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Mysterious Cold War Spacecraft Designs!
Kermit Woodall writes: "This is worth checking out: www.deepcold.com -- illustrated reports on US/Soviet cold war spacecraft designs that never saw completion." This site looks like a labor of love. I wonder what's being planned now that'll get scrapped but we won't know about till 2041 ...
Amazing!
;)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Dufus.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
It wasn't so much the media. People are always more willing to listen to first statements over later statements, bad news over good news, and simple answers over complex answers. Therefore, when the opponents of nuclear power, spread the simple bit of misinformation (knowingly or not) about plutonium, that was the bit that made the news. Anyone who tried to clean up the multiple errors had to fight that early impression, and was doomed to failure.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
1) Buran has no engines. It uses that space for cargo instead.
2) Buran still uses the old tile method for heat shielding. The Space Shuttle no longer uses the original asbestos tile. Now they have a spray-on version that doesn't fall off like the tiles did.
DOesn't really matter, space shuttles are a loser's game anyhow right now. It costs too much to launch payload into orbit for most purposes -- big dumb rockets can be built for cheap to launch most payloads (except for people, who need safer handlikng). The only use for a space shuttle is for a manned space program, and even there, the Russians did just fine with "dumb" capsules for many years, building Mir without a shuttle even.
Buran, alas, is one of those great ideas that won't ever really fly.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Actually it is not thousand time more expensive then coal --- only slightly more. The reason nuclear energy is more expensive is because nuclear power station have to meet much more strict restrictions on emission of radioactive elements then coal ones. If coal power stations were required to emit as little radioactive elements as nuclear ones, coal power would be more expensive. Coal power stations in US emit about 2000 tons of torium and 800 tons of uranium yearly.
Is there an original version of the above somewhere written in coherent,non-paranoid English? It sounds as though it would be interesting.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
by 1967 - with unmanned Corona satellites effectively managing this task and military costs escalating in Vietnam - MOL [the Manned Orbital Laboratory] was cancelled.
// Zarf //
Darn it. At the same time that the Cold War inspired these great innovations, the money spent on Cold War related efforts killed them! Danged if you do... danged if you don't.
Ofcourse today, there isn't much reason to go into space because we have the internet. Otherwise wouldn't VC's be spending some of that cash on space-tech? Or... maybe they are... and we don't know about it because we're computer geeks?
-
[signature]
First of all, it's SDI, not "Star Wars."
Secondly, your facts are in error. SDI was not cancelled because "the new laser technology failed to materialise." The whole POINT of the SDI effort was to build simple kinetic energy interceptors using off the shelf parts. Lasers were never part of the game plan, except in a "in 20 years, if this becomes available we'll use that too" sort of way. (Unlike Joe Reporter, I actually bothered to read the government releases on the SDI program in NTIS.)
The kinetic energy interceptors WERE developed, with a fair degree of success. They were called "brilliant pebbles," which is a play on "smart rocks," which is slang for kinetic energy interceptors. They made the news, and I even saw video of one of them flying around. Unfortunately, since the press had never done their research in the first place, they covered the story as "hey, guess those lasers didn't work out," which is insulting given that the only people talking seriously about fielding lasers at that point were Time and Newsweek.
I recommend checking around at college or city libraries near you to see if you can browse the NTIS reports (Otherwise, you'd have to spend big bucks getting things mailed to you on microfiche). You will get a lot clearer picture of what was going on than was given in the mainstream press.
Jon
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Buddhist Extremists Attack Temple
.... blah blah blah
Disassociated Press (DP) - Dhaka, Banglehesh
Bhodidharmilt, the paramilitary wing of the radical Buddhist extremist party staged a predawn raid at several area Christian churches this morning, killing at least 3 priests and kidnapping dozens of little children from daycare. "All I could see were orange robes, gas masks and blazing machine guns" said parishoner Albert Walker, who survived by hiding under a pew in the Choir Loft. "We were in the middle of morning vespers when we heard a commotions outside and suddenly the doors were bashed in with some strange god-headed battering ram, followed by dozens of bald headed, mantra chanting monks."
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
You can see pictures of the plane at this page.
