A project you can partake here. Rewriting some NASA GISS temperature record code in Python at first.

I’d go further and say things like these should not be volunteer efforts… government codes for something important like this should be open (and GISS is) with people being paid to update and keep them in good shape. Hopefully they can take things like these as templates.

Doug Stanley, the notorious ESAS leader has said some strange things (this is his option three, one being Ares I and two Ares V):

Eliminating Ares 1 and 5 and all shuttle infrastructure could save NASA future costs that could eventually be applied towards exploration by significantly reducing the workforce and fixed infrastructure costs. This approach would require “commercial” crew transportation for ISS and exploration missions, and would likely require propellant depots to compensate for the smaller commercial launch vehicles. This was not politically feasible in 2005, but perhaps could be today. Additional detailed cost analysis is required, however, to determine the true cost of a procurement that would require paying for two human-rated capsules and launch vehicles to refine the rather optimistic estimates of the Augustine committee.

Umm. The multi-launch scenario technical analysis in ESAS was a travesty. (One launch pad-> too many delays->multi launch not an option. Hello? And lots of other things, like the unbearable cost of manrating, which suddenly vanished a couple months ago when Doug last spoke…) And now Doug is turning around and saying it might be more politically feasible today? Way to wash your hands! So, politics tolerates more launch delays now? Or politics is sufficiently advanced to launch from more than one pad (or VIF)?

I’ve certainly heard stories from before ESAS of how Doug Stanley had been open minded to commercially launched capsules. So what was this nefarious political influence that caused the ESAS to be so bad and subsequently practically freeze most commercial progress for the next 5 years.

One quite obvious road was clear from day one when shuttle retirement was a real thing in the future: a simple capsule on an EELV for ISS taxi. Those rockets exist and fly and have a history. The sooner development is started, the better, the smaller the gap. You can use that for other purposes as well.

I do agree that more than just the Augustine panel report would be nice.

Sunday was the ninetysecond anniversary of Finland as an independent state.

I saw this band back in 1997/8 when they were on one of their first gigs in Helsinki. They played in a small old warehouse, Lepakko, that had been converted to a music hall by squatters years ago. And they were great. The building is gone long since, new fancy offices occupy the place. And Nightwish had internalt trouble, changed it’s lead singer and is not really the same anymore, at least not to me. But they achieved some great things. This video is from the last concert with Tarja Turunen’s unbelievable voice. How do you rise from the small Finnish town of Kitee to greatness on the world’s stages? There are countless bands nowadays who take their influence from them.

It takes a lot of work and dedication, that is for certain.

Photos of a certain large Soviet ground effect vehicle.

Starship (this is nice):

Avanti (this is boring and low quality):

Starship: First flight in february 1986. Powered by Pratt & Whitney PT6A-67A turboprops 895 kW each, designed by by Burt Rutan and Scaled composites, the maker of planes that fly around the world nonstop, or rocket planes that go to space. Photos: 1 2 3

Avanti: First flight in September 1986 but development was protracted. Powered by Pratt & Whitney PT6A-66 turboprops 634 kW each, designed and built by Piaggio, an Italian scooter manufacturer. Photos: 1 2 3, more

How do they compare in performance?

The picture found on a French website speaks quite a lot (translation should be trivial):

Avanti and Starship top views and specifications comparison

The Starship is a bit bigger overall but still, it has a proportionally stupendous wing area and suffers high weight and high drag as a consequence, being slower despite more power. The three surface configuration of Avanti could also help to minimize trim drag in cruise.

The cabin space looks to actually be not that far off, since Avanti’s nose is shorter. The Avanti has thin straight laminar flow wings that give very little drag. Has someone been into both cabins who can comment on the internal room?

Landing speed is surprisingly similar, 150+-3 km/h for both. Even if Starship has half the wing loading. On the other hand, it probably can’t fly at a high angle of attack or use large high lift devices because the “stalling canard” control arrangement. The rear end of the large chord wing is so far behind that the nose down moment from bigger flaps could simply stall the canard.

