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Mysterious Cold War Spacecraft Designs! 176

Posted by timothy from the while-the-pentagon-was-buying-toilet-seats dept.
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 ...
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Mysterious Cold War Spacecraft Designs! More

Mysterious Cold War Spacecraft Designs!

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  • Design ripoffs (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I would like to remind all of you that the complete foundation of the US space program was not created by americans, but rather germans who, were.. uh.. 'offered' jobs here. We are still seeing their research affect our space program. A good example would be ion propulson research which was initiated by Von Braun, der father of der Amerikan space programme. Heck, nearly all of the small arms(among other things) the US Army uses today are copies or descendants of copies of German weapons. The M-60 machine gun is a good example of that.
  • Both the successor agency to the KGB and the CIA both view "economic intelligence" (e.g. filching airplane plans from other countries) to be a major part of their mission now that the Cold War is mostly over (except for Elian!).

    Spooks don't disappear, they just change targets.

    -E

  • Some of these look pretty nice, but others look like rejects from 80's cartoons.

    I'm sure "Dyna Soar" could carve out a nice place in "The Transformers" or "G.I. Joe", but the name is still too cheesy. Good thing they didn't build it. Spiral looks pretty, though.

    This is *definitely* a labor of love, looking at what he had to do to get the images to look nice. Three different programs, image maps, mapping textures to individual, hand-picked polygons, tweaking... Ugh. Too much work for me. :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

  • Just asking, but I was under the impression that MOL and Dynasoar were either not secret or have been declassified since 1970, at least.

    Another good site along these lines is the Encyclopedia Astronautica, if I could remember where it is.

  • Cassini was the probe carrying plutonium RTGs which caused a furor among some misguided activists, a few years back.

    The only way that the amount of plutonium on Cassini could be dangerous to large numbers of people is if it were dispersed in a fine dust. That is simply impossible - or, to be scientifically precise, is so improbable as to be unworthy of consideration.

    The plutonium stored in RTGs is mixed into a hard ceramic which is designed to crack into large pieces. The ceramic is encased in such a way that it is designed to survive re-entry.

    The most dangerous thing that would happen from Cassini, or any other RTG-powered spacecraft, smashing into the earth, would be that it would land on someone's head.

    The next most dangerous unplanned-reentry scenario, and the most likely scenario for plutonium poisoning of anyone, is that chunks of solid ceramic with plutonium oxide in them would smack small craters in the ground, and that some exceptionally stupid person would walk up to the craters and decide to devour the hot smoking projectiles buried in the craters. That's really the only (statistically feasible) way the plutonium could be ingested by anyone. Of course, eating the stuff probably wouldn't kill you anyway because you'd excrete it all in a day or two.

    Indeed, the anti-Cassini activists even admitted that the most dangerous period was during launch - and during launch, the forces involved are simply not enough to disperse the plutonium in a dangerous manner. Worse-case scenario is a launch explosion which would scatter big ceramic chunks around the area - where they would sit and do no harm. A launch explosion simply cannot vaporize these things, they're very solidly built.

    I worked out the odds a few years back when Cassini launched. The total statistical danger to human life posed by Cassini between its launch and its flyby turned out to be far smaller (by several orders of magnitude) than the danger, during the same period of time, that an unrecognized near-earth asteroid would smack the planet hard enough to cause mass extinction. If people are concerned about death from above, they should put their activist effort into programs to identify near-earth asteroids.

