A further expansion of the concept would strap two boosters to the sides of a core. This would reduce to two the number of launches required for this large lunar mission.

For indoor cats, few opponents are more frustratingly wile than the Evil Green Dot or the Evil Red Dot. You pounce on it… and it somehow slips out of your paws, without your even feeling it. And then it shoots up a wall, and wanders around the ceiling…

A paragraph or so from Czysz/Bruno’s “Future Spacecraft Propulsion Systems,” where they discuss a little problem in aerospace: over the last generation or two, as our ability to collect and analyze data has increased, out actual physical progress has stalled or even slipped backwards.

I’ve been involved with the whole spectrum of aerospace… from two guys testing rocket components out of the back of a truck in a mostly-empty parking lot, to major aerospace contractors working on NASA manned vehicles. And I gotta tell ya… there was much more progress – certainly much more forward momentum – at the small end. Why? Because we *didn’t* have all the analysis hardware and software. If we wanted to know how hot something would get, we had to actually put it in the fire. In doing so, you often learned things that you would *never* learn by simulation.

At the end of a simulation run, all you’ve done is shift some electrons around, perhaps consumed a whole lot of processed tree slices, and increased the entropy of the universe. At the end of a test run, you’ve actually *built* something. If it works, you are *far* ahead of the simulator. If it didn’t… you are very likely *still* far ahead of the simulator, if you have the wit and grit to understand what went wrong and to correct it and try again.

From the Deutsches Museum, a 1933 illustration by Rudolf Nebel illustrating trajectories, distances and flight times for “Rocket Torpedoes.” Presumably this is for civilian rocket transport rather than military payloads, given destinations such as Rome, Zurich and Wein. But within a few short years, this sort of chart would take on a whole new meaning.

After going to no small effort to save the life of a miserable, abused and wrecked cat that I didn’t know and had no responsibility for, I am a little sensitive to the notion of people who go a different direction on such matters. For, example, this:

4 “TUNISIAN” MEN SKIN AND BEHEAD A CAT & BRAG ABOUT IT ON THE INTERNET(SWEDEN)

Note: Disturbing photos at the link.

The four Swedish citizens responsible for this have been tentatively identified as Hamza Tchaki, Youssef Ben Ali, Kuorbam Uomama, Firas Mani.

Yeah. One wonders if there might be some common link between these guys.

It looks as if there were at least two cats that these “gentlemen” tortured and beheaded.

There’s much more that I’d like to say, but somehow I don’t think that most of it would be terribly productive.

In 1993 Boeing designed a modular heavy lift launch vehicle for a range of space launch missions. The core vehicle was based on Shuttle External Tank components, with a multitude of SSME’s at the rear (in two recoverable pods). Shown here are some basic launchers built from these components, being used to launch parts for a lunar mission into Earth orbit. The Shuttle is shown with the solid rocket boosters replaced with the new core vehicles.

A nice website, with some good art (the best kind of art: orthographic views of spacecraft).

historicspacecraft.com

From David Akin. They’ve been around a good long while, most have probably seen them… but they are worth being reminded of from time to time. The canonical list is HERE.

1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.

2. To design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort. This is why it’s a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong .

3. Design is an iterative process. The necessary number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time.

4. Your best design efforts will inevitably wind up being useless in the final design. Learn to live with the disappointment.

5. (Miller’s Law) Three points determine a curve.

6. (Mar’s Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

7. At the start of any design effort, the person who most wants to be team leader is least likely to be capable of it.

8. In nature, the optimum is almost always in the middle somewhere. Distrust assertions that the optimum is at an extreme point.

9. Not having all the information you need is never a satisfactory excuse for not starting the analysis.

10. When in doubt, estimate. In an emergency, guess. But be sure to go back and clean up the mess when the real numbers come along.

11. Sometimes, the fastest way to get to the end is to throw everything out and start over.

12. There is never a single right solution. There are always multiple wrong ones, though.

13. Design is based on requirements. There’s no justification for designing something one bit “better” than the requirements dictate.

14. (Edison’s Law) “Better” is the enemy of “good”.

15. (Shea’s Law) The ability to improve a design occurs primarily at the interfaces. This is also the prime location for screwing it up.

16. The previous people who did a similar analysis did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis over yours. There is especially no reason to present their analysis as yours.

17. The fact that an analysis appears in print has no relationship to the likelihood of its being correct.

18. Past experience is excellent for providing a reality check. Too much reality can doom an otherwise worthwhile design, though.

19. The odds are greatly against you being immensely smarter than everyone else in the field. If your analysis says your terminal velocity is twice the speed of light, you may have invented warp drive, but the chances are a lot better that you’ve screwed up.

20. A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.

21. (Larrabee’s Law) Half of everything you hear in a classroom is crap. Education is figuring out which half is which.

22. When in doubt, document. (Documentation requirements will reach a maximum shortly after the termination of a program.)

23. The schedule you develop will seem like a complete work of fiction up until the time your customer fires you for not meeting it.

24. It’s called a “Work Breakdown Structure” because the Work remaining will grow until you have a Breakdown, unless you enforce some Structure on it.

25. (Bowden’s Law) Following a testing failure, it’s always possible to refine the analysis to show that you really had negative margins all along.

26. (Montemerlo’s Law) Don’t do nuthin’ dumb.

27. (Varsi’s Law) Schedules only move in one direction.

28. (Ranger’s Law) There ain’t no such thing as a free launch.

29. (von Tiesenhausen’s Law of Program Management) To get an accurate estimate of final program requirements, multiply the initial time estimates by pi, and slide the decimal point on the cost estimates one place to the right.

30. (von Tiesenhausen’s Law of Engineering Design) If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist’s concept.

31. (Mo’s Law of Evolutionary Development) You can’t get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.

32. (Atkin’s Law of Demonstrations) When the hardware is working perfectly, the really important visitors don’t show up.

33. (Patton’s Law of Program Planning) A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.

34. (Roosevelt’s Law of Task Planning) Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.

35. (de Saint-Exupery’s Law of Design) A designer knows that he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

36. Any run-of-the-mill engineer can design something which is elegant. A good engineer designs systems to be efficient. A great engineer designs them to be effective.

37. (Henshaw’s Law) One key to success in a mission is establishing clear lines of blame.

38. Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say.

39. The three keys to keeping a new manned space program affordable and on schedule:
1)  No new launch vehicles.
2)  No new launch vehicles.
3)  Whatever you do, don’t decide to develop any new launch vehicles.

40. Space is a completely unforgiving environment. If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies (and there’s no partial credit because most of the analysis was right…)

A photo from the Los Alamos National Lab webpage of the fireball from the Greenhouse-George nuclear test, May 9, 1951. This was the first fusion “boosted” bomb, with a small increase in yield due to deuterium & tritium fusion, but a large increase in yield due to fast neutrons from the fusion reaction boosting the efficiency of the fissioning process. The yield was an impressive 225 kilotons… less than half of yesterdays meteor explosion.

The test was in broad daylight, but the brightness of the fireball at this stage far exceeded sunlight, and makes it look like a night test.