Taken from a bit of a distance, this seems to show the vehicle leaning pretty substantially as it lands. Looks a lot like the first landing attempt. Balancing that pencil seems to be a bit of a challenge.
I wonder if a wider, shorter, *squatter* booster would have made sense. Shape it like the old Phoenix design, the ROMBUS, the Nexus. Then tipping over wouldn’t be nearly the concern, though drag would be much higher.
The wholly impractical robot TARS was the only truly interesting character in “Interstellar.” And now someone has gone and made a damned spiffy cosplay version of him:
I am often amazed at the level of craftsmanship that goes into some of these cosplay outfits. And while cosplay is currently still well outside the mainstream, it seems to be edging closer, as nerd culture gets more and more accepted and indeed popular. So I wonder how long it might be before people are wandering around society wearing at least some portions of cosplay-inspired fashion and accessories and whatnot. The giant ridiculous swords and hand cannons might be a bit much, of course…
Imagery from the approach phase, so this will get better in time:
So this afternoon I went out to get groceries. I stopped at a gas station on my way home, about 5 miles from home. After having heard a weather report, I checked the cars thermometer… 75 degrees. Nice warm day. Five miles later as I pulled in the driveway… 60 degrees. Within an hour… snow.
By tomorrow I expect nitrogen to rain out of the sky.
Launch was great, landing was great. *Sticking* the landing… well, not so great.
Looks like Falcon landed fine, but excess lateral velocity caused it to tip over post landing pic.twitter.com/eJWzN6KSJa
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 14, 2015
Well, I guess now the program will be put on hold, Congress will get involved, there’ll be years of hearings and political posturing before another attempt is made… oh, wait. No, this is a private effort. Never mind, they’ll fly again in a month.
Here’s the cool thing: Unless the barge was trashed (I have no data on that)… NOTHING WAS LOST. It was an entirely successful launch! Even though the first stage booster was destroyed on landing… it was gonna get lost *anyway* if they didn’t try to recover it. So…w ell, ok, maybe they lost the cost of the landing gear, but that’s not exactly a lot.
Were this a NASA vehicle, the *landing* would have been the metric by which the launch was measured. Like if a VentureStar went into orbit, delivered its payload to the ISS, re-entered, and then pancaked onto the runway when the landing gear failed to lock. And then the program would be terminated.
Vincent Burnelli was an aircraft designer who specialized in lifting-fuselage aircraft… instead of a cylindrical tube, his fuselages were fat unswept wing cross-sections. The thinking was that this would reduce drag and increase lift and make the vehicles more structurally sound in the event of a crash; while in some cases testing did show some occasional advantages, on the whole these designs did not provide much if any aerodynamic advantage; and once aircraft started flying high enough to require pressurization, the non-circular cross section made pressurization difficult to achieve cost effectively. Sadly, any advantages these designs may have had have been overshadowed by the largely unhinged conspiracy theories that have sprung up around why they haven’t been adopted.
One of the last of Burnellis designs (from about 1962) was the “GB-888,” a supersonic jetliner of unusual configuration. Artwork reproduced below seems to date from the 1980s; here the SST has been relabeled an “aerospaceplane.” The idea, apparently, was to ride the coattails of the X-30 National Aero Space Plane, which had a *vaguely* similar lifting fuselage configuration. As drawn, of course, the GB-888 would make a terrible ASP… the windows on the sides would be melt nicely on re-entry; the sharp edges would concentrate aerothermal heating loads to a fantastic degree; and putting then engines on the top surface would do a fantastic job of getting them out of the airflow, assuring that the engines would not perform very well at all. Still, it’s interesting art.
I have made the high-rez of this illustration available for $4-level patrons at the APR Patreon.
SpaceX was going to try to launch a Falcon 9 today with payload for the ISS, but weather forced an abort. So they’re going to try again tomorrow at 4:33 PM ET/1:33 PM PT.
Should be live webcast here: http://www.spacex.com/webcast/
Might be a massive change in worldview coming up. In short: the Type 1A supernova (which I yapped about HERE about 3 years ago) has long been considered a “standard candle.” In short, they are caused by gas being dumped on a white dwarf by a nearby “living” star. At a certain point so much hydrogen builds up on the white dwarf that a runaway fusion reaction occurs within the carbon in the white dwarf. Since this is a mass-dependant event (1.38 times solar mass), it has been considered that every supernova like this would be pretty much a carbon -copy (see what I did there) of every other. As a result, when a Type 1A supernova is spotted and recognized – by a distinctive light curve – astronomers can determine how far away the event was based on the relative brightness of it. As a result of *that,* the universe has been mapped out in 3D. And as a result of that mapping, the expansion of the universe, which should be slowing due to gravity, has been found to perhaps be *accelerating.* This has been attributed to a mysterious “phantom energy” that, in the course of time, will cause the entire universe to fly apart in a “Big Rip.”
But now it appears that there *may* in fact be more than one type of Type 1A supernova:
It appears that there might in fact be two types of Type 1A supernova, based on examination of the light curves in ultraviolet. If this is the case, then *some* of the acceleration of the universe might be negated. The writeup indicates that this won’t completely eliminate the notion of phantom energy, but it might be weakened substantially. And thus the universe might last a little longer.
Huh. Saudi Mufti Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah has declared that it is permissible for a husband to eat his wife, or perhaps just parts of her, if he is “afflicted with severe hunger.”
So, y’know… there’s that.
Umm, ladies, serious question: if you are considering moving over there, or converting in… errr… WHY???!?!
BTW – the Abdul in question is his winner right here:
Who wants to bet that if we could strip the Mask Of The Moron off this guy, we’d find Loki smirking in there? That seems abut as likely an explanation as any to explain the sort of insane gibberish that comes from that region.. Hell, I’d kinda *prefer* if it turns out that certain Surt-worshiping cults turned out to be just a long form gag by a trickster god looking to pull one over on the dim-witted Midgardians.
There might be some sort of correlation in here somewhere…
