold ’em up and leave ’em in the sun, and they’d fade in an entirely “proper” way.
Let me know.
An astronaut dies on a mission, it’s big news. Engineers or technicians die in a testing accident, it’s lesser news, but still sizable news. And then…
Virtually data-free article. No cause of death given or suggested… maybe it was chemical fumes, maybe a heart attack.
As may have been apparent, I’ve been traveling the last three weeks. Had Raedthinn and Fingers with me; Buttons and Fluffy were boarded at the vet. Before I left, Fluffy had a bladder infection, and had been peeing all over the place (trust me, that sucked). He got treatment while boarded, and the infection was all cleared up. Now that I’m home, I brought Buttons and Fluffy home from the vet. Fluffy… immediately began peeing everywhere but the litter box. Worse, he decided to start a *real* fight with Raedthinn.
The peeing: bad. The fighting: unacceptable.
Four cats is about three too many, from a purely practical standpoint. But the first three have earned a place here through good behavior. But Fluffy is rapidly burning through his welcome. I cannot have him fighting with Raedthinn. At this time, the options that come to me are:
1) Keep him perpetually in the basement.
2) Something else.
I’m open to suggestions. Note: killing the little bugger is off the table.
