Interesting:
It seems they’re gearing up a manufacturing facility in Mojave to build the large twin-fuselage carrier aircraft, with a planned first test flight in 2016. Photos of display models of the carrier aircraft and the orbital vehicle at the link.
I’ve put a few sets of 11X17 diagrams on eBay:
I don’t really know if these’ll do at all well on eBay, but what the heck. I’m hoping they might serve as a bit of advertising, though. The Archangel set is very likely a one-off, a result of the printer actually spitting out two copies rather than one.
For those of you who were generous a good long while ago and have been wondering “what the hell?!?!” the technology and techniques I’ve been developing and requiring recently will prove relevant.
NPR ran an interesting hour-long piece on the Vietnam veterans memorial wall in D.C. today. If you have an hour and the interest, I recommend giving it a listen (click on the “Stream” button in upper left; keep a hanky or a box of tissues at hand).
The Wall is in the news again, thanks to Obama’s government shutdown. In order to ‘save money,” the government has ordered the Wall closed to visitors and is spending money to pay police to evict people who walk up to the Wall, which is on open public ground. This is not only stupid, it’s insultingly stupid and a transparently obvious ham-handed political stunt. The claims being made about the National Park Service closing down facilities that normally require little to no actual staff is that without staff on hand, visitors could get injured and need rescue that won’t come, or vandals could sneak in and damage things. Both of these arguments are silly in this case. In the case of the first argument, the Wall is located in an open, public place… not a difficult place for an ambulance to get to. And the second argument, that vandals could cause a ruckus… well, if you’ve ever been to The Wall, you know that the Wall has a security system in place far more effective than a few dozen Park Rangers or random police: the veterans themselves. Anyone who pulls out a hammer or a can of spray paint is going to very quickly find himself the subject of intense… ah, “scrutiny,’ shall we say, from a number of guys like these:
A few anecdotes:
In May of 1996, I was packing up to leave the D.C. area. My first real job after graduating with my Aero E degree was at OSC in Virginia; the job lasted all of a month, because the X-34 I got hired to work on got cancelled the week after I got there. My dad came out to help me pack and move to my next job in Colorado. We went to supper at a restaurant in Arlington and noticed a large number of bikers… bikers with Vietnam veteran regalia. Came to find out that the next day was “Rolling Thunder,” when hundreds of thousands of bikers would roll into D.C. to pay respects at the Wall. The original plan had been to leave that day; we put it off one more day in order to see the procession. We went to the Mall early in the morning, several hours before the bikers were to arrive, and made our way to the Wall. If you’ve ever been there you know that approaching it is unlike approaching pretty much anywhere else on Earth… a level of solemnity not readily found. While my dad looked up his friends on the Wall, among a number of other veterans and family members, a group of tourists approached. These tourists, clearly Asian (Japanese? Vietnamese? Korean? Don’t know, doesn’t matter), were unaffected by the force field of sadness that surrounds the Wall, and were joking and laughing and have a good old time. Anywhere else… nobody would care. At the Wall… that was the wrong reaction. A wave of shock and anger passed among those of us close to the Wall. But the problem came to an *extremely* sudden close. I turned around at the sudden silence and found that this group of a half dozen or so college-age happy tourists were instantly silent and solemn… and surrounded by several times their number of very large, very angry, and very silent Hell’s Angels-looking fellers. There were no raised voices, no threats, no acts of violence, not even the expenditure of a single taxpayer dime, and yet a potential issue at the wall was dealt with quickly and efficiently by those who were there.
A few years later, while living and working in Colorado, a good friend and I were having lunch at a pizza joint in Golden. The TV was on over his shoulder; something on screen caught my attention, and the look of shock on my face caught my friends attention. We instantly shouted for the volume to be turned up. What was going on? In Denver there is a really good military aviation museum, “Wings Over The Rockies.” Sitting outside is a B-52. And what the TV was showing was the cockpit of the B-52 a roaring mass of flames. The volume came up in time for us to hear that some jackass had decided to toss Molotov Cocktails into the cockpit in some form of delusional protest about… something. We were both instantly PO’ed, my friend rather more so since he’d served around B-52s during his time in the Jimmy Carter Peace-Time Fly-In Club (aka: the USAF in the late 1970’s).