My favorite factoid about Hyper-X is that the front half of the plane, more or less, is solid tungsten -- one of the densest materials there is; significantly denser than lead or even gold. Tungsten is very resistant to heat; and the weight serves as ballast to keep the pointy end forward -- but as I build model planes out of balsa wood using something 100 times as dense tickles my funny bone.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Wow, this actually got moderated UP?
Every single one of your precepts is wrong, nearly all of your facts are wrong, and all of your conclusions are based on those faulty facts and precepts.
I'll have to dissect this one paragraph-by-paragraph:
Star Wars was cancelled after it was realised that the technology involved (new types of lasers, etc) did not exist and was not about to, not to mention the fact they could never work out a way to solve the problem of thousands of decoys.
It wasn't cancelled, and the reason it was scaled back was quite the opposite; the people holding the purse strings thought we didn't need to spend that much money to solve the problems. They're still viewed as quite solveable.
However, Clinton recently (within the last year) made a statement to the effect a scaled down version of Star Wars was in the works.
Which proves you *KNEW* it wasn't cancelled, so that makes your first entry kind of curious.
This is in violation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty of 1972, in which the US and the USSR agreed the largest anti-missile system either one would develop would be to protect one (1) city, e.g. Moscow or Washington.
It is not in violation of the ABM treaty, and you've even listed the proof that it isn't; how could one deploy an anti-missile system to defend Washington without researching and developing it first?
Since you've admitted that the treaty (which, BTW, is held by some scholars to be null and void since it was with a country that no longer exists, and in any event is voidable by either party with six months' notice) allows for deployment, how can you therefore say it disallows research and development?
The point of the ABM treaty, if it's not obvious, is that if a country were to successfully develop such a system, the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction would be rendered completely null and void, thus allowing for destruction of at least half industrialized world. And it would be even worse if a country unsuccessfully developed such a system; such a confident country could launch an attack and then find its system fails defending against the counterattack, in which case there would be 100% destruction rather than just 50%.
And thus, why it's fallen out of favor and is likely to be abrogated at some point; because that's not the world situation.
Yes, it's true that we couldn't protect against 100% of a Soviet missile attack, or even probably a Russian one now.
But we most assuredly could protect against an attack by any of the other countries that have nuclear weapons, and against an attack by any of the dozen or so countries that will develop them in the next few years.
Unless, of course, we don't build the damn thing; then we're just screwed.
There is still a great deal of hostility between Russia and the US, and in many ways Russia's current rule is the same as it was, under a new name.
You got part right. Good job.
As a result, there are still a lot of worries about restarting an arms race.
Bzzzt, wrong answer, thanks for playing International Relations!
The Sovs were violating the damn treaty the whole time. The arms race in question was running the whole time; we just spent 8 years tying our shoelaces.
If the US is smart, it will not violate the ABM treaty--therefore, if the US is smart, Star Wars is gone for good.
Doesn't follow. SDI doesn't violate the treaty, so one means little to the other.
If the US is smart, it will get China to sign the treaty, merrily research and develop a system in complete compliance with the treaty, then abrogate it and deploy like crazy.
--
The ABM treaty restricts the deployment of an ABM system, not research and development. The treaty also has a termination clause that allows either party to withdraw from the treaty after giving six months notice. A limited ABM system that would protect the USA against a small scale attack is not a threat to Russia, which still has thousands of ICBM warheads.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The plutonium paranoia is a recent development. NASA flew RTGs on deep space missions and used them to power the ALSEP lunar experiment packages left on the Moon by the Apollo missions.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Are there any Buddhist extremists? I always thought Buddhists were really laid back and calm...
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
It is actually called the X Prize, and the web page is here.
Woogie
OK, I don't have details so you can file this response in the "rumour has it" category. However, the Metric/Imperial error seems to have been a *very* limited mistake caused by a misunderstanding between a supplier (I'm tempted to say Lockeed Martin but I may be well out on that one), and the customer (JPL, if I'm not mistaken).
I do not believe that this error - embarrassing and fundamentally unforgivable as it is - is a general indication of deterioration within NASA and related organisations. NASA, and JPL in particular, has a 30-year history of outstanding celestial navigation - work out the error-bars on getting Gallieo into Jovian orbit for instance.
So, to come back to the points above I personally would not be more wary today than during Cassini. You're extrapolating a single error into a systemic failure based on an extremely limited sample set.
