Basic Transportation
I’ve always thought that NASA’s manned rover concepts were a little too consciously “futuristic”, designed more with a sci-fi aesthetic in mind than simple rugged practicality.
Now this…this is my idea of a manned rover…
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Settlement Infrastructure
The clouds and greenery (such as it is) distract from the impression here, but the geothermal taps at Krafla struck me as looking a lot like the infrastructure one might expect to see near a settlement on the Moon or Mars. The offworld resemblance wasn’t only in the incompletely-terraformed appearance of the landscape.
Now You See X-37B, Now You Don’t
This sounds a lot more intriguing than it probably is:
US military’s top secret X-37B shuttle ‘disappears’ for two weeks, changes orbit
Since then, the X-37B been arguably the least-secret secret project on the planet, as fellow backyard astronomers joined in the scrutiny, aided by how-to video guides and apps such as the Simple Satellite Tracker.
That is, they did until July 29, when the shuttle disappeared, causing all kinds of consternation and conspiracy theories about its fate.
It took amateur skywatcher Greg Roberts of Cape Town, South Africa, who noticed that it failed to appear as scheduled above his base on August 14, another five days to find it.
When he did, he noticed it was some 30km higher and on a different trajectory, according to calculations from other colleagues in Rome and Oklahoma.
The X-37B’s new track means it takes six days to pass the same spot on Earth, as opposed to its original four-day track.
So it can maneuver, which is interesting but not unexpected. The hype, though, made me think of an old short story from Analog, Jerry Oltion’s “The Getaway Special”
A certified Mad Scientist invents a hyperdrive which can be built out of spare parts and can instantaneously teleport an arbitrary spherical volume of space and all it contains into a vacuum…
Because he’s immensely rich from having invented the perfect battery, he hires space on a Space Shuttle to test his drive – in a Getaway Special shuttle experiment canister – and tests it by taking the shuttle and crew on an unanticipated jaunt.
Heh. If only.
More Mars on Earth
Finally getting the time to post more of my Iceland pictures on Flickr. Aside from the clouds and the sparse moss, one could picture a vista like this on Mars:
As I upload the pictures, I’m also adding any especially un-Earth-like shots to a separate set which I will publish here later. The set will include some shots I got of various geothermal installations, which (like the landscapes) look an awful lot like what I would expect some of the industrial parts of a Mars settlement to look like.
Raygun Gothic Rocket
Looks like someone’s got both Orion and Dragon beat…
Falcon 9 Maiden Launch Successful
UPDATE: added NASA’s coverage of the launch, from liftoff through (I’m guessing) max-Q.
Congratulations to SpaceX on a successful first launch of the Falcon 9. With any luck, they just drove a 180-foot-long aluminum stake through the heart of Ares-I. Heh.
It’s amusing, though, that a company founded by a dot-com millionaire can’t seem to get a webcast video to work properly. But I suppose there were other, more important concerns this morning.
Oddly enough, the launch was originally scheduled (the aborted attempt) at the same time as the biweekly all-hands teleconference with the LM Orion management team — otherwise known as the “everything is fine, don’t panic” meeting. I missed the first part of the meeting, but the portion I sat in on was dominated by voices sounding like relatives of Milton from “Office Space”, asking tediously detailed and irritatingly petulant questions about layoff notices, benefit rollovers, job transfers and other HR matters “for when the time comes”. A very strange juxtaposition.
One of the good things about the Falcon 9 success is that it will help still some of the critical voices speaking out against commercial crew and cargo, and newspace in general. Or if not still them, at least force them to find something else to complain about regarding newspace, much as successful missile defense intercepts forced critics who claimed it was physically impossible to pull off an intercept to find some other rationalization for their opposition. Had the launch failed, it would have been much more difficult to establish credibility for newspace — with this success, however, the industry can probably tolerate a few less than successful follow-on launches before losing the credibility established by SpaceX.
PA-1 Test – A Little TOO Successful?
A little bit behind schedule (it was supposed to launch before the 2008 Presidential election), the Pad Abort 1 test launched at White Sands yesterday — and would have subjected any astronauts inside to 16 gees. Oops.
The one-minute, 35-second test at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., took the capsule higher — 3,886 feet — and farther down range — 6,919 feet — than anticipated.
“That motor was quite a performer,” said Deputy Test Director Jay Estes. “You might not want to be riding in there.”
That’s the truth in more ways than he intended, I’m sure. (And I can’t be the only one who finds it amusing that one of the guys launching a big solid rocket is named “Estes”.)
Were the program to be continued, this excess capability might actually be a good thing to have, given how much the capsule has changed since the PA-1 design was frozen (more to the point: how much more it weighs now).
Landing was gentler than expected, but a heavier capsule would work against that:
The boilerplate capsule floated down to the desert floor under the three red-and-white main chutes, slowed enough by them that the telemetry system continued to operate after impact. Estes said test engineers received all of the data they expected to receive.
“It was a beautiful flight,” he said. “That went like clockwork from what I could see.”
Don Reed, the NASA test director, said the capsule touched down at about 24 feet per second (fps), less than the 33 fps impact velocity predicted at the outset. That sort of data will be helpful as NASA refines its predictive models for future developments.
The best part of the test, though, was that the discarded motor stack turned into an enormous lawn dart. I don’t have permission to share the pics that were floating around the office today, but the shots of the burning adapter cone sticking up out of the desert floor are awesome — since the entire 40-odd-foot-tall tower above it is buried nearly vertically into the ground, along with about 40% of the cone itself, with just a small bulge of dirt humped up around it. It’s such a perfect needle-jab that it’s ridiculous. As for the rest of the hardware, the early reports suggested that, given another LAS, the boilerplate capsule and even the separately-jettisoned forward bay (parachute) cover could have been launched again in short order.
James Cameron’s 3D Mars Camera
If James Cameron is so passionate about restoring the 3D camera to MSL/Curiosity, then…instead of lobbying, and urging, and taking his concerns to the NASA administrator, why didn’t he just pay for it out of pocket?
I don’t know that he didn’t, or didn’t offer to do so (the article doesn’t say), but it seems like the obvious thing to do for a guy with a passion and a couple billion dollars in the bank. Indeed, a sponsorship arrangement with NASA would have been a coup for both. Trade Cameron the rights to market the resulting imagery in exchange for underwriting the camera, let him produce a theatrical 3D documentary using it, and both win: Cameron cleans up at the box office, and NASA gets a great PR and education/information outreach opportunity.
STS-131 Shuttle Launch – Longer Version
Finally got the time to upload the longer version of the video of Monday’s launch.
STS-131 Launch
In Florida today to watch the STS-131 launch, which went off without a hitch this morning. More later, but I need a nap, and then I have to drive back to Orlando for the return flight to Denver. Video now added below (at least, one little clip – I’ll try to add more later).
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