It's not rocket science
Congratulations to SpaceX!
After a last-half-second abort on Saturday, they fixed their little problem and lit the candle early this morning. Their launch window to ISS was instantaneous, so this is quite a big deal that they could pull it off on just the second try. It also speaks well of Falcon 9’s reliability (and repair ability).
They have a lot of on-orbit tests to do before NASA will let it anywhere near the space station, but this is a very good start.
I’m saving up $$ for my ticket!
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:
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”
Kirk vs. Picard? Lame.
Starfleet vs. Galactic Empire? Small ball.
Yoda vs. Aliens? Now that’s something I’d pay to see:
From the LA Times comes an update on that Defense Department hypersonic flight test last year. Short version: it went really fast.
No news on when passenger service might be available.
And you just knew the red one was the angriest of them all!
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.
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”
…the Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon is performing. Watch and enjoy the nation’s finest.
From the USA Today of space news, space.com, a nicely illustrated story on the (non) evolution of space plane designs. I say “non” because precious dadgum few of them have ever made it to the cutting-metal stage.
Come to think of it, we’re going to need a new expression, being in the age of composites. But “baking plastic” just doesn’t have the same cachet, does it? Continue reading “Wings in Spaaace!”
Via space.com, another story about cool goings-on in commercial spaceflight: Skydiver Leaps from Stratosphere in “Space Jump” Practice.
Baumgartner is gearing up for an even bigger leap — his so-called “space jump” — from 120,000 feet (36,576 m) this summer. The current record for highest-altitude skydive is 102,800 feet (31,333 m), set in 1960 by U.S. Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger.
Baumgartner hopes his attempt will also set several other marks. He is chasing the record for longest freefall (estimated to be about 5 minutes and 30 seconds from 120,000 feet), and he hopes to become the first person to break the speed of sound during freefall.
Not that I have any desire to skydive – much less space jump – but this looks cool as all get-out. It’s been speculated as one potential adventure-tourist possibility for suborbital spaceflight (pretty sure Armadillo Aerospace‘s project specifically has that in mind).
The Chiles Files 