Having said all that, I'd agree that the EI statement basically represents a pro-Cassini standpoint (after all, NASA's hardly likely to say "we'd like to launch this probe that will kill all life on earth if it blows up and oh by the way our launchers have a 20% failure rate"), although there's also something called Common Sense to be used.
RTGs (not russian honest-to-god Almaz reactors, but RTGs) have been flown, AND brought back to earth the "easy way" and the "hard way" (commonly known as "lithobraking" :-), with no measurable environmental damage. Apollo 13's RTG lies in 5 miles of water in the pacific after a 7KM/Sec re-entry, with no leakage. Yes, in theory there's enough Pu per RTG to eliminate humanity (for it's poisionous effects, not it's radioactivity). However that assumes you can magically transform that Pu from a solid lump contained in a foot-cubed package into sub-micron particles evenly distributed throughout the entire biosphere. Finding mechanisms to achieve this are somewhat problematic :-)
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Cassini did not "orbit Earth for a few days". Cassini flew-by Earth, at an insignificant distance (astronomically speaking), and thus gained a significant velocity boost in exchange for stripping the Earth of a infinitesimal amount of it's orbital velocity about the sun.
Because of Mr. Newton (and to a limited degree Mr. Einstein), the chances of a collision with the Earth during this fly by were approximately 0% (to any degree of precision you choose). The environmentalist's assessment of the danger to the biosphere caused by this manoever was therefore even harder to justify than the fears of contamination during launch.
However I would have been very interested to have seen a competent arguement made over the increase in global warming that will *inevitably* result from the momentum-loss caused by Cassini - after all, our orbit is now *that much* closer to the sun :-).....
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
>>In the era of McCarthyism and the Cuban Missile Crises>>
:)
They did pursue it relentlessly back in the late 50s and early 60s. By the time they figured out how to actually do it, sub-launched missles were just as effective and much cheaper. Instead of spending a few billion for a FOBS satellite or two, they just built Trident.
Mike
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get me.
If you mean Cassini, yeah, people kinda went goofy over that. Even better - it actually had two chances to kill us all. After orbiting Venus for a little while for a gravitational boost, Cassini had to orbit Earth for a few days to do the same thing. Some were afraid the Saturn probe would somehow end up crashing through the atmosphere and spilling the plutonium all over the atmosphere and into our lungs.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Well, AC - whoever you are - thank you!
For years I have tried to find out more information on the Antipodal Bomber, the only reference being some book I had checked out long ago from the library when I was a kid - I thought I might have dreamt the whole thing. Thank you for restoring my sanity!
BTW, this is what I live to see on the web - not all the commercial shit that is out there, but honest sites bringing cool information - information that is hard or impossible to find otherwise...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
And can someone with an aerospace engineering degree tell me what the difficulties are in building one? One would think they'd be easier to do than a rocket launch since you can get lift for the first 15 miles or so, as opposed to going straight up.
The big difficulty is heating and engines.
From memory, low earth orbital velocity is around mach 25.
For a space plane, you want to breathe oxygen from the atmosphere for as long as you can, this cuts down the amount of oxidizer you need to carry along.
However, the faster you go in the atmosphere, the greater the frictional drag, and the hotter you get. The fastest a known jet plane has gone in the atmosphere is about Mach 3.3, with the SR-71. To do this, it needed special alloys, a corrugated skin, and leaky fuel tanks (which seal when the plane heast up). To go faster, you need better materials, and perhaps a regeneratively cooled skin (cooled with liguid hydrogen or liquid methane perhaps). The fastest a known manned plane has gone (except for the shuttle) is Mach 6-ish, with the X-15. The X-15 was rocket powered, which brings us to the engine question.
A conventional jet engine burns fuel at subsonic speeds, meaning the airflow through the engine must be subsonic.
So what do supersonic planes do? They slow down the airflow using compressive shockwaves, generated by the nose, and engine inlet geometry. Each change in contour generates a small shockwave, which slows and compresses the airflow a little bit. You build enough little shockwaves, and your supersonic airflow becomes subsonic, and your engine works. You can only do this so much, though, and the maximum supersonic speed you can reasonably slow down is probably around Mach 3.3.
There is a theoretical solution though, the Supersonic Combustion Ramjet, or SCRamjet. The Scramjet burns fuel at supersonic velocities, and is theoritically capable of reaching Mach 25.
