Search Results : shuttle

Picard: a review

 AARRRGH, art, Crazy, Gah., Meh., science fiction, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 282020
 

So, CBS All Access finished up their run of “Star Trek: Picard,” and it was apparently such a rousing success that in a desperate bid to get *anyone* to watch it they’ve made it free to watch until April 23.  Well, what with lockdowns and working on the computer and such, what they hell, I binge watched the series.

Summary: five “mehs” out of ten.

There are  a number of reviewers out there who can give you chapter and verse about how STP craps all over Trek… and they’re not wrong. Taken as a followup to TNG, it just lands with a baffling thud. Pretty much everything is just “off” enough to grate, like someone dragging their nails on the chalkboard two rooms down. And since these reviewers are better at that sort of thing than I am, I’ll let their reviews speak for themselves at the end. I will instead focus on two things… one bad, one good.

The bad: starship design. The ships that appear in STP are video game generic ships for the most part. The Hero Ship looks like it could have come out of damn near any video game from the last 20 years, and were you to see it outside of the Trek context there’s almost no chance you’d think that it belonged in Trek. Worse: not only do the shuttlecraft from Star Trek: Discovery make several appearances, the mutant STD All Wrong Enterprise NCC-1701 *also* shows up in the form of a prominent holographic display. Thus “Picard” takes place in the STD timeline, not the TOS/TNG timeline.  This can be used to explain why everything seems wrong: because everything *is* wrong.

The Romulan ships that show up, everything from small fighter-like designs on up to capitol ships, do not look remotely like Romulan ships. With the exception of a TOS-era Bird of Prey  that shows up briefly under the control of some sort of space pirate, once again you’d likely never guess that these were meant to be Romulan ships unless you were tipped off by the green coloration.

Starfleet almost never appears. Near the end of the last episode, though, an entire fleet of Starfleet vessels shows up. Huzzah! The ships actually look like something more or less Starfleety. But… there are hundreds of ships, and they are THE SAME EXACT DESIGN. Feh.

OK, the good.

As the ten-episode series drags ponderously onward, it becomes clear that STP is as much Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror as Star Trek. Attend:

1: There is an ancient secret left behind by a vanished race.

2: The secret is held by a secret society

3: Most of the people who learn the secret promptly lose their fricken’ minds… one caps herself with a pistol, another rips her face up with her fingernails, another bashes her noggin in with a convenient rock.

4: And the nature of the secret? There are vast elder beings out there in the dark beyond the stars just waiting for the time to be right to come back here and lay waste.

5: There are cultist-like folks  (a small number of folks almost completely lacking visible character traits) yearning for just that to happen.

6: How does the great evil come back? By way of a portal that the cultists open up.

7: And when the great evil starts to come through the portal, what do we get?

Now, I’m all in favor of blending Star Trek with Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror. Hell, that’s a little project I’ve been pecking away at for probably well over a year now, complete with dozens of pages of text, 3D CAD models and gravity maps of things that distort spacetime (it involves something that makes Vulcans go buggo when they come to understand The Secret). But to have a proper blending of Cthulhu and Trek, ya *gotta* have proper Trek. And Picard just ain’t. Never mind the design issues I raised, it’s just wrong. And here’s a hint as to why:

Star Trek: Picard Showrunner Michael Chabon Admits He Wanted To “Piss Off Or Provoke People”

See, now, *no.* If you start off Trek with the intention of annoying the fans… what the hell is wrong with you. So they could have had something really interesting, but ended up with the sound of something large, squishy and uninteresting going “splat.” So, in summary… a wasted opportunity. Pretty much like all Trek since 2009.

 

 Posted by at 10:04 pm

X-34 proposals

 aircraft, drawings, history, projects, rockets  No Responses »
Mar 272020
 

The X-34 was the first aerospace project I worked on after graduation. Sadly, one week after I was hired to work on the X-34 the whole program was cancelled. “Welcome to aerospace, kid. Here’s your layoff… last one in, first one out.” Feh. Anyway, Orbital Sc iences proposed two vehicles:

1: The X-34A was a small-ish vehicle carried under the same Lockheed L-1011 jetliner that OSC used to launch the Pegasus. The X-34 needed greater volume than the Pegasus, but since there was limited clearance under the L-1011, the X-34A had a wide lifting body-like fuselage.

