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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 ...
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.
"Even if Cassini had slammed into the earth, the plutonium was of insignificant quantity to do any damage, I believe." actually cassini carried quite a bit of Pu-238 (about 122 moles) DEFINITLY enough to do alot of damage since only a few micrograms is considered enough to induce cancer if inhaled. the reason the Pu in Cassini is much less harmless is because it is in the dioxide (solid ceramic) form, about 33Kg of it; which does not tend to break up into respirable particles(ie. your coffe mug won't powderize if you drop it, it tends to break into large chunks). also they're in iridum/graphite capsules in case of reentry that you mentioned.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
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.
Nuclear power had a widespread use in spacecrafts in the last thirty years - not only in the outer space probes, like Pioneer 10 + 11, Voyager, Viking, Cassini, Galileo, but also in the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package, carried onboard the LEM (one of these RTGs crashed into the atmosphere on Apollo 13).
Most worse, the Soviets had used small natrium-cooled reactors in radar surveillance satellites during the sixties and seventies. Anyone remembers the Kosmos crashed in Canada in 1977? These vessels had a mechanism to separate the reactor just before the mission ended and send the reactor to a higher orbit, about 5000km, where it shoud stay for some thousand years - clearly not long enough to make the radiation vanish. In some cases, this mechanism didn't work, so there are two or three reactors remaining on lower orbits which maybe return to Earth in this century.
After the propellants for the stabilization system had been finished, the reactors broke up and spread the radioactive natrium alongside their orbital path.
So I think there is plenty of stuff to clean up in orbit for the next generations...
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.