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| Burnin' the place down | Dec 31, 2010 5:57 PM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:By the time you read this it'll probably be New Year's somewhere in the world, so...Happy New Year! And as Mar suggests, have fun (I'm sure he meant that) and don't do anything too stupid...or you could say burn your house down like my neighbors did this morning:
video on Youtube
(Or watch it on YouTube)
Yikes! Fortunately all eight people in the house made it out, although seven had to be rescued from the roof, and one old granny got banged up pretty bad. Here's a local news article on it. I'd woken up at 5:30 am to find a fire truck right outside my window lighting my apartment up in festive flashing red light, and the entire block covered with emergency vehicles, but couldn't see the fire since it was on my side of the street, a ways down, and also my window was frozen shut, but here's what it looked like when I went out at 9:30 and found it still smoking.
So hm well that was exciting, but yes have fun but maybe stop short of burning the house down!
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A couple top lists of space! 11 Things Americans Will Be Doing in Space in 2011 includes things like sending a larger rover to Mars, getting a(nother) probe to a comet, retiring the shuttle fleet, and sending probes to an asteroid, Jupiter, and the Moon. Lots of stuff!
The Top 10 Fantasy Spaceships Headed for Reality shows a bunch of commercial space vehicles being prepped for the near future, including one by a company founded by game programming legend John Carmack, and one being made just south of me here in Seattle, in the oft-maligned little town of Kent, WA. Kind of interesting to see the designs, although only the Carmack-company one is really out there.
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The next page of my weekend fantasy comic will hit on Sunday—next year! You can catch up with last week's page by clicking this handy little tidbit of it:
So see you next year!
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| Nixon and cooties on the Mooooon | Dec 30, 2010 7:20 PM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:As you may have noticed, I'm kind of obsessed with the Apollo program, probably because I don't know much about it and am just now finding out stuff I probably should have known since, like...grade school? I dunno, when are they supposed to teach this stuff? :P Anyway, I was looking over the Apollo 11 Wikipedia page recently and noticed some little tidbits I hadn't known before and thought were interesting, so as usual I'll just copy them here in order to look smarter than I actually am!
The American flag Armstrong and Aldrin famously planted next to the Eagle lander
image by NASA (source)
turned out to be too close; when they lifted off from the moon, the blast from their thruster knocked the flag over. Oops! It was about 25 ft / 8 m away from the lander; later missions planted their flags about four times farther away to avoid that.
Aside from a toppled flag, they also left a plaque behind on the Moon, and look at these fine signatures engraved there for all Moon men to see through the ages:
image by NASA (source)
Yep, they'll always remember good ol' President Nixon on the Moon; he didn't miss a chance to get in on the mission, although when he called them up on the Moon for a widely broadcast conversation, he considerately did not read a long speech he'd had prepared for the occasion, "out of respect of the lunar landing being Kennedy's legacy." What a guy! Why, when they got back, he even kept the boys entertained during their 21-day quarantine:
image by NASA (source)
(Man, is that like the perfect picture for sticking your own photo in the window of the quarantine module, or what? Not that I've done that. :P)
The next two Apollo missions to the moon--12 and 14; 13 hit a snag, and I hope to have a separate ramble about that another day--also stuck their crews in quarantine afterward, until they finally realized there were no Moon cooties.
And that's all I know about Apollo 11!
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| Danger, Will Robinson! | Dec 29, 2010 11:52 PM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Note to self: the next time you're going to have a space war, design ships with fewer radiator fins. =P
The end of 2010 has been a tough one for certain space industries!
- The deputy head of the Russian space agency and the deputy chief of a related Russian state-controlled rocket manufacturer have been fired over the December 5th loss of three GPS satellites: their Proton-M booster rocket failed to put them into the correct orbit, leaving them to crash into the Pacific Ocean; apparently an excessive amount of fuel had been calculated.
- An Indian GSLV rocket carrying a communication satellite exploded in spectacular fashion during launch over Christmas, with boosters breaking up and going every which way through the sky, as seen in this video; strange highlights include someone breaking into a slow clap as the rocket explodes, and the chairman of the Indian space agency explaining the cause of the cause of the cause of the malfunction in tragi-comically pedantic fashion.
- Back in April, a malfunction aboard the Galaxy 15 commercial communications satellite caused it to stop receiving control commands, which left the poor thing adrift, continuing to send out its own signals, disrupting signals from other satellites wherever it went. Nobody could stop it! But! On December 23rd, the battery back-up for its solar power panels ran out, at which point it rebooted, clearing the glitch and restoring control. Yay a happy ending in one case anyway!