    Jamie McCarthy

  • AC, Thanx for the links! I've been looking for Saanger info for a while, with little luck.
    J05H
  • Who in their right corporate minds is going to subject a bunch of old people rich enough to afford it, and therefore rich enough to afford trained attack lawyers, to several G's of acceleration at liftoff?
  • Think "hidden insights". In this case hidden from the person who had them. (you're right about the less than universally excellent quality of moderation these days, though)
  • Search on the terms "South Vietnam" and "self-immolation". Always seemed pretty extreme to me.
  • Who actually signed the ABM and other treaties? Russia, or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics? Are any other former USSR members obligated in any way by any of those treaties?
  • WvB was not involved in the Manhattan project as he was still an active Nazi working in Holland to build V2's. But otherwise yes he was the NASA director during the Saturn V effort.
  • Actually most of the Nazi scientists that formed the core of the American space program were hurried out of Germany at the end of the war and hidden away in military projects in the US. This was called 'Project Paperclip'. The reason they were hidden away was not because we were afraid that the Russians would get them. Instead it was because we KNEW they were actively being sought by Allied agencies for prosecution as war criminals for their activities during the war. It was a well known open secret that von Braun and company were ardent, respected, honored and low numbered Nazi party members, that they made extensive use of slave labor in camp Dora and other places, that the entire Nazi space medicine program was founded on torture and murder of victims in the camps and that the US gov't under Paperclip which was a joint project of the CIA and DIA was hiding these people. In several instances Paperclip arranged to 'kidnap' back several scientists who had actually been captured and detained in the US and overseas.
  • Because as we all know you can't shut off an SRB. So there must have a liquid fuel component or the story is incorrect.
  • But since they were designed in the late seventies it is likely that they are hardly more powerful than a 68000/7

    The 68000 came out in the late seventies. IIRC one 68000 controls each of the shuttle's 3 main engines. They are mounted on the engines to avoid long control cables (and have to endure lots of g's due to vibration) and make sure that the engines don't explode in operation.

    The shuttle's engines are used to nearly maximum of their power unlike earlier engines like Saturn's for example. Before engines had to be seriously oversized to be driven at a fraction of their available power just because of the danger of an explosion.

  • the Pentagon wouldn't have wasted its money on anything that wasn't completely feasible.

    Bwahahahah! [Bob falls over laughing]

    -=Bob

  • Local drugstore. Buy some hydrogen peroxide.
  • There is some US law, or UN regulation that bans RTGs, it was passed, and was set to go into effect like a month after Cassini was launched
  • This guy points out that the plutonium is in a pelittized form. Even if that stuff were to fall into earth orbit, it wouldnt kill us.

    The reason nasa scraped use of RTGs is because of public outcry over the shooting of plutonium. The media would say, that their newest space craft is carring 6 pounds of plutonium, when only one pound is enouf to kill everybody on earth. Of course, the media dosent tell people it is in a ceramic form.

  • Taken directly from the deepcold website:

    The images shown are all my own renderings of spacecraft which were planned but never flew operationally, some cancelled before they even left the drawing board. While the pictures are fictional interpretations (except Spiral), the text describing each project is factual unless otherwise indicated.

    If the person who makes the images himself is saying they are fictional interpretations then, really, how can you argue as to authenticity? What I said was what he said on the web site. If I'm wrong, he's wrong.

  • If you read what I posted, I said:

    Aside from the text describing the projects, the author states that these are total fabrications.

    Meaning, that the text descriptions weren't fabrications.

  • If you read the fine print on this site, you'll see that all of these designs (save one) are made up by the site's author. Aside from the text describing the projects, the author states that these are total fabrications. While I suspect he's done his homework on making the designs look authentic, and they certainly look plausible, I have real doubts any "rogue nation" is going to get anything out of this site that they couldn't get out of "Avaiation Week."

  • 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).

    What happens when these old folks come back? Their bones, which weren't so strong to begin with, would be far too weak from the loss of calcium. Astronauts in the primes of their lives who have spent months in space need a good deal of training and reconditioning before they return to normal, so imagine whatit would be like for an elderly person. Forget about weekend visits and the like, too...

    If you blast Grandpa into orbit, he ain't coming back. :)

  • Does it really matter that the shuttle was originally designed in the late 70's? The F-117a was designed around the same time. Almost every one of our front line fighters (F-14, F-16, F-15), come from the 60's.

    That doesn't mean that they are still based on technology from that era, though. All have updated computer systems, glass cockpits, better engines, etc... The platform might be a few decades old, but the technology is quite current.