Of course, you need alloys that can withstand the heating of Mach 25, and you need a way to push the SCRamjet to supersonic speeds, which is either rockets or another jet engine.
Interestingly, a SCRamjet was scheduled to be tested on an X-15 flight, but the program was cancelled.
You may get better mileage from a rocket powered plane that gets some atmospheric oxygen, it lets you cut your takeoff mass.
Why did rockets get us into orbit? They are a brute force solution, bring everything with you you need to burn, and don't speed up until you're past the astmosphere.
Wild rumors? There have been plans for liquid methane cooled Mach 5 surveillance craft floating around which ride on their shockwave, and you can do a web search on Aurora.
Hope this helps,
George Haberberger
BSAE Penn State, 1988
There's an interesting analysis of the Cassini Environmental Impact Statement here. I'd take it with a grain of salt, but I'd take NASA's statements on the risks the same way. (Check out pre-Challenger estimates of risk on the Shuttle, for example.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The russian shuttle was an almost exact copy of the US shuttle, but it was called 'Boran' or something similar. I think it's in an amusement park somewhere at the moment. Energija is a russian booster-rocket, quite a powerful one. Can't give much details since I don't know them :)
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Nah.. they'll just print Dyna-soar-achu, the pokemon. times change...
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
It was. The idea goes way back and I think the BIS (British Interplanetary Society) had some of the earliest ideas about this.
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
Kids these days. Jesus Christ.
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
John Walker's Website contains information on the Salyut 3 (Almaz) station that apparently carried an automatic cannon (like on a MiG fighter). Cosmonaut Pavel Popovich (the ?4?th person to fly in space) claims he flew on the station with the weapon aboard but it was only fired once to test when no cosmonauts were on board. They had to hook the station's thrusters into the controls so they would fire simultaneously to offset the thrust of the gun. Wierd stuff eh? Strange but (apparently) true.
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
Who are these idle millionaires who are supporting this prize? Why not invest this cash with a reputable company they think has major potential instead of setting up this little trust to hasten something that takes time to do right and when isn't done correctly might just kill test pilots and passengers?
I've seen this Diamandis character on TV, all he needs is a persian cat and a monocle and he's a damn Bond Villian. Nothing stinks of insincerity like talking about how there are expected casualties in the new privte space race. Screw him, no one's life is worth his prize and private developers should take the responsible and slow way to develop a reusable 'space' tourist craft.
...we get the plans (we can do it, we're SLASHDOT, we can do anything) and build our very own Zvesda (the Russian word for "star" BTW). We can get the plutonium on the black market to power the thing. I have some contacts in Sankt Petorburg who would be more than willing to help.
/. reader were to contribute just $50.
Once she is in orbit, we begin our conquest of Redmond. Fisrt, we launch an offensive against Microsoft's network of spy satillites (you know they're watching you!), then, drop a small nuke on M$ headquarters in Redmond.
We can raise the money without any problems, if every
Long Live TUX!!!
-----
Vikhozhu odin ya na darogu;
Skvoz' tuman kremnisti put' blectit;
Noch' tikha. Pystinya vnemlet bogu,
Rhapsody in Numbers
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
IIRC, the Tupolev-144 was largely a carbon copy of Concorde, at least in it's later incarnation. The first prototype (that flew before Concorde) was configured differently. It carried more passengers than Concorde, but was a lot less fuel efficient (It was heavier, and needed more power). Details on the amount of spying that took place can be found here. It seems that Soviet Russia certainly did not have her eye solely on the USA.
Of course, popular theory would suggest the West would never have stooped to spying back, until it was discovered that the famous crash at Le Bourget, which sank the Tupolev's reputation was caused by maneouvres to evade a French Mirage photo-reconaissance jet ;-)
There was a comparitively recent NASA experiment on supersonic transport, using the Tupolev as a basis.
This could be considered OT, but it shows exactly how much those on both sides of the Iron Curtain would throw at a project to keep them one step ahead (Not that I would relish a return to those dark old days).
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
Even if Cassini had slammed into the earth, the plutonium was of insignificant quantity to do any damage, I believe. And had the rocket that launched Cassini exploded on launch, the RTG would have survived intact and still sealed. There was more danger due to falling debris than due to radiation from a comprimised RTG.
-Aerowolf
I dont have a link to the satellite killer you are talking about, but... from this link here, it looks like China either does, or will have soon the same capability.