2: The X-34B was a larger, better optimized vehicle to be launched from atop a Shuttle-carrying 747.

Both the A and B models had payload bays that would contain an upper stage and an orbital payload. Neither was built (apart from a full scale mockup of the A); after the program was cancelled it came back as the X-34C. the C model *was* built, but it never flew.

 Posted by at 10:20 am

Sea Dragon Operations

 art, history, Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Mar 122020
 

Sea Dragon was, as is doubtless news to few around here, an early 1960’s idea at Aerojet for an extremely large, very simply two-stage pressure-fed space booster. It was meant to be as cheap to build and operate as possible with 1960’s tech, relying on scale to make it all work. Would it have worked? Maybe. Physics supports it. Would it have been cheap to operate? Hard to tell. “Simple as possible” does not equate to “simple,” and anything the size of Sea Dragon, especially screaming out of the sky to smack into the ocean while blisteringly hot… well, there are always risks.

In 1963 the idea of a pinpoint vertical landing a la the Falcon 9 would have been ridiculous, so splashdown was really the only way to go for a booster designed for simplicity. But as NASA and Thiokol found with dropping Shuttle boosters into the drink, recovery and refurbishment after salt water immersion can be a bit of a headache. The way to make a Sea Dragon truly economically competitive would be, as with Falcon 9, flight after flight after flight, often enough that it ceases to be an Amazing News Story and becomes, like the Falcon 9, seemingly dull and monotonous. But given the million-pound payload of the Sea Dragon it’s difficult to envision a space program following on the footsteps of Apollo that would have required a Sea Dragon every few weeks. It would certainly have been *nice* to have had such a program (and if the current pandemic takes down western civ it will turn out that the lack of such a program was criminally negligent) but the existence of a timeline with such a program seems a little difficult to envision.

The article, written by sea Dragon advocate Robert Truax, that the above illustration came from has been scanned and made available to above-$10 APR subscribers and Patrons.

 Posted by at 3:23 pm

PDF Review: A Meteoroid Handbook for Aerospace Engineers and Managers

 Hmm..., science, spacecraft  No Responses »
Jan 132020
 

Recently added to the NASA Tech Report Server is NASA/TM-2019-220142, A Meteoroid Handbook for Aerospace Engineers and Managers. It covers a range of interesting topics such as effects on spacecraft, airbursts, dust in the air, etc.

At the beginning of the Space Age, spacecraft designers and mission planners were very concerned about meteoroids. They envisioned vehicles being ripped to pieces by streams of fast-moving space rocks, a notion promoted by the science fiction novels and movies of the time. The reality is, of course, different—the meteoroid streams that produce meteor showers are not dense by laypeople’s standards, having spatial densities of just a handful of particles per cubic kilometer, even during meteor outbursts. The ever-present, diffuse, sporadic background, which produces observed meteor rates of only 5 to 8 meteors per hour, makes up 90% of the meteoroid risk to spacecraft that spend at least a year in low Earth orbit (LEO), whereas the visually spectacular but short-lived meteor showers make up the other 10%. Still, meteoroids do pose a significant risk to spacecraft. At Earth, they can travel 12 to 72 km/s. These high speeds cause even small meteoroids to carry enormous kinetic energy, making them capable of doing serious damage to spacecraft. For example, a 1-mm-diameter meteoroid moving at 25 km/s can inflict the same damage as a bullet fired from a 0.357 Magnum pistol. An exterior wire can be severed by a 0.1-mm (100 mm) particle, a spacesuit can be penetrated by a 0.5-mm meteoroid, and an unshielded pressure wall (like the cabin of the Space Shuttle) can be perforated by centimeter-sized particles. Along with mechanical damage, meteoroids can also cause other types of spacecraft anomalies. Meteoroids can transfer their momentum to the spacecraft, which can destroy or damage equipment such as shunt resistors and charge-coupled device (CCD) detectors with a clear view of space. Meteoroid impacts can also generate plasma. The impact vaporizes material, producing a crater and an expanding plasma, which can in turn provide a conductive path for any charge accumulated on the spacecraft. This effect is thought to be responsible for the demise of a satellite in one case: the OLYMPUS communications satellite was sent tumbling out of control during the 1993 Perseid outburst, and a Perseid meteoroid strike has been posited as a possible cause (McDonnell et al. 1993; Caswell et al. 1995). Other researchers have suggested that very fast meteoroids could produce a small electromagnetic pulse capable of disrupting spacecraft function (Close et al. 2010).