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| Why don't they have eggnog all year round? | Dec 29, 2010 12:33 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Phew, still a bit of holiday hangover, getting better though. I suppose the cinnamon roll French toast this morning didn't help. And now I'm out of eggnog--nooooooooooooooo!
One little holiday pick-me-up I do like though is Soma FM's Christmas Lounge music channel. It only lasts through the first week of January or so, drat. I really wish they--or anyone--had a year-round channel like this: classic vocal jazz, rather good modern versions, and funky remixes--and no ads. Why isn't there a regular channel like this, gah!
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| Two-day-old eggnog | Dec 27, 2010 6:40 PM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Woo Christmas hangover, think I'm gonna manage just this one page today. =p
I've actually got an A* New Year's resolution, sorta! I'm going to try to get my work schedule oriented a bit more toward that "daylight" stuff... So hopefully on Mondays, for instance, I'll manage to start posting pages before midnight. ;)
That's the plan, anyway; we'll see how it goooooooeeees. I guess it worked today, even if it was just one page, blargh!
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| It's full of gradated stars! | Dec 25, 2010 3:46 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Yay, Christmas! Or *mas, if you will (see the previous news post :P). Have a merry little one, as Lou would say:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyViLLPxUAU
I brought back my old gradient stars for the nearer stars in the last two pages, 'cause my scribbley little stars just couldn't provide the fill rate I needed on their own. I've been trying to avoid using gradients, but I assuaged my weird mental block on the subject by rendering these down to lower color levels, which sorta gives them a banded look like my own hand-drawn shading. Here are the gradient stars from page 91 on their own:
That's over in the episode 11 gallery (episode galleries, movies, etc can be accessed by the episode list link in the top menu), should you want to find it in the future!
And I hope a happy holiday is in your future; mine is to have more A* comics for you on Monday! (You may also wish to check out the new Princess and the Giant page that I'll do Sunday!)
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| Merry *mas! | Dec 24, 2010 3:50 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Christmas is just around the corner, isn't it! They don't have Christmas--or any of our Earth holidays, I don't think, but it's for no fault of their own...--far away at the Galactic Core, but maybe if they did have something similar...
Yes, Merry *mas to you all! Thank you very much for that, Solvan Scrooge. :D
And I'm happy to say I will have A* comics for you right up to the verge of Christmas day, not to mention all next week! Yessir, we continue here undaunted by Scrooge and his ilk.
(For future reference, this *mas greeting can be found in the episode 11 gallery.)
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| Other fairly massive holes | Dec 23, 2010 3:57 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Did you know that one of the largest known craters in the Solar System is on our ol' Moon?
image from JAXA, modified by Ittiz (source)
(Interestingly enough, the data for that topographical image came from the Japanese probe Kaguya, which was originally named SELENE (Selenological and Engineering Explorer), after of course the Greek moon goddess, who also lent her name to a certain A* character.)
The South Pole-Aitken basin is about 2500 km in diameter, 3-6 km deep, and stretches from the Moon's south pole up across the far side of the moon--that part we never see because only one side of the Moon ever faces Earth. The crater's existence had been suspected for a while--from that tantalizing view of its edge across the south pole--but it wasn't confirmed until lunar probes started sending back views of the Moon's hidden side in the mid 60's.
The far side is actually quite different from the side we see; while nearly a third of the Earth-facing side is covered with flat basaltic plains from ancient lava flows, less than three percent of the far side has those nice smooth maria covering it, so it looks a lot more cratery:
image by NASA (source)
Only the Hellas Basin on Mars is known to be larger (smaller in width at 2300 km in diameter, but 3 km deeper), although it is thought that the northern 40% of Mars, the North Polar Basin or "Borealis Basin," which is lower than the rest of the Martian surface, may in fact be a much, much larger crater, caused by an impact with a body up to 2700 km in diameter (which would have been bigger than Pluto!). You can see that here; Hellas is the dark blue spot in the lower right:
image by NASA (source)
But back to our Moon's big crater, an illumination map compiled from readings by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was released recently by ASU, showing how much light the various areas down at the Moon's south pole get:
image by NASA/ASU (source)
They also have a nice conventional composite view of the pole, and you can see where that LCROSS experiment looking for water hit recently--they sent it into a perpetually shaded region, because water ice would have been most likely to survive in the shade:
image by NASA/ASU (source)
The Clementine probe was the source of a nice earlier mosiac of the pole in the mid '90s:
image by NASA (source)
That probe's name came from the old song "Oh My Darling, Clementine," because after its Moon orbits, it was to go investigate the near-Earth asteroid 1620 Geographos--which at the time of the mission, in 1994, was at its closest approach to Earth in two centuries, and the closest it will get until 2586: 5 million kilometers (curiously expressed on the Wikipedia page as "5.0 Gm"--that's gigameters, a unit equal to a billion meters)--so the probe would fly by the asteroid and then, out of fuel, continue drifting off into space, becoming "lost and gone forever" like the lyric of the song.
