Posted in Architecture, Demotivation, ESA, ISRU, Motivation, NASA, RLV:s, Suborbital, tagged Armadillo, COTS, ESA, fed up, Future, NASA, RAGA, RLV, SpaceX, XCOR on Wednesday 2008.06.18 | 6 Comments »
I’m quite that just right now. It will pass. Perhaps.
There’s been some discussion in various places about both NASA and potential future launch vehicles. Everything’s just so static in a large sense. Completely hopeless. I’ll throw in the towel for now.
Almost nobody has the required long attention span or patience to make any useful progress [...]
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Posted in RLV:s, engines, tagged air breathing, effective exhaust velocity, engine, F-16, F110, isp, J-58, Mach, SR-71 on Monday 2008.04.21 | 4 Comments »
I was not completely happy with the last post’s vagueness so I’m adding more formal treatment here. This long post still ends up lazily speculating around the advantages and disadvantages of air breathing propulsion in the end though.
Air Breather’s Advantage
Effective or apparent exhaust velocity (ISP to some, but that is an old-fashioned troublesome [...]
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Posted in RLV:s, Uncategorized, tagged Add new tag, afterburner, hypersonic, propulsion, ramjet, scramjet, serj, turbofan, turbojet, turborocket on Monday 2008.04.14 | No Comments »
I’ve been long meaning to do this. There are a huge amount of propulsion concepts and terms floating around so this is my small part of trying to clear up and order this corner of the internet. Namely, high speed aircraft and rocket engines and their advantages and disadvantages in very short form. This is [...]
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BEGIN EDIT
Oh well, there actually is more info about the vehicle outside XCOR’s press release (why didn’t they put that there?). Here, at Clark Lindsey’s Hobbyspace. Seems my speculations were a bit off-base, the dry mass was fine but the mass ratio is a lot bigger, about 3. I noticed after posting from the flight [...]
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Posted in RLV:s, meta, tagged snow, space access on Monday 2008.03.24 | No Comments »
I changed the blog title picture. Will see what I invent next, eh. Was out with a friend whose camera I used.
Also, there was the first snow this winter that stayed more than 24 hours. As well as some sunshine.
The sea hasn’t frozen over really at all this year. There are just some thin ice platelets melancholically clacking together near the shores. Been seing geese (Branta canadensis), swans (Cygnus cygnus) and other waterfowl like Bucephala clangula who didn’t bother leaving for winter. (EDIT: Also, Opera’s [...]
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Posted in Architecture, ISRU, Models, RLV:s, Spacecraft, Uncategorized, tagged analytics, ESAS, heavy lift, Koelle, Lunar architecture, Moon, VSE on Sunday 2008.01.27 | No Comments »
Okay, the topic of course is a pun of the current moon exploration approach chosen by NASA. It has been the subject of endless debate, and rightly so, but the various ideas for that are a subject for other days. Bush’s Vision For Space Exploration (VSE), NASA’s 90 day Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS), the resulting [...]
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Posted in Models, RLV:s, Uncategorized, tagged cruise, hypersonic, Slug, transatlantic, v prize, virginia, wallops, X-24C on Wednesday 2008.01.23 | 16 Comments »
The Virginia Spaceport at Wallops (east coast of USA, south from New York) advocates want to create a prize to foster use for the spaceport, and have floated an idea of a “one hour to Europe” style prize, the V Prize, but the rules aren’t yet finalized.
The requirements are quite tough. About 6000 km in [...]
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Jon Goff had an analysis (no equations or numbers though!) of an air-launched reusable SSTO idea, furthermore he promised to look at other reusable orbital launch vehicle ideas in the future. I thought I’d drop a few lines in regards to almost all architectures.
The summary is that big rockets have little drag losses going up [...]
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Posted in Depot, RLV:s, Spacecraft, tagged Arctus, COTS, ISS, Lockheed Martin, NASA, Progress, Spacecraft, Spacehab, SpaceX Dragon, ULA on Thursday 2007.12.20 | No Comments »
SpaceHab together with ULA (Lockheed Martin) is proposing a simple cargo capsule to ISS, launched on existing rockets like Atlas V. This seems good.
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Well, as has been noted in the newspace circles, Armadillo Aerospace failed to win the lunar lander challenge even after coming very close in 2006 already, and being even closer this time. Their report text is here and videos and pictures here (highly recommended). Other teams failed even to participate.
Everybody was cheering for Armadillo. The [...]
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