Cancelled Crew Transportation Systems

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rebirth Of The Spaceship

Image
Over the last year the space advocate community has splintered into two major groups in answering the question "where should we go next?" Moon First or Mars First . This division was present in the Review of Human Spaceflight (aka Augustine) committee's final report in late 2009, with the surprising conclusion that there isn't the funds for either, suggesting a number of intermediate destinations first - including asteroids. However, as few people consider asteroids to be truly interesting destinations for the human utilization of space ( except me! ), the debate rages on. Many Moon First advocates are "Mars Next" advocates while most Mars First advocates are "Moon Again?" detractors. The former claim that Mars exploration will benefit from lunar exploration, particularly in experience and risk reduction, and perhaps the procurement of propellant. The latter claim that lunar exploration is just a distraction and want to avoid the risk of be...
Read more

Scaled Composites' Dirty Little Secret

The public is incredibly easy to fool. Way back in 2004, Mike Melvill made history by flying Burt Rutan's beautiful creation SpaceShipOne across the unofficial border to space, twice, and later that year Brian Binnie did it again, winning the Ansari X-Prize and raising the hopes of all that private access to space had finally arrived. But how did they do it? There is no question that Burt Rutan is a natural genius at aircraft design. His true innovation on SpaceShipOne was the shuttlecock styled effortless reentry system, and in particular, the ease of replacing these two large booms after a few flights to mitigate wear. SpaceShipOne/Two is a glider, and just like the Space Shuttle the wings are "only" used on the way down. There are wings used on the way up, of course, they are on WhiteKnightOne/Two, but once separated from the carrier aircraft the only lift is generated from the rocket. As smart as Burt Rutan is, he's not a rocket guy. For SpaceShipOne he...
Read more

FreeSynd version 0.2 released

The never ending effort to recreate a game from 1993 continues. There's now nine developers in the project and none of us do much. Every now and then I get bored and fix something.. go to check it in and discover that, shock, someone else has checked something in too! Then I have to update and resolve conflicts. Take the good with the bad I guess. Anyway, in release 0.2 you will be happy to discover that we have done some work to get sound faithfully reproduced. For a while, we were focusing on music and trying to get the SDL midi synthesiser to play back this ancient XMIDI format. Believe it or not, this was actually acheived. Slight problem though, Syndicate used custom instruments. This was not uncommon at the time. The result was that the music just didn't sound good.. but it was good enough to ignore for a while. Having declared that I wasn't going to touch sound.. I got bored one day and changed my mind. I told myself that I really ment I wasn't going ...
Read more