But our rage turned very suddenly to laughter. The guy who torched the B-52 was shown sitting in a police squad car… beaten and bloody, apparently lacking a few teeth he’d started the day with. Was this due to Park Rangers or police being Johnnie On The Spot and laying a beatdown? No. His capture and apparent fall down a few flights of stairs was courtesy of a veteran who was simply visiting the museum at the time and who took a dim view of arson.
There are some places where a lack of Park Rangers could reasonably argue towards closing the gates. But the Wall? The WWII memorial? Please. These are examples of places that without government authorities still manage to self regulate. If someone has a heart attack at the Wall, there will be dozens to hundreds in the immediate vicinity who *will* render aid. If someone decides to engage in criminality, there are again dozens to hundreds who will leap in to make him stop, and they will do so much faster than any pre-shutdown collection of Park Rangers.
It might be interesting to know how the Wall is doing in a few decades. For Baby Boomers – the generation that served in Nam – the Wall is powerful. For many Gen Xers – the children of Nam vets, who grew up with the stories or the silence, who saw at first hand what the war did to the vets – the Wall is powerful. But how about following generations? The kids of the Gen Xers will only get occasional war stories from Grampa, or reminiscences about long-lost Grampa from Mom or Dad. The impact of the Wall will, probably, fade. Who gets weepy at Spanish American War monuments? Time fades the impact of such things. But perhaps the power of the Wall will last longer due to its unique nature. As mentioned in the NPR piece, it has changed the way people relate to memorials in the US. Before the Wall, people rarely left mementos. after the Wall, piles of photos and teddy bears and notes and such *are* the memorials.
Ever since Imperator Obama shut down the government, officially because there wasn’t enough money to keep all the functions running, the fedguv has been spending a *lot* of effort – and money – to annoy the hell out of people. For example: not only have they shut down Mount Rushmore’s facilities and blocked access to the park, they went out of their way to shut down scenic pulloffs on roads well away from the site to prevent people from getting a good if distant look at the monument:
More disturbingly, the fedguv has been shutting down *private* *property* as a way to expand the public annoyance:
And what’s more: not only are they shutting down private property, they are in some cases telling private property owners to spend their own money to buy the Barrycades needed to block public access.
If this was an *actual* shutdown (considering that the furloughed fedguv workers are going to get back pay, it’s clear the fedguv is not actually serious when it pleads poverty), the areas of the government being shut down would simply… shut down. Instead, we’re seeing governmental over-reach. One need not be a tinfoil hat wearing paranoid to wonder if, if this overreach is successful, this will be used as a stepping stone for even more once things get back to normal. Walmart, after all, is involved in interstate commerce, which is the purview of the fedguv; does this open up Walmart to being shut down at the whim of a imperial President? Hmm.
Just back from seeing the movie “Gravity.” Here is a small review, in two parts:
Part One: The Howlers
There are some serious science issues with this movie. For starters: the cause of the trouble in the movie is the Russians blasting one of their satellites with a ground-based interceptor. This is obviously the sort of thing that could cause serious trouble in low Earth orbit, but the movie stepped it up a notch by having the cloud of debris causing a chain reaction among other satellites, making *them* blow up, which makes *more* satellites blow up… in the end, the way it’s described a wave of shrapnel girdles the Earth and takes out pretty much the entirely of man-made space-based infrastructure in a matter of a few minutes. Ummm… no.
Second: Hubble is co-orbiting with the ISS, separated by a hundred kilometers or so. Ummm… no. And ISS is co-orbiting with the Chinese Tiangong space station, separated by a hundred kilometers or so. Ummm… no. You can get from one to another under the power of a backpack maneuvering unit. Ummm… no.
