Apr 182021
Apr 172021
NASA selects SpaceX as its sole provider for a lunar lander
No moon for you, Bezos.
NASA said it will award SpaceX $2.89 billion for development of the Starship vehicle and two flights. One of these missions will be an uncrewed flight test of Starship down to the lunar surface and back. The second mission will be a crewed flight—the first one of the Artemis program—down to the Moon.
Artemis is the NASA program that has been reliant upon the SLS. But by going with a Starship derivative… will SLS still be relevant? The plan apparently is to launch the Starship to lunar orbit unmanned, there to rendezvous with an SLS-launched Orion capsule to transfer crew over. But… if SpaceX has the ability to get a Starship to the moon, seems like they’ll have the ability to get at least a Dragon capsule there and back. I wonder what the payload capability would be for an Earth-to-lunar-orbit-to-Earth Starship might be given LEO refueling. Perhaps such a vehicle could send a couple dozen people to lunar orbit there to meet up with the Starship lunar lander; transfer four or five tot he lander and the rest stay in the transfer Starship, there to play tourist and pay for the trip.
Apr 162021
They finally get what they want more than anything: extremely white guy with an AR-15 goes buggo.
FedEx shooter ID’d as 19-year-old former employee Brandon Scott Hole
Once again, we get us a whackaloon who did things backwards: he shot eight people dead and *then* shot himself.
Watch the coming hours and days to see the ghouls come out to gloat over the corpses, their gore-drenched political fangs slavering over the idea of banning a hundred million Americans from having something a vanishingly small number of crazies misuse.
Apr 162021
Whoa.
This was a wild 46 seconds pic.twitter.com/jIHQg0G4qU
— Sada (@Evi3Zamora) April 15, 2021
Ooops, there is context, and it’s sad. This happened in North Carolina and the bobcat had rabies, which explains the craziness. The guy in the video ended up shooting the bobcat, and the folks involved ended up going to the hospital and likely got a super-fun series of rabies shots.
Bobcat with rabies? Sad. Husband going from Mr. Pleasant to “I’m gonna shoot that ᚠᚪᛣᚳᛖᚱ” in ten seconds? Priceless. Now, if you want the racist take on the incident, The Root has you covered. And even here, where they try to disparage and dehumanize white folks at every turn, they gotta give this feller the respect he deserves.
I once stared down a bobcat. Going on 20 years ago, I dug through a black widow infested rocket parts boneyard a day or two after 9-11 in order to find components for Tomahawk cruise missile booster motors so’s we could finish a bunch of motors we just knew we’d soon need to send downrange. And as I dug through a pile of boxes and pallets, a big-ass bobcat climbed up to the top of said pile of pallets and just looked at me like “Hey. ‘sup.” We looked at each other for a few seconds, then it turned and wandered off. Normal bobcats? Reasonable fellas. Rabid bobcats? Noooooooo thank you.
Apr 152021
Banshee is quite good at letting her disdain for humanity shine through.
Apr 152021
Here we go…
The last President to seriously try court packing was the same one who locked up American families in internment camps due to their ethnicity. So bear that in mind when considering the outcome of this idea.
Apr 152021
Old school paper manufacturers. Kinda sad to see the skill fading, though honestly it’s pretty niche.
Apr 152021
Maryland trooper shoots, kills teenager who had airsoft gun
In 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was waving around an airsoft gun and got shot by a cop for his troubles. As a result, Rice’s family scored $6 *million* dollars in damages. Additionally, numerous protests broke out, helping spark the BLM movement.
So, will the same sort of thing happen here? In this case, 16-year-old Peyton Ham was waving around an airsoft gun and got shot by a cop for his troubles. One would imagine that the same basic setup should lead to the same basic outcome… a payday for the family, a series of protests, the rise of a race-based political movement. I wonder…
The teenager was white, as is the trooper who shot him, according to Maryland State Police spokesman Greg Shipley.
Huh.
Never mind.
Apr 142021
A while beck someone sold a brochure about the Sukhoi-Gulfstrem supersonic business jet, the S-21. This concept, dating from the early 90’s, was a failed attempt to build a corporate-jet sized SST. While Gulfstream eventually dropped out, Sukhoi kept going until around 2012. The design changed substantially as time went by, but the realities of the economics of supersonic small aircraft around the turn of the century doomed the idea.
Apr 142021
I’m kinda swamped with actual aerospace history stuff to do. But at some point, that will probably come to an end (at least a temporary pause), at which point I will launch back into producing US Bomber Projects, US VTOL Projects, US Launch Vehicle Projects, etc. But another idea occurs: a somewhat similar sort of publication but on fictional aircraft. Why? Why not.
What I’m thinking right now is to limit it to:
1: Aircraft, not spacecraft
2: Movies and TV, not books, comic books, etc.
3: The aircraft must be at least mostly realistic
4: The time setting: from any time in the past to the relatively near future
What I’d kinda like to do is produce not just the sort of diagrams I usually produce (with an eye towards model makers), but technical specs and, if at all possible, “in universe” descriptions. Descriptions that could conceivably put all the designs into the same universe. probably formatted for printing in 8.5X14 or 11X17
.The list as it currently sits:
1: “Starflight One”
2: BV-38 Flying Wing, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”
3: Switchblade, “I Spy”
4: “Blue Thunder”
5: “Airwolf”
6: “Firefox”
7: Whispercraft, “The 6th Day”
8: Luckup Peacemaker “Deal of the Century”
9: F-19, “Deal of the Century”
10: Skyfleet S570, “Casino Royale”
11: Rutland Reindeer, “No Highway in the Sky”
12: Willis JA-3, “Chain Lightning”
13: B-3, “Broken Arrow”
14: F/A-37 Talon, “Stealth”
15: EDI UCAV, “Stealth”
16: Hyperion airship, “Island at the Top of the World”
17: VTOL corporate jet, “Contact”
So… thoughts? Something of interest, or a giant “meh?” And are there any designs I’ve forgotten?
There are other designs I’ve considered but seem to be beyond the scope… the aerial HK’s from Terminator 1 &2, the numerous MCU aircraft, the Orion III spaceplane from “2001,” *anything* from Gerry Anderson, etc.