Scary.
However, Clinton recently (within the last year) made a statement to the effect a scaled down version of Star Wars was in the works. This is in violation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty of 1972, in which the US and the USSR agreed the largest anti-missile system either one would develop would be to protect one (1) city, e.g. Moscow or Washington.
Needless to say, Russia isn't happy about Clinton making statements to the effect he's going to violate this treaty (I'm sure they weren't too happy about Reagan doing it either, of course). As a result, when they agreed to a recent big nuclear arms reduction treaty, the name of which escapes me, a couple of weeks ago, Putin announced that if the US persisted in violating the ABM treaty of 1972, Russia would pull out of every arms treaty it has entered into.
The point of the ABM treaty, if it's not obvious, is that if a country were to successfully develop such a system, the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction would be rendered completely null and void, thus allowing for destruction of at least half industrialized world. And it would be even worse if a country unsuccessfully developed such a system; such a confident country could launch an attack and then find its system fails defending against the counterattack, in which case there would be 100% destruction rather than just 50%.
There is still a great deal of hostility between Russia and the US, and in many ways Russia's current rule is the same as it was, under a new name. As a result, there are still a lot of worries about restarting an arms race. If the US is smart, it will not violate the ABM treaty--therefore, if the US is smart, Star Wars is gone for good.
I used to work on this stuff at NorTek until I got laid off. I was pissed off for a while, until I discovered the internet. The site makes me nostalgic for the days when I was defending America from communism.
"I am an American. You are a sick asshole!!"
A lot of these designs sure look a lot like things I've read about in comics, but the best part is that they might actually work! Personally, I think it's a bit strange that NASA is still using the space shuttle, wich to my knowledge is built on tecnology from the (late) 70's. (Perhaps they work by the slogan "If it works, don't fix it"?) I suppose they have changed a few parts inside of it, but still, the design is about as old as I am. (And I sure wouldn't last long in space! ;-) ) The more interesting it will be to see if any of these will make it into orbit, and hopefully (I might be a bit egoistic here, but when I'm happy, I can start helping others being happy, right? And I know I'm not alone about this.) space vacations in no-gravity environment will be possible before I'm to old to participate. A weekend in space with friends or family might be great fun!
And then there is a scientific view of it. I don't know much about this, but the has been done research of how no gravity affect old people. How about living on "Mars retirement home" for a couple of months a year. Floating around, don't having to stand on those weary bones. I suppose there would be a back side to this, too, but I can't really think of any (except for the bones weakening from lack of "use"), since I don't have any first hand information (yet).
And profit. Of course, some (a lot) people will try to make money on this, and I know they would probably get mine. However, I don't think I'll live to se huge mining shuttles returning from other planets with minerals and other things. But if this science takes on part of the development speed that we see when it comes to computers, I might be prooven wrong about that.
Still, it is interesting to see that the designs look quite a bit like the old spaceships, landers and return capsules. Could it be that we found the best alternative "right away"?
---
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
I heard a funny story about this: the reason is computing power, the difference similar to the gulf between Playstaion 1 and 2. The science of modern stealth topology comes out of an old book by a Russian scientist who studied the effects of radar on simple polygons. The early designers of the stealth fighter used this book as their bible and created a computer simulation to generate the profile of the plane. The computer and program were very crude (by today's standards) and could only model a small number of primitive polygons.
Later versions of the software and hardware have become much more sophistiacted so we end up with profiles like that of the stealth bomber. Sleek and smooth.
Anyone looking for information on the Sanger spaceplane (which both Dyna-Soar and its Soviet equivalent were influenced by) should try here.
Actually, anyone interested in aerospace "what if"s might find the site that's on kinda interesting - lots of information on what Nazi Germany had waiting in the wings towards the end of the war - had the war gone on longer and Germany's industry not been pretty much reduced to rubble by that point. Simultaneously fascinating and frightening.
I really appreciate the hard work that these people went through to get this site up. It's an incredible piece of work, and I can imagine it being informative for both space buffs and the curious individual.
but...
I watched their movie about the LK Lunar Lander and, of course, they got it all wrong. There is no sound in space! . Will anyone ever get this one thing right? I mean, they easily could've put on Russian radio communications during landing (that would've been cool) and given the extraordinary detail they went into in this site, you'd think they wouldn't let something like that slip through.
