This should go over well:
You know those federal civil rights violation charges that many were hoping for against the cop who shot Gentle Strong Arm Robber Giant Michael brown? Yeah… apparently that’s not gonna happen.
Now available: US Spacecraft Projects #02, the “Spaceplane Special.” This is done in the same style as the other US Aerospace Projects publications, but this issue is focused specifically on lifting spacecraft… and is more than twice as long as usual with more data and more diagrams.
USSP #02 includes:
USSP #02 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $6:
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It’s in some weird moon-man language, but even so it’s a fairly interesting look at the less successful of the two SSTs put into service.
Something struck me right off the bat. The film starts with footage from the Paris air show of 1973. There are various snippets of film… snippets that caused a moment of cognitive dissonance. Today, a supersonic transport would be a fantastical vision of the distressingly distant future… but the films were of incredibly low quality, scratched, dusty, black-and-white, grainy, clearly shot with crappy hand-held econo-model film cameras. Technology now safely in the distant past.
Think of it: the era of supersonic transports -a technology that we can only dream wistfully of today – began in BLACK AND WHITE.
Remember, these are the jackholes who want to drag Israel before the International Criminal Court…
“The stabbing operation against Zionists in Tel Aviv is a heroic and daring act. This is a natural reaction to the occupation’s crimes and its terrorism against our people,” Izzat al Risheq, an official at Hamas’s political bureau, wrote on his Facebook page.
Who were these Zionists who deserved to be stabbed to death? Random civilians on a bus. And at least one woman *not* on the bus, who was caught on video being stabbed in the back.
Nature is just, just horrible:
The photos are some dandy nightmare fuel.
Illustrations of a Martin concept from 1961 called “DEIMOS” (Development and Investigation of a Military Orbital System). Pitched to the Air Force, this entailed a modified Titan II launch vehicle, a standard cargo hauler and a scaled-up two-man Mercury capsule (this was before Gemini was finalized). The result was something akin to a smaller version of the later MOL (Manned Orbiting Laboratory). The Titan II described here (modifications unknown) could put a 10,000 pound payload into a 300 nautical mile orbit.
Capabilities and roles of DEIMOS were not provided, but it would presumably serve much the same role as MOL, though simpler and lighter weight: basic science as well as reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. The claim as of August 1961 was that if work began soon DEIMOS could begin flying in 1963.
Birmingham airport in Engleland seems to have had a spot of wind recently…
Now THERE are some damn ugly landings. Not helped by the waviest runway I can recall seeing this side of the ocean surface.
You had to know that eventually someone who rejected modern western medical science in favor of supernatural woo would actually succeed. Well, rejoice!
The Dawn spacecraft is approaching Ceres, and for the first time we’re starting to get images of the “dwarf planet” that begin to show it as a distinct world. It is really quite round, and appears to have some unusual features.
An hours worth of images taken on January 13 from a distance of 238,000 miles… roughly the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Dawn won’t go into orbit around Ceres until March 6. The rather creakingly slow approach is due to Dawns low-thrust ion engines.
More info HERE.
Project Blue Book was the US Air Force project to study UFO reports and try to make sense of them and determine if there was any sort of threat to the security of the US. In 1969 the project wrapped up with a “nope” and a shrug, but nevertheless kept a whole bunch of stuff classified. A lot of researchers have been driven to distraction by the classified status of the documentation and have spent years making FOIA requests. The National Archives has made a whole lot of these documents available on microfilm, but one feller went ahead and scanned them and has made them available as 130,000 pages of searchable PDFs.
The files are supposedly available on the website “The Black Vault,” but right now all I’m getting is a “this page cannot be loaded” message. I’d bet good money that the site simply got swamped with an exceedingly large number of people who want to download the docs. Or, you know, reptillian overlords. Whichever.