  • I though the site (deepcold.com) is very beautifully crafted. The attention to detail, the planning, and the focus on process is great. I was very impressed by the page which describes the making the models, and I love how the whole thing was made by one (1) person USING CHEAP READILY AVAILABLE MACINTOSH SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE. This is a reminder to all of the creative, talented, amazing people out there, that it does take a 256 processor SGI Onix reality engine, with Softimage XSI, Maya , and Pro-Engineer, and a crew of 400 animators and designers and editors etc; to create really amazing work with creativity, perseverance and passion. People on this site have tons of great ideas, but spend too much time talking about them, and rumminating both about which tools to use and how much god damn linux nodes, it will take and wether to use overclocked atlhons, verses liquid cooled Alphas. /.ers get a grip and remember that why you are using this site (News for Nerds) in the first place is that you where the geeks in school who spent countless hours soldering together random parts to make your own computers, or in some cases film recorders. Instead of merely yapping, put your money where yo mouth is and challange, George Lukas and the like by producing your own "Starwars", (shieet!! he's even using All hd VIDEO for his next Episode 2) which hopefully wont SUCK as much as the first one --Did that freakky ridiculous comic relief character need to have a stupid Jamaican accent, and why is there so much ecco's of the Aryan Power movement in this movie (Darth Vador's mom has a German Accent?) . Why is it if Linux is so so great, there still isn't real strong video support in it, why is it that even BeOs has more tools to make a Starwars than all of the Linux distro's and it's legions of coders? Let's not even talk about content. it seems the Whole culture of linux is driven By 4 or 5 people, with a bunch of others just following and repeating everything they hear. This is supposedly the place of people who take their lives into their own hands, by making their own tools and thinking their own ideas. But all I really see here is a bunch of drones, who spend their time Politiking and creating more conjecture to pile on top of all the shit we already have, and none really pushing the enveloppe by creating something trully amazing. But I guess we only really need one Linus. the rest of youz, can just follow around, and FANTISIZE, which is a lot different than CREATING. (the only way things get done is by doing them) Sorry about being so High and Mighty but I needed to rant about something that I myself is as most of you are guilty of.
  • A) It's the X-Prize not X-Project
    B) It doesn't have to be orbital, it only has to reach an altitude of 100 kilometers.

  • Our shuttle's new "glass" dash [slashdot.org]...

  • http://spacefligh t.nasa.gov/station/assembly/flights/2000/1r.html [nasa.gov]

    Looks like the prototype minus some panels & the rapid-fire gun.
  • You're referring to an ongoing USAF project called the Airborne Laser (ABL) [boeing.com]. Contractors include Boeing, TRW, and Lockheed Martin.
  • Umm... no, the SR-71 doesn't look like queen amidala's ship, smartass. I appreciate the "kids" sentiment, tho...
  • Man these designs are nothing. You guys should see what the Air Force was working on in the 60's with Adolph Coors.

    Coors originally had a ceramics manufacturing plant out in Colorado (someone feel free to correct me at any time if my dates and places slip) that the government used to send contracts to. He later opened a brewery up the road and became famous, but before that, his ceramics plant was manufacturing nuclear ramjet engine cores for a little Air Force black ops deal called Project Pluto.

    Here's how it worked: You take a standard nuclear core, but honeycomb it so it's air-cooled. Set the thing inside a large ramjet-type design inside something the size of an ICBM, get the thing up to about Mach 2 with solid rocket boosters, and start up the engine. It'll last about six months of continuous operation, during which time you have the thing run laps over the Pacific. Give it cruise-missle-like guidance, load it up with strategic H-bombs, and when a war breaks out, simply cruise the things over to their intended targets at around Mach 6.

    Nothing can catch them, or shoot them down, or even see them coming. It would have been the perfect first-strike weapon, or the perfect retalitory weapon, as there's no pilots to scramble out of bed, and all you have to do is push the button!

    For several reasons, however, the program was cancelled, as they couldn't get around problems like, the exhaust is highly radioactive, consisting of particles of the ceramic core, and dust from the fuel rods themselves. Plus, nap-of-the-earth flight at supersonic speeds tends to annoy whoever's directly underneath, and our allies might get pissed at being horribly irradiated and defeaned as the thing screamed overhead.