That said…
Part Two: Everything Else
Ho. Lee. Crrrraaaaaaaaap.
This movie earns the price of admission in the first ten minutes. The opening scene is just a view of Earth from orbit; outside of IMAX films shot from the Shuttle, you’ve never seen the like. From there you see the shuttle “Explorer” working on Hubble, With George Clooney doodlybobbing around the vehicle in a new, experimental maneuvering unit. Within short order, the SHTF, and the Explorer is struck. The Shuttle is trashed, the Hubble is trashed, and Our Heroes are pitched into the dark. This was all shot – as it should be – in virtual silence. Nowhere in the movie do the descend to the intellectual depths of adding impossible sounds to the vacuum of space. The scene on Explorer being destroyed is one of the most astonishing things I’ve seen on-screen, as nail-biting as the plane crashes in “The Edge” and “Flight.” There are no explosions, no fireballs, no smoke, no high-energy detonations. What there is a lot of, however, is a lot of debris. A lot of things that clearly have *mass.* Things that interact with each other, and have inertia (including rotational momentum).
And even while things are being torn apart, billion dollar machines are being converted into garbage and people are dying on-screen… it’s all just so beautiful.
The filmmakers spared no expense – or at least it looks that way – to depict realistic zero-gee. This includes several scenes within space stations, floating through modules filled with floating debris. A scene of Sandra Bullock in an airlock is particularly effective.
Water floating in space station modules. Zero-gravity *fire,* which might be the first serious depiction of on the big screen. Things that are tethered to each other whip around and snap back elastically, as would actually happen. A parachute is shown deployed in space (as result of taking impact damage); it is not a static thing, but flails around like a trapped jellyfish. Because, with no gravity and no air, there’s nothing to make it stop except the slow grind of friction.
Earth is ever-present, as you might expect. And unlike most movies, here Earth is not a big ball *painted* like Earth, but is instead an actual fully realized planet. The oceans are not a uniform shade of blue. The limb of the Earth has an atmospheric haze and a greenish glow at certain times; when orbiting over the night side of Earth, the aurora is clearly visible as are cities and other artificial lights.
Sandra Bullock’s character is the main one, and only one of three that you actually see alive (you hear a few others, including Ed Harris as the voice of Mission Control… a job he’s had before, and a barely-heard Greenland Inuk – which provides some truly heartbreaking moments). She does a fabulous job as a mission specialist just trying to survive. She’s not a Super Hero, nor is she a Useless Victim. She’s a Regular Joe caught up in horrible events, and she does a damned fine job of it.
In the end, the Orbital Mechanics Howlers mentioned at the beginning of the review don’t detract much from the staggering spectacle of the film. There is no sex, no drug use, no politics (apart, perhaps, from the plot element of the Russians blasting one of their satellites), only a little profanity, and no violence beyond the obvious.
Go see it. Go see it on a big screen. At some point in the nearish future I’m going to put the 250 miles on my car to go see it on an IMAX screen
Some time back I finally started putting my CAD diagrams into some sort of order. As well as cataloging them I’ve been reformatting them for 11X17, printing them off and putting them into a binder. I’m not quite done yet, but I’m already at over 230 pages.
Not quite as spectacular as last evenings mammatus clouds, tonights events included relatively small clouds pourings forth over limited areas, seen at a distance.
The world turned yellow just before sundown tonight. This was due to, presumably, dust in the air , with the resulting yellow-stained sunlight being reflected down from clouds. It was a rare and perfect alignment of mammatus clouds and sun right at sunset.
I’m trying to find a three view drawing of the Lockheed Martin X-55 Advanced Composite Cargo Aircraft. Since this plane has actually flown, I’d expect drawings to be available, but durned if I can find any. Does anyone have access to recent issues of “Janes All the Worlds Aircraft,” or know of a 3-view published in Flight or Av Week or something?
A couple different NASA CG animations depicting portions of a mission to capture and explore a tiny near Earth asteroid:
[youtube ejIXRFzXgsg]
[youtube jXvsi7DRyPI]