The abstract and other data is HERE, or directly downloaded as a PDF HERE.

 

 

 Posted by at 7:03 pm

Spaceballs

 art, history, spacecraft  No Responses »
Nov 272019
 

A 1978 NASA artists impression (taken from ebay) depicting a “rescue ball” being used. This short-lived product was basically a space suit in spherical form, one that a Shuttle astronaut in shirt sleeves could enter relatively quickly in the event of an on-orbit disaster. Another Shuttle could send astronauts to collect the encapsulated and helpless astronauts and transfer them to a non-doomed shuttle. It was *kind* of a good idea, but once it was realized that the Shuttle takes *weeks* to prep for launch, the idea of using a Shuttle to rescue another Shuttle fell by the wayside. Instead of the crew of a stricken Shuttle relying on another Shuttle for rescue, official policy became la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you and orbital rescue equipment became superfluous.

 Posted by at 1:05 am

Possibilities of New Business Growth: Space based refueling and spare parts

 history, projects, spacecraft  No Responses »
Nov 102019
 

In 1985, Rockwell suggested that there might be profit in turning the Shuttle into a tanker for refueling/and servicing other spacecraft. At the same time they had the idea of a space-based “spare parts bin,” which was just what it sounds like. The former makes a great deal of sense, but the latter… not so much. Today, however, a similar idea would probably include buckets of raw metal powder and some form of zero-g 3D printer to fabricate the needed parts. Otherwise, the number of parts that would be needed to service even the smallest fraction of satellites in orbit would be vast.

 

 Posted by at 10:35 pm

Beam builder photos: 1983

 APR, blather, history, Hmm..., Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, photography, projects, spacecraft  No Responses »
Oct 312019
 

In the mad dash to collect what I needed for shipment (and for a time storage… there was, until a late development, the full expectation that I and my cats would spend a good long while as officially homeless), I looked through a great many things I had not examined in a long time, and wound up throwing a *lot*of it into the garbage. My college aerospace engineering homework? Garbage. The vast majority of the photos I took in my pre-digital days? Garbage. This was aided in the fact that the vast majority of those photos had found themselves under a leak in the shop roof and had been welded together into an undifferentiated brick of paper. But a few random, scattered photos were found more or less intact… and even then, most wound up in the garbage because, come on, they were little better than garbage when they were fresh from the developer.

A few that were deemed worthy of scanning were three taken when I was in Space Camp in 1983. The three, which are technically *really* *bad,* show a Grumman “beam builder” that we space tykes got to see at NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center. A device intended to by launched by the Shuttle, it would be fed rolls of aluminum “tape” and would bend, cut and weld them together into structural beams, sure just the thing that would be needed by the early 90’s at the latest to help build the solar power satellites, space station and early space habitats that would certainly be under construction by then.

As my damn near 40-year-gone memory suggests, we were told that the device on display was a *real* beam builder as opposed to a mockup. But I can’t be sure about that.

I’ve uploaded the three photos scanned at 600 dpi, including some modest “enhancements,” to the 2019-10 APR Extras folder at Dropbox available to all $4 and up APR Monthly Historical Document Program subscribers & Patrons. Is it great stuff? Nope. But what do you really expect from one of these kids?

 Posted by at 4:08 pm
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