    Also, there were some difficulties with explaining away such an obvious terror weapon as a "defensive solution."
  • SLC-6 was originally built for the MOL program. I thought it had been used for Titan III launches, but I could be wrong. I know the last plan was to modify it to accept the Titan IV launchers.
  • I stand corrected - forgot most of the details, just knew that Cassini had to come back by Earth, and the more hard-core environmentalists were having conniptions.

    Thanks for the info!
    Plat
  • Ok, so the guy did a really nice job with the rendered pictures, and the "cool" look of the site. So all in all it just all seem prefect.
    But there's just one tiny thing that's missing, PROOF ?

    Ok so I guess if your an X-Files junky an tend to believe the whole conspiration theories it's ok the jump straight ahead a go for all this.
    But I simply can't get the feeling of a "never published" Popular Mechanics about secret space programs out of my head

    Just give me a tiny bit of FACTS, and I will shut up ;)

    Murphy(c)

  • Please do yourself a favor and go educate yourself a little bit about world religions before spouting such ignorant and prejudiced crap. Let me suggest Huston Smith's The Religions of Man as a starting point.

    There are plenty of Muslim and Buddhist scientists and engineers out there. Yes, there are also those who are ignorant and fearful about science, but one can say the same about Chrsitians, Jews, Hindus, Pagans, and atheists.

  • It'll cost me $50 to nuke Redmond and I get to use Linux or *BSD? What do I get when I spend $100+ for Windows?

    A Blue Screen? That's it?



    Devil Ducky
  • Actually the name for Russian Shuttle is "Buran" that means "Snow storm". "Energiya" (just Russian for 'energy') is a rocket booster intended to carry Buran into orbit. Energiya was capable of placing 100 metric ton payload into near-earth orbit. There were two launches of Energiya sometime around 1988. Buran has flown once in an automatic mode (without a crew on board and with fully automatic landing). In early 90s the program was discontinued because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and radical changes in Russian military doctrine. There is still a deteriorating gigantic launch pad for Energiya rockets at Baikonur in Kazakhstan. Three Burans were built and are kept somewhere in Russia now. There is a web site about this project http://www.buran.ru/ [buran.ru] with some pretty pictures (all in Russian).
  • > I think it's in an amusement park somewhere at the moment. There was something like that in Gorky Park (now called 'Neskushnyi sad') in Moscow. But actually that was not Buran itself but its full-scale mockup originally used to test spaceship aerodynamics.
  • Russians had little ressources and electronic stuff, but they did make up for it with more inventivity and originality in design. Plus they are the only country on earth using metric system in their planes (ie altitude in meters) - which is cool.

  • We nuke it from orbit.. It's the only way to be sure.
  • Don't all these pictures remind you of that Battlezone(the remake, not the original) game by Activision?
  • Now we just need to defend America from Washington..you decide which one..
  • 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
  • The big differences in the Buran design that I saw:

    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

  • 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.
  • by 1967 - with unmanned Corona satellites effectively managing this task and military costs escalating in Vietnam - MOL [the Manned Orbital Laboratory] was cancelled.

    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?

    - // Zarf //
  • 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 [ntis.gov].)

    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 [ntis.gov] 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
  • Buddhist Extremists Attack Temple
    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." .... blah blah blah
  • Scramjets are not purely theoretical; or at least the theory will be tested quite soon; on the Hyper-X. This is a relatively small test vehicle, to be boosted by a Pegasus rocket to Mach 7 to Mach 10 (depending on the test) and then fly for a little while; before plunging into the ocean.

    You can see pictures of the plane at this page. [nasa.gov]

    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

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Are there any Buddhist extremists? I always thought Buddhists were really laid back and calm...

  • It is actually called the X Prize, and the web page is here [xprize.org].

    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 :-)

  • 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 :-).....

  • >>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.
  • 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...
  • 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
  • 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).
    ...Assuming, that is, that everyone calculated everything properly. With recent failures on the Mars probes, I'd be much more wary of something going up today than I was during the Cassini launch and fly-by.

