Category: Aviation

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T-Minus Eight Years And Counting

Spaceship One. Credit: Scaled Composites

It’s been eight long years since SpaceShipOne became the first privately-built spacecraft to actually fly into space, thus earning the title of…spacecraft.

OK, so that’s redundant. My kids have been making me watch too much Austin Powers (allow myself to introduce…myself).

Not being content with making history just once, Rutan and Co. went on to make two more flights with ballast equivalent to two passengers, thus earning the $10 million Ansari X-Prize.

Naturally I was geeked out over the whole thing when it happened. It also gave me the impetus to start writing Perigee, which had already been flitting about inside my cranial region for some time. I figured now that someone had actually done it, and another really rich guy was bankrolling a whole new airline on the concept, that my own wild ideas wouldn’t feel so…science-fictioney.

Yeah, that’s a word. Trust me, I’m a writer. Continue reading “T-Minus Eight Years And Counting”

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Chasing the Dragon

Splashdown!

The SpaceX Dragon has successfully completed its first demonstration mission to the International Space Station.

Wish I had time to opine more, but for now get thee to this here link for pictures and details.

UPDATE:

Here’s a shot of Dragon waiting for its ride home:

“Here there be Dragons” (Via SpaceX)

The significance of this mission cannot be overstated. From my layman’s perspective, it was pretty much flawless – and did I mention this was only the second flight? There’s been a lot of skepticism about the whole Commercial Crew program from politicians and others who are ordinarily pro-free market, but when seeing their NASA cash cow starved, begin to freak out and insist on throwing more money at an agency which has not demonstrated that it can successfully develop a new spacecraft in the past thirty years. Continue reading “Chasing the Dragon”

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Flying the Hump

So I’m driving home from work the other day, with my usual wait at the traffic light along runway 10L/28R here in Columbus. Being a professional airplane geek (i.e. stupid enough to work in the business instead of doing something that makes real money), I of course spend that time watching the departing airliners stacked up behind the hold-short. This day, something unusual caught my eye, namely this unwieldy-looking hump on a Southwest bird:

Nope, that’s not a luggage carrier back there. Photo: gTarded/flickr

The last time I saw one of these was on a different 737, one that my employer was preparing to sell, and we had been tasked with running the test flights for a brand new satellite antenna housing. That’s what that hump is, though I see how it could be mistaken for a luggage container like you’d put on top of the old Griswold family station wagon. Or maybe a carrier for Mitt Romney’s dog. Continue reading “Flying the Hump”

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Need for Speed

If you follow aeronautics, this is a significant development. Plus the pictures are really cool.

Economics aside, noise is the single biggest impediment to building a new supersonic airliner. The reason you never saw Concorde zipping across our skies is that nobody wants sonic booms trailing across their country on a regular basis (especially Boeing, since they didn’t have their own SST ready at the time). And yeah, that’s a lot of windows to replace in any case. But if these guys have really been able to shrink the noise footprint and solve the pressure drag problems, then we could see a lot more progress on the SST front. But even given this breakthrough, I suspect that it makes a lot more sense as a small business jet than a higher-capacity airliner.

The next biggest impediment is air traffic management: really fast bizjets like the Citation X (.92 Mach, almost sonic) still have to downshift into the same arrival traffic as pokey old 737s. For really busy areas (think NY or SoCal), this tends to happen a lot farther away from the destination than most people realize – several hundred miles in some cases. It’d be like driving an Indy racer full-blast down the interstate, then having to merge into the off ramp to sit in traffic behind a minivan for the last hour of your trip. Ick.

Regardless, I guarantee you there will be plenty of bizjet owners clamoring for one of these if they ever make it into production. I’ll need sell a lot more of these to pick up one of my own, though.

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Once and Future Past

Gemini 9. Credit: NASA

The Atlantic recently posted a couple of really nice photo essays on the space program. The piece on decommissioning the space shuttles isn’t too surprising; that’s a big and fairly recent deal. The Gemini story is more surprising, as it happened nearly 50 years ago and is generally only thought about by space geeks like me.

Gemini was the gateway drug that hooked me on the space program, maybe because they were the first missions I was conscious of. I remember being fascinated by the big silver rocket with the little two-man tin can on top. And spacemen were cool. How could I not be drawn to something that looked just like my favorite G.I. Joe? Continue reading “Once and Future Past”

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ATB! OMG! AOG! WTF? LOL…

Airbus A380 cutaway. Credit: FlightGlobal

A quick note for you text-addicts who don’t recognize aviation-speak: “ATB” means “air turn-back” and “AOG” is “airplane on ground”, otherwise known as “we broke it”.

So, a couple of the super-jumbo A380s had some problems recently. Yawn.

No one will ever mistake me for an Airbus apologist – if it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going – but in all fairness to the Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys™, these incidents are not the big deals they’re being made out to be. And both are contingencies that we prepare and train pilots for (the wing cracks are another story entirely). Continue reading “ATB! OMG! AOG! WTF? LOL…”

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Can’t Get There From Here

At least not in this kind of style. Not yet. We obviously have a long way to go before the kind of technology speculated about in Perigee comes to fruition. Aerospace geeks might remember the X-30 “National Aerospace Plane” project from the Eighties; it never got off the ground (literally) but still led to ways around some important technological barriers. Roger Launius writes about it here.

And just for grins, he also speculates about going a little ways beyond low Earth orbit. Hang on to your seats. Continue reading “Can’t Get There From Here”

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