Supposedly one of the tail fins screwed up early on, preventing the scramjet powered vehicle from getting up to speed.
What with Ryan taking the VP nomination, Ayn Rand is back in the news. Here’s a 1967 interview on the Tonight Show where she describes her principles fairly clearly and succinctly, albeit with a supervillain accent.
[youtube ewMG1SdF4EI]
Perhaps as interesting as Ayn Rand is the way the interview is conducted: Carson asks her a question, she answers… and he lets her make her point. Imagine that *today.* I can’t see Piers Morgan or Soledad Obrien or Jon Stewart or Bill O’Riley or all the rest actually letting the guest speak for more than ten seconds without an interruption of loud bloviation.
The Convair B-58 Hustler grew out of a long series of design studies dating back to the years immediately following World War II. Early concepts called for small jet bombers carried aloft by B-36 or B-60 bombers, and would shed jet engine pods during the mission. These massively complex and expensive systems evolved over time to the somewhat more straightforward B-58 which was a single stage aircraft carrying an underslung pod containing both jet fuel and a single nuclear weapon. But even that was originally intended to be a rocket powered missile.
The B-58 evolved directly from the MX-1964 design from 1952. This is recognizably related to the B-58, but had the four jet engines in two pods rather than four, and a higher degree of integration between the pod and aircraft.
A coupla weeks ago, on a very very hot day at Golden Spike, the “Jupiter” and “119” fully-functional replicas:
Compared to Spaceship Two, Lynx is a dinky little guy, and should prove to be simpler to maintain and operate, meaning faster turnaround. And take this with a grain of salt, but XCOR is estimating first Lynx test flights this year and first paying flights in 2013.
The Lynx has another advantage over SS2 in that it is a single stage vehicle. But it’s interesting to contemplate how it might perform as a second stage… perhaps even carried to altitude by SS2’s White Knight. I suspect a good case could be made for a military mission using a C-130 or C-17 as a carrier aircraft. Haul the Lynx to the proper latitude, launch the Lynx either off the top or beneath a wing, and then capture the Lynx again at the end of the mission. While actually docking the gliding Lynx to the C-17 would be ridiculously challenging, unreeling a tow cable and having the Lynx connect to it probe-and-drogue refueling style might be practical.
1) APR V3N3: working on numerous CAD drawings of the XC-132 and related designs
2) NPP: re-designing the “Landing boat.” It’s amazing what people will sometimes post online without knowing just what it is that they have… in this case, three paintings of the landing boat, finally visible with adequate resolution.
3) Whispercraft model is just about done. Will be followed up by the Soviet LK lunar lander. Tremulis Zero Fighter may be sandwiched in there somewhere.
4) APR on MagCloud: after a few emails, it’s clear that substantially revising Volumes 1 and 2 *again* for release on MagCloud would not be worth the effort. So they will be reformatted to fit the MagCloud layout, some minor errors corrected, then released at some point. I’m considering producing a collection of CAD drawings to be released as an 11X17 formatted pDF, probably one collection per volume.
Hrrrmmph.
If you are trying to read or post comments and can’t, well, here’s why. Hopefully temporary.
Beer ain’t my thing, but I’ve got to admit that this is pretty clever.
[youtube mGCzfp869u8]
Perhaps not the one you expected:
Copenhagen Suborbitals LES/TDS Launch
Copenhagen Suborbitals private spaceflight company tested the Launch Escape System and its Tycho Deep Space capsule on August 12, 2012. The launch took place in the Baltic Sea.
It was very much in the style of an Apollo capsule launch abort test… except for the whole “spinning out of control and crashing headlong into the Baltic” bit. Some interesting photos at the link.