    There's an interesting analysis of the Cassini Environmental Impact Statement here. [animatedsoftware.com] 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.)

  • Search on the terms "South Vietnam" and "self-immolation". Always seemed pretty extreme to me.
    When viewed against the background of American actions at the time - like carpet bombing - self-immolation actually seems sort of restrained.
  • 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
  • Nah.. they'll just print Dyna-soar-achu, the pokemon. times change...
  • It was. The idea goes way back and I think the BIS (British Interplanetary Society) had some of the earliest ideas about this.
  • Golly! What an -- amazing -- thought! And you know what else, that SR-71 Blackbird jet looks a lot like queen amidala's ship, too! Do you suppose Kelly Johnson had access to early cuts of Episode 1 back in 1963 and borrowed the design?

    Kids these days. Jesus Christ.

  • John Walker's Website [fourmilab.ch] 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.
  • 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.

    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 /. reader were to contribute just $50.

    Long Live TUX!!!
    -----
    Vikhozhu odin ya na darogu;
    Skvoz' tuman kremnisti put' blectit;
    Noch' tikha. Pystinya vnemlet bogu,
  • The threat of a small extremist group making a craft that is capable of going into orbit is highly unlikely. First, even if you don't have write offs for $400 hammers the cost of making a craft like this is enormous. You need a launching platform, heat shielding, and a lot of other stuff I don't even know about. Not to mention rocket fuel. The cost and complexity of such a project makes it almost impossible for a small group, even if they were well funded, to do. Making a bomb is another story. Sorta complex but much, much, MUCH easier then building a shuttle. We have more to fear from someone walking into a city with a brief case that blows it to kingdom come then we do from an orbiting craft raining death on the western world.
    Molog

    So Linus, what are we doing tonight?

  • Speaking of Superior Russian Design, that comment reminded me of the russian Tupolev-???, which was a Concorde lookalike.

    IIRC, the Tupolev-144 [www.bird.ch] 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. [pbs.org] 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 [nasa.gov] 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).

  • Quite aside from Cassini and the moon probes, NASA used RTGs on almost all of their probes (including Voyager, Pioneer, Mariner, etc). The further out you get from the earth, the less sunlight there is (at the extreme is Pluto, where the sun is little more than a brigher than average star), so you need nuclear power because you sure aren't going to get the power you need from solar panels.

    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 [jue.org] here, it looks like China either does, or will have soon the same capability.
    Scary.
  • 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.

    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.

  • 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"?
    ---

  • 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.

  • Sanger Spaceplane (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 27, 2000 @03:29AM (#1107882)

    Anyone looking for information on the Sanger spaceplane (which both Dyna-Soar and its Soviet equivalent were influenced by) should try here [visi.net].

    Actually, anyone interested in aerospace "what if"s might find the site that's on [luft46.com] 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.

  • Will Anyone Ever Get It Right? (Score:3)

    by Hrunting ( 2191 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2000 @10:06PM (#1107883) Homepage
    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.

  • Encyclopedia Astronautica (Score:3)

    by dwdyer ( 5238 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @05:39AM (#1107884) Journal
    The site references this, but provides no link. You can visit it here [friends-partners.org]. Quite a bit of information can be found there. Pictures, articles, etc.

  • Other fringe designs (Score:3)

    by coreman ( 8656 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @04:37AM (#1107885) Homepage
    I had thought that the nuclear propulsion [geocities.com] method Niven/Pournelle proposed in Footfall had actually been a cold war design at one point.

  • Re:I wonder why... (Score:3)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2000 @09:55PM (#1107886) Homepage
    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.

  • NASA vs. USAF (Score:3)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2000 @10:05PM (#1107887) Homepage
    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.

  • Re:This it the past, get with the future. (Score:3)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2000 @11:43PM (#1107888)
    > There is supposedly a constestant ready to launch this summer

    REDMOND. When asked about this by a reporter, Bill Gates paused briefly with a look of surprise on his face, and then announced that MS Orbiter will ship before the end of May.


