A sizable tornado hit the NASA-Michoud facility near New Orleans yesterday. Few injuries are reported, but there is reported to be some substantial damage. The old ET-GVTA test article from the Shuttle program was reportedly “blown to bits.”
When I was ten I thought this movie was awesome. Well…. kids is teh dum, I suppose. In short, a Space Shuttle launches a satellite, which promptly smacks into a flying saucer, which promptly crashes in the Arizona desert and is scooped up by the Air Force and transported to… Hangar 18. Standard government conspiracy/1970’s-style Ancient Aliens hijinks ensue. It’s… it’s just terrible. Enjoy!
I don’t know what the story is on the driver and passenger in this vehicle, but I can understand why they decided that backing the frak up was a good idea. This is the fireworks market in Mexico that went FOOOM yesterday, with, last I heard, more than 30 dead.
I’ve never been anywhere near an inadvertent pyrotechnic event on this scale. I’ve been not quite this close to *advertent* pyrotechnic events of greater scale than this… Shuttle boosters being tested, old propellant and explosives being burned off, that sort of thing. Close to 20 years ago when I lived near Denver I happened across a truck on fire on the road up to Boulder… a small pickup truck with a crappy fiberglass camper. Normally such things make a lot of smoke and some fair flames, but this one was a rampaging inferno. It had some sort of high energy accelerants toasting it along. I don’t know what, exactly… but there was one of those fly-by-night fireworks revival tents just a few hundred yards down the road behind the truck. And *that* fire was sufficiently energetic that it was like the laws of physics had taken physical form and set up a “do not approach” sign. Interesting, as I was inching my way past it (note: I wasn’t first on the scene, but probably half-dozenth, so it would have been counterproductive to stop), the first official “first responder” showed up: a fireman tear-assing down the road in a fire-engine-red Porsche with the fire department logo on the doors and emergency lights permanently bolted to the roof.
It will, I imagine, come as almost zero surprise that I’ve long been a fan of the various “Star Trek” blueprint sets produced over the years by fans and professionals. They range from the “why did you even bother when you had to know you had neither skill nor talent” to the “I want to frame that and hang it on my wall.” In my opinion, just as a matter of aesthetics, the best ones were produced in the 70’s and early 80’s (the original Franz Joseph “Constitution Class” set, the McMaster “Klingon Book of Plans,” the Dreadnought, etc.). These were drafted by hand. The errors are in evidence, inconsistencies can be readily found, imprecisenesses here and there, a whole raft of unfortunate things that were eliminated when people started doing this sort of thing on the computer. And when vector graphics, CAD systems and 3D modeling came in and cleaned everything up, a little bit of the art seemed to go out of the enterprise. Dunno… maybe it’s just me.
So, promptly after pointing out that I prefer hand0drawn over computer aided…. here’s the beginnings of my own stab at the art form, done entirely on computer.
Something I have been working on for quite some time is a series of 2D diagrams of the “Messiah” spacecraft from Deep Impact. This is an outgrowth of the 3D CAD model of the Messiah I made for Fantastic Plastic (I gather there were some hiccups in the process, but I understand that things are back on track) a year and a half ago. This is the very definition of a “back burner” project; it’s not a secondary effort, not even a tertiary effort. There are paying gigs ahead of it. Still, going in and tapping away at it from time to time is a good way to destress from the other projects.
I’d spent a long time considering what to do with “Messiah.” Options included some sort of book/magazine/thing, or one or more large format (24X36, say) prints, or even cyanotype blueprints (I did in fact make a grand total of two *very* large Messiah blueprints, quite a while back… a year and a half, as it turns out). But I’ve decided to adopt the “Book Of General Plans” format. In this case,a set of prints, say, 11 inches by 36, folded and in an envelope. Retro!
The Messiah would cover about half a dozen sheets, plus or minus. A lot depends on scale. The image below (purple coloring just a drawing aid, will go to black before printing) shows the 2D diagram in 1/200 scale… which is a quite large sheet. Below that you can see a rectangle, 24X36 inches, subdivided into two 11X36 strips. At 1/200, the plan view of the ship will just fit. Thus, there’d be one sheet for the top view, one for the bottom, one for the side, one for the fore/aft. There are also a number of scrap views…the Shuttle/lander in both flight and landing configuration, details of the Orion booster section, an inboard profile, others.
Here’s a quick look at a small fraction of the illustrations created of the lander:
Along with the diagrams there’d also be “in universe” text and data, with my best efforts to rationalize the design. In the case of Messiah… it’s powered by a wandwavy form of nuclear pulse that uses bomblets that are more akin to “nuclear hand grenades,” with explosions that are slightly oblate rather than spherical… justifying the elliptical pusher plate. The large chemical boosters are liquid systems filled with high-energy space-storable propellants… FLOX burning with a kero-boron slurry. The aft boosters look like Energia boosters; the forward boosters look like Ariane V boosters, but in both cases they are much larger than the originals. This was done because… ummm… well, they were in a hurry (so they copied what they had), and they were working in secret (so they made the boosters look like things people had seen before, so if they were photographed at a distance they could be passed off as the more mundane boosters… yeah, that’s it…).
I’m doing this (veeerrry slowly) because I’m just that much of a geek. Anybody else interested? If I have ’em printed off in quantity, I’m thinking of selling them for around $20 a set, on a print run of *maybe* twenty.
After Messiah, there are a number of other designs I’d like to do the same with. 10-meters USAF Orion (real design). 4,000 ton Orion Battleship (Pax Orionis). Helicarrier (Avengers). USS Ascension (from the miniseries of the same name… oy, the monkeymotions to rationalize that).
