Slashdot Mirror
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 ...
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.