    "MS Orbiter will carry a crew of 5 rather than the usual 3," he said. "It will be bright red and have lots of blinking lights. The control panel will have Minesweeper and a singing asteroid. It will stay up even longer than our last one did."

    "Unlike other orbiters, it will move from east to west, in accordance with industry standards," he added.

    When asked which direction the earth rotates, Mr. Gates was heard to mutter something about "right to innovate" as he hurried off the stage claiming a late appointment.

    Within minutes, Mr. Gates' quotes were avidly cited on Slashdot, the popular nerdnews site. One prolix poster named "Anonymous Coward" drily observed that the boosters would probably require Microsoft branded fuel, but the sky to ground communication system would surely run on FreeBSD.

    A Microsoft spokesman was unable to comment on those speculations. "You know how it goes," he said. "One minute everyone is hanging around the water cooler catching me up on company business, and the next minute everyone is busy as bees, almost as if they had been given a hot new assignment with a short deadline." He offered to return our call as soon as he found out what the heck was going on.

    --

  • MOL (Score:3)

    by Catmeat ( 20653 ) <mtm.sys@uea@ac@uk> on Thursday April 27, 2000 @02:40AM (#1107889)
    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 [okstate.edu] 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

  • Did anyone else think... (Score:3)

    by sparx ( 25164 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @04:29AM (#1107890)
    ...that the "50-50 concept model" of the space plane looked a lot like queen amidala's ship???

  • Re:NASA vs. USAF (Score:3)

    by henley ( 29988 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @01:46AM (#1107891) Homepage

    ...Err, no. Not really anyway.

    USAF's manned space program was killed by USAF's unmanned space program.

    Basically, they proved that spy satellites and ASATs could do just as good a job (if not better) than a man on-location (as opposed to a man in a bunker pushing remote control buttons) could do, cheaper and safer.

    This is a vast over-simplification of the history involved, but it's essentially accurate. The entire story is a triumph of technology over human limitations, with a very large dose of politiking and in-fighting thrown in for good measure.

  • RTGs? (Score:3)

    by / ( 33804 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2000 @09:21PM (#1107892)
    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?

  • danged world peace (Score:3)

    by gunner800 ( 142959 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2000 @09:33PM (#1107893) Homepage

    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!

  • Russian Shuttle story (Score:3)

    by Marketolog ( 161923 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2000 @10:08PM (#1107894)
    I've talked to the guy who was calculating the fuel of the shuttle. He said, that the Russian Shuttle "Energija" (Russian for Energy/Power) has been

    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...

  • EWH MY GOD THE SKY IS FALLING.... 0000 (Score:3)

    by TinMan00 ( 176049 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @02:15AM (#1107895)
    Madame Curie lived to be 82 after
    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 ,they didn't NEED me they
    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,

  • This it the past, get with the future. (Score:4)

    by Ephro ( 90347 ) <ephlind@yahoo.com> on Wednesday April 26, 2000 @09:34PM (#1107896)
    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.

  • Re:RTGs? (Score:4)

    by deglr6328 ( 150198 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2000 @11:22PM (#1107897)
    "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.

  • Feasiblity of these designs (Score:4)

    by Yu Suzuki ( 170586 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2000 @09:56PM (#1107898) Homepage
    I'm a pretty big fan of space stuff, so I spent a lot of time checking out this site. And I got to wondering: could any of this stuff actually be used today? I mean, sure, there aren't concrete blueprints or anything, but the concepts are probably sound -- the Pentagon wouldn't have wasted its money on anything that wasn't completely feasible.

    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

  • Re:RTGs? (Score:4)

    by HGWS ( 176285 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @12:42AM (#1107899)
    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...

  • Design Aesthetics? (Score:5)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @04:01AM (#1107900) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Buy me a Buran (Score:5)

    by gad_zuki! ( 70830 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @12:05AM (#1107901)
    Here's a link to the russian space shuttle Buran [buran.ru] in english. And for you dot.com millionaires it looks like you can buy [buran.ru] one, in russian though. Real photos, not any of that CG crap. This one is especially sexy [buran.ru], 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.

  • Comment removed (Score:5)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2000 @09:24PM (#1107902)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

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