Some Links

I forgot to mention earlier, but Jon Goff has had good stuff lately.
Also, check out a nice picture of Titan 1 gimbals (you can click for a big picture but it’s quite a slow site). I’m pretty sure this is the first stage so there is actually another engine behind the one in the picture. [...]

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Less Posting for a While

I seem to have left space stuff a little behind lately, maybe because I’ve also been working with some other projects, some including new social scenes. I’ve been trying to broaden my horizons for the last month or so, getting into places where I’m quite out of my element, just for the heck of it, [...]

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Testing Embedding

Images from BBC, music from Yeasayer, AFAIK. I’m just linking to it. Enjoy.

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Interstellar Travel Destinations

Nowadays new exoplanets are found every week. Exoplanet blog systemic has an article from February about possible Earth-like planets around Alpha Centauri B.
What’s remarkable is the easiness with which they could be detected if some resources are spent. And if a planet like that exist, it’s one of the top destinations for future interstellar probes [...]

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Freefall

I’m a long time reader of this excellent web comic, freefall. It’s actually the only one I read. It’s quite clever and funny, although often quite cheesy and finger-pointing too. I keep coming back to it. It’s clear the writer has good technical and scientific knowledge and weaves that in with the comical happenings. And there’s a bigger [...]

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The Last Five Kilometers

I was recently reading Mark Wade’s Pausanias, Encyclopedia Astronautica’s blog. He called quits from blogging in November 2007, after being utterly disappointed in the short-sightedness and selfishness behind NASA’s exploration architecture decisions, and I quote:
What can be more sobering than NASA returning to water landings and expendable capsules descending under parachutes — technology selected as [...]

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Sigh

EDIT: Thought I lost a post I wrote but found it in an unexpected place instead! So I’m cancelling this rant about autosave not working and will finish that post instead.
[rant was here but is not worth reading]

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Japanese Invisibility

There’s been some press about the “invisibility cloak” that would become possible with the new metamaterials that can exhibit negative refractive index. There’s an article about a specific “lens” design here at the Japanese Tech On site. The basic idea is just to bend the light rays coming from behind the object and make them [...]

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The Memristor

EDIT: Wikipedia had a good page already about it which clarified a lot, I have made corrections to my post that has been up for only a few minutes.
If this article about the memristor, a new fundamental electric circruit component is any good, then some radical new things are coming up in electronics. It’s a [...]

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Ares I is in a Bit of a Trouble

Nasaspaceflight.com’s Chris Bergin finally wrote the article on Ares I’s thrust oscillation mitigation options. There are three main ones: new pulsed brake rockets, a damper between stages and a tuned small mass damper in the SRB. All three could be applied. They also increase mass and thus reduce performance.
Ares I’s thrust oscillation coupled with the whole rocket’s already looming possible underperformance and the Orion spacecraft mass growth drives towards a possible no win situation. It’s a bit hard to know about the margins.
There is only one earlierdocument making a clear picture of the masses, performances, margins and
reserves out there:
Brian Muirhead’s presentation from 31 Jan 2008. (Thanks to Renclod on Nasaspaceflight’s forum for finding it.)

So it seems there could [...]

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