Could these be the reasons why the Starship never became a commercial success, with only 53 having been operated commercially? A big aircraft compared to its capability? Avanti on the other hand at least has made and is making some sales, over 150 have been made. I’ve heard stories about how Scaled composites didn’t know how to make commercially operational craft back then, and maintenance folk actually had to cut holes in the skin to do some work. The french site claims Starship used over five times the research development budget, and the craft looks like an enlarged EZ, so nothing that novel aerodynamically. What went wrong? Is it the composites, a bridge too far?

I find comparisons interesting. They put matters into better context than just examining features of things alone. I feel it is done far too rarely – when reading about technical histories, they follow one project at a time and the reader can’t form a comprehensive picture of things or give meaning to the years and numbers thrown around. I was actually working on a free print-it-yourself trump card game with rocket engines some years back, to help familiarize oneself with their features, I still think I have the publisher files stashed somewhere. (Too bad it still is impossible to find even a semi decent page layout program for free.)

I always had a different idea compared to the one Jon and Kirk posted, (Kirk Sorensen is now a contributor at Jon Goff’s place, I’m afraid having such top men in the same place might cause a awesomity criticality event). I assume this idea is probably found in some old NASA report from the sixties or seventies, like most things are.

Rendezvous is mostly a 4D problem: 3 space dimensions and time (some more if you take into account that proper attitude must be maintained as well, but that is assumed to be trivial). If you can take out two space dimensions, the problem should simplify greatly. This is possible with the following arrangement:

A boom at both the target and the vehicle, placed at right angles (and both at a right angle to the approaching vector). Basically, this should reduce positioning accuracy requirements hugely. The booms could be short barrels (even inflatable), or really long semi-rigid wires or composite girders or whatever. Depends on design aims.

When they contact, they will both slide until one boom is caught by a hook at the end of the other boom. Then one boom will slide through the hook until the hooks contact. From there on it’s a known geometry. You can reel in the boom, if it is flexible, or just slide it if it is rigid, and get both craft to a configuration you want, for either ordinary robot arm capture for berthing (as demonstrated by HTV, many station modules and Shuttle MPLM:s) or traditional docking (Soyuz/Progress/Shuttle/ATV).

This concept has some problems. For example whipping the target or the vehicle with an improper attitude / position boom. In the pictured boom configuration, approaches should have an offset always to one side. Alternatively one could have multiple booms. That way it wouldn’t matter on which side the rendezvous error would be. Also, the target could have a V shaped bow to avoid having the vehicle hitting dead center with a boom.

Another issue is if there is some kind of failure in the rendezvous, like too high velocity, the boom might rip off. That would result in a very dangerous object co-orbiting with the vehicles. This would be a very bad day for something like the ISS or a propellant depot.

One way to avoid this is to have the hooks have a mechanism to give way if the load gets too high. Another more outlandish is to have a weaker boom attachment in the vehicle. This would sever its boom and leave it hanging to the target in case of a problem.

This all was motivated to make unmanned rendezvous much easier to enable cheap propellant depot tankers. As all know, ATV and HTV are hugely expensive and high dry mass systems. Something like a Centaur or any basic “dumb” already existing restartable upper stage with just mostly a working attitude control system (including a star tracker) could be used instead, if some out of the box thinking is deployed. Most of the smarts should be in the target that is launched only once, but it can’t be the maneuvering party since it is very heavy. This system should get the best of both worlds.

Tim Lambert examines one of the specific fraud claims in the CRU code.

With workers like these, everything like cars should be super cheap! It isn’t, there’s a fault somewhere…

Seventy years ago today, 26 of november 1939, Soviet Union claimed Finland had fired cannon shots across the border to the village of Mainila. In reality these shells were shot by Soviet cannons. Wikipedia has more.

And that’s how it is. The plight of the Finns started with gross lies and accusations… Only after the Soviet Union broke up, could there be admission of this theater, and yet many Russians to this day keep the schoolbook snippet how the Shelling of Mainila was done by Finns. Who controls the information, controls the people.