All well, that's just a pet peeve of mine. Please return to your regular reading.
The site references this, but provides no link. You can visit it here. Quite a bit of information can be found there. Pictures, articles, etc.
-dwd-
I had thought that the nuclear propulsion method Niven/Pournelle proposed in Footfall had actually been a cold war design at one point.
In the 1960s there was a lot of discussion about FOBS (Fractional Orbit Bombardment System), an idea that was popular in the Soviet Union. This was a nuclear warhead delivery system that involved putting a nuclear warhead in low Earth orbit and deorbiting it over the desired target. The idea of nuclear weapons in orbit, waiting for someone to push a button, made many people unhappy. This type of weapon was banned by treaty.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I've been told that the U.S. Air Force is still pissed off about the cancellation of DynaSoar, Blue Gemini, and the "Blue Shuttle". They had a great program when they were flying the X-15. After that, all of their manned space programs were repeatedly cancelled in favor of NASA programs.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
There was actually an unmanned MOL test flight just before the project was cancelled. The Gemini capsule it carried was a refurbished one that had flown before and so was the first spacecraft to fly in space twice, about 20 years before the first shuttle flight. Here's a picture of a MOL Gemini and you can see the hatch in the heat shield that would lead back into the main part of the spaecraft. This actually isn't as dodgy as it sounds as during re-entry the heat would melt the hatch shut making it quite secure. Another interesting thing is that the Titan III rocket developed to launch MOL was eventually used to launch the Voyager probes and the Viking spacecraft to Mars. To know what they're currently doing up there, the best source is the Federation of American Scientists site, www.fas.org
...that the "50-50 concept model" of the space plane looked a lot like queen amidala's ship???
Zvezda would have been powered while in orbit by 2 plutonium radioisotope generators and had a rapid-fire gun for defense against killer-satellites.
I can see including an anti-satellite gun ("sputoyed" anyone?), but the last time NASA launched a probe with an RTG, people went ballistic (no pun intended). And that's for a one-time launch. You can imagine what the furor would be if either space agency got into the habit of having rockets regularly going up and down with a plutonium payload?
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
This just illustrates the great evil of our times: peace.
Just think what marvels would have been cooked up during the cold war if it had lasted. But, nooooo, we had to get all warm and fuzzy. Without the "Red Menace" breathing down our necks, we stopped out push for better, faster, cheaper ways to kill people.
All those talented designers...wasted on bridges and curing diseases...
---
Dammit, my mom is not a Karma whore!
1. completely onboard-computer operated
2. had solid fuel booster, which had more then enough power.
3. has been a rip-off the US Shuttle.
The onboard computer had less power then amiga, just that the code was superb (I wish people writing that code would write something for Linux). When they first fired this up, it flew so fast, that they had to shut the main thruster before it actually went to the orbit, because they were afraid they would loose it somewhere above Canada.
Now, talking about Superior Russian Design...
Madame Curie lived to be 82 after
,they didn't NEED me they
being exposed to concentrations of
radiation that would be equal to the
nuclear waste collected from running the entire
world for a century.She was rxposed every day for
five years and went on to live longer than 70
% of the readers might expect to share.
People used to wear false teeth & paint
their apartments with a yellow Uranium oxide,
which is slightly radioactive.
To run the planet would take 3 lbs of uranium a
year. The ash for running the planet for a 100
years would fit into your monitor box.
If You melted the 300 lbe of Uranium
into 5 tons of silicon oxide the resultant
rock would be as radioactive as any other rock.
Drop it into a subducting plate and it wouldn't
appear again for a billion years.
What they are burying in all those
containers is plastic gloves. The barrels are
half filled with plastic gloves.
So far the wealth and birthright of
2 generations have been looted by the ignorant
who profess a knowledge well beyond their
training or interest.
I could make a dosimeter that would
allow these SO CALLED CONCERNED CITIZENS
to pick lo rad foods at their grocers.
The cost in parts? less than a buck.