This YouTuber makes quad-drone and other flying RC Star Wars vehicles. In my opinion, it’s a toss-up whether his best is the Imperial Probe Droid or the Imperial Shuttle. I can see both being turned into successful commercial products. The probe droid needs a way to land other than being grabbed…
On ebay a little while back were some pieces of art illustrating some Martin Marietta concepts for teleoperated spacecraft. Included was an idea for a Skylab reboost spacecraft to be carried by the Shuttle. The reboost spacecraft would, it seems, be based on a simpler spacecraft to be used for general satellite repair, recovery and reboost.
Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin has described a new rocket his company is working on , the “New Glenn.” It’s kinda big:
The “New Glenn” will be 27 feet in diameter (close to the Shuttle External Tank, it seems), 270 feet tall in a two-stage configuration and 313 feet tall in a three stage configuration. The first stage is recoverable, landing vertically under rocket power. It will have seven BE-4 engines burning natural gas and oxygen, producing 3.85 million pounds of thrust. The second stage uses a single BE-4 engine with an increased expansion ratio. The third stage uses a LOX/LH2 BE-3 engine.
The article says that Bezos has claimed that the rocket will fly “within the decade.” If that means by the end of 2019, that’s pretty ambitious.
Several days ago word hit of someone with six file boxes of their fathers stuff, wondering what to do with it. Not an unusual occurrence. But in this case, the father was an important engineer at North American Aviation, worked on the XB-70, B-1 and Shuttle, and the files all related to that. In the end, the archive wound up on Craigslist, and sold shortly afterwards. It is now being shipped… to me.
I would not have been able to afford the archive – never mind the shipping costs – on my own. However, by working with the patrons on the APR Patreon , we were able to pool funds so that the total cost per person is *trivial.* When the archive gets here – all 300+ pounds of it – I will go through every single page and catalog it; the best stuff will be scanned and, barring ITAR & classification issues, all of the crowdfunders will receive the complete set of high-rez scans. And then when I’ve gleaned from it what’s worth gleaning, it will be donated to an appropriate archive… the Smithsonian, the SDASM, the National Archives, Edwards AFB, whatever seems best in the end.
The door to sign up for this crowdfunding project is now closed. It followed shortly on the heels of a similar project that scored an admittedly much smaller but definitely fascinating collection of F2Y Sea Dart documentation and diagrams, including much about operational follow-on attack aircraft meant to operate from ships and subs; and a similar archive that was crowdfunded a year or two back that scored a whole bunch of 2707 SST stuff. I’ve grown sick of seeing amazing stuff appear on ebay and then vanish into a black hole, never to be seen by anyone again; this way, aerospace history is preserved and shared.
If you’d like to be involved in this sort of thing, sign up for the APR Patreon and you’ll not only get the monthly aerospace goodies that comes with membership, but you’ll also be able to get in on these crowd funding efforts. You’ll save aerospace history, get a bunch of amazing stuff, and not have to spend a whole lot to do it.
China will be building them based on the Ukrainian design, presumably with Chinese engines and equipment. The question is: why? What ginormous payloads do the Chinese think they’ll need modernized Mriyas for? The An-225 was designed to carry the Soviet “Buran” space shuttle orbiter on its back… *perhaps* the Chinese are thinking of doing the same thing. Feel free to speculate.
The article suggests the Chinese believe that the first of an unspecified number of new AN-225’s will fly in 2019… only three years away. That’ll be a neat trick, unless the Chinese have been working away at this for a while, or are going to work themselves to death to get it done, or are going to half-ass certain aspects of the process. I wouldn’t bet against any of those.
I’ve recently figured out how to get reliably good-quality vector graphic PDF files from my AutoCAD diagrams.These differ from standard “raster” graphics like GIFs and JPGs in that they are composed of scalable lines rather than pixels; this means that they can be printed off at many scales and they’ll retain clarity.
I think a lot of the diagrams would look quite good printed in large format; I’ve previously mentioned that I’m working on a few diagrams specifically for printing off on large format (24X36) mylar, but I’ve others that I think would also look good scaled for 18X24. I’m making these first seven diagrams available, formatted and scaled for 18X24. They can be viewed on screen, printed on a standard printer or printed by a large format printer all with equal clarity.
If this idea appeals, be sure to tell your friends, family, foes, anyone you think might be interested. Also be sure to comment if there are any diagrams I’ve previously created for APR, USXP or elsewhere that you’d like to see in this format. Some of them would be best as multi-sheet diagrams. Suggestions on how to improve also appreciated.
CAD 007: Northrop Low Altitude Penetrator
A 1/72 diagram of a 1979 design for a B-2 alternate configuration
Download for $3
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CAD 006
A 1/96 scale diagram of the 1979 Rockwell D645-4a spanloader bomber.
Download for $3
CAD 005
A 1/144 scale diagram of the Manned Spacecraft Center MSC Orbiter 020, a 1972 Space Shuttle concept with a single 260″ solid rocket booster.
Download for $3
CAD 004
A 1/350 scale diagram of the 1971 Boeing Resource Air Carrier (AKA RC-1, AKA “Brute Lifter”) designed as a flying oil tanker for the arctic.
Download for $3
CAD 003
A 1/72 scale diagram of the Martin-Marietta “Zenith Star” experimental space-based laser for the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Download for $3
CAD 002
A 1/24 diagram of the Lockheed “Harvey,” the initial concept for a low radar cross section strike platform that eventually became the F-117.
Download for $3
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CAD 001
A 1/32 diagram of the North American Rockwell D-541-4 “Surprise Fighter” from 1973, an early stealth concept designed to sneak up on Soviet AWACS planes.
Download for $3
Download all seven for $18.90 (10% off)