[a piece of cyano acrylate doped with
zinc oxide,a photodiode a cheap digital
watch chip & a case]
Picking between carrots or potatos
or apples grown in NATURALLY radioactive
soils or the lesser radioactive vegs&
meats would make the difference equal to
having been 200 miles down wind in the
fallout of a 1 megaton bomb. [difference in internalized rads after a month or so. But you
won't find a single one of them that
would go for $10 to protect themselves or
their beloved families. They advocate the destruction of the dreams & and aspiratione
of 2 generations on ideas they wouldn't invest a thin dime on.I can only believe that its because the know the truth. What other reason could there be.
In 1945 the US developed techniques that
allowed them to put together enough fissionble
material to make a bomb which a free mason president droped. Two years later the age of the UFO opened.
A number of years back I was an M P, I got
called to this traffic accident. This guy
who came thru the halt sign was doing a great
job of looking skunked. After trying to convince me that the girl in the other was responsible he
finally blurts out , hes a mason, switch the report around or things could get difficult for you. I had just come from sleeping over nuclear
weapons for six months, how bad could it be.
[The free masons are those guys who
accused themselves of killing several popes ,
stole money from same, (knights Templar)
caused the anti masonic third party with a
murder, branded themselves the beast by
placing their great seal on the dollar.
("He looks with favor upon our new world
order") And they brag they don't pay tickets;
they got contacts. So half my squad & ths desk seargent had a field day messing with me. It was only later I realized
could have lost the report or my junior could have wrote & signed it. If I had stuck it to the wrong guy they could easily own me today.
I don't khow how it looks to you , I know how it seemsto me. I don't think that the Space program is going to pass muster and looking at the pretty pictures doesn.t make it better
^ ^ ^ ^ ^
The guys with Desert
Storm syndrome have
been thoroughly checked
for chemical and
bacterial agents but
none were found. Sounds
the only other possibility is
MICROWAVE LASERl,
The X-Project is here to make sure great ideas happen. With a prize of 10 million dollars on the line the last time I heard there was about 50 contestents. The contest? The first reusable orbital craft. If you can design a craft that can carry 3 people, reach high enough altitudes to enter into orbit, return to earth, and send another 3 people up within a week, you win. There is supposedly a constestant ready to launch this summer, and many more within three years. Who needs governments, we have competition.
That's why I'm starting to wonder whether putting DeepCold.com on the Intneret was a safe move. The principal threat in the world today has shifted from rogue nation-states to paramilitary fringe groups. What if some group of Buddhist extremists decides to build its own Blue Gemini or ZVEZDA and rain death down upon Western civilization? Would-be terrorists have often gotten bomb plans off the Internet... wouldn't getting spaceship plans off the Internet be the logical progression? We couldn't even do a damn thing to stop it, since U.N. regulations prohibit nations from building weapons in space. I really don't want to have look up in the sky every day wondering if a nuclear missile is waiting up there with my name on it. Remember that kids' book "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs"? Well, picture a really, really violent version of that and you've sort of got what I have in mind. This is a fascinating subject, but as much as I hate to say it, some information is better off classified...
BTW, congrats to DeepCold.com for not suffering from the Slashdot Effect (yet).
Yu Suzuki
Yu Suzuki
Deamcast. It's thinking.
This is going to sound kind of silly, but has anyone else noticed a preferences for angularly joined planar surfaces in US designs and smooth curved surfaces in Soviet designs?
With the exception of the spacecraft that are meant to be stuck on top of a cylindrical rocket, the American designs featured on this site all look vaguely like modern stealth aircraft (which have good reason to look that way). Even compare the design of the Soviet lunar landar to the US LEM. The US LEM has a kind of geodesic look to it, wheras the Soviet design looks like an oblate spheroid.
I've heard that the Russian spacecraft are rather more handbuilt than US ones; could this somehow be related to the different look of Russian craft? Or is there a kind of aesthetic sense which consciouly or unconsciously crept into the designs so they would look "cool"?
Remember the old TV show, "Batman"? The Batmobile has the kind of angular design aesthetic that displaced the melted edge look of the 40's and 50's autos in the 60's. US aerospace designs seem to have undergone the same transition.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Here's a link to the russian space shuttle Buran in english. And for you dot.com millionaires it looks like you can buy one, in russian though. Real photos, not any of that CG crap. This one is especially sexy, can we say Brrrr, comrade?
This badboy's rocket, Energia, could lift 4 times the tonnage compared to the space shuttle's engine and booster, it even had an automatic landing program.
does that make you horny, baby?
ack! don't hit me! it was just a joke!
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.