Geographos, incidentally, is thought to be the most elongated body in the solar system, measuring an estimated 5.1x1.8 km--that's the best measurement achieved from Earth by radar telescopes in the Deep Space Network, because Clementine didn't make it to the asteroid: while looping back to Earth for the transfer to its course to the asteriod, a malfunction fired one of its maneuvering thrusters for 11 minutes, using up the probe's fuel and leaving it in an 80 rpm spin! So it was left in an Earth orbit, passing through the radiation belts, and was last heard from a month later before it lost power.
Poor Clementine! I came across her because I was looking for a model for a satellite I had to draw for the current "Death Boy" storyline in my other daily comic, "Sketchy"
much of which has taken place on the Moon! You can jump to that bit here.
And one last nifty thing I found out about lunar geology (hm well aside from the constant electrostatic levitation of Moon dust by the solar wind) is that its crust is likely to be honeycombed with ancient lava tubes, from back when it was newly formed and all hot and volcanic. That's suspected because we can see holes that sure look like entrances into lava tubes from lunar probe photography, like this one taken by the LRO in the Mare Tranquillitatis pit crater and released this past September:
image by NASA/ASU (source)
That little baby's estimated to be about 100 meters deep! Man, we need to drop a probe down there.
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| Calendars in Spaaaaaace | Dec 22, 2010 5:58 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:NASA made everyone a free 2011 International Space Station calendar, with lots of colorful photos highlighting life on the orbiting lab/whatever; you can download it and, uh...print it out or something.
Say that reminds me, I need to order my usual Dilbert day calendar for next year so I have something on which to jot down important stuff!
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| No Beer and No TV | Dec 21, 2010 7:34 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:You know, it's kind of hard to draw people from below, and lit from below, and smiling, without them looking pretty crazy. ...
Hey check it out, a new page of my fairy tale comic, The Princess and the Giant, came out over the weekend, and is just one click of this banner away:
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The "Zip-A-Tone" company (Zipatone Inc.) produced paste-on screen print tones from 1937 up to about 1992--and that was maybe because everyone does them by computer, these days. Anyway I mention it because while they're often overused in webcomics, they can be neat, like in Matt Wagner's story "Heist" from "Batman: Black and White, Vol. 1," for instance this page and this page (found in this blog). Really nifty style there.
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| Princess and Rockets | Dec 18, 2010 10:05 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Oh yeah, I went there. ;)
On the topic of impending space conflict, did you know that there's an Outer Space Treaty? Yep, since 1967, over 100 countries have signed the thing, which mainly says that you can't have nukes or other weapons of mass destruction in space, can't build military bases out there, and you can't claim any part of it for your nation. Basically, it says that space "shall be the province of all mankind."
There are some interesting particulars. For instance, any nation discovering anything "which could constitute a danger to the life or health of astronauts" must inform the other nations of the threat immediately. The nations "should consider on a basis of equality" any requests by other members to observe their "space objects," ie ships and probes and stuff. They're supposed to inform the Secretary-General of the UN, and the international scientific community, of their space activities, "to the greatest extent feasible and practical." And nations are supposed to let astronauts from other nations into their space homes "on a basis of reciprocity," as long as they "give reasonable advance notice."
So it sounds like space is supposed to be a big international party, which I guess it pretty much is so far. Pretty neat, and I think we're all better off if space wars are confined to comics and movies and other such fictional things, really. I suppose the Treaty probably came along when it did because at the time it must have been pretty clear that either the US or the Russkies were gonna land men on the Moon in the not-too-distant future--so when the Apollo 11 astronauts landed there two years later--on July 20th, 1969--they could plant flags, but couldn't actually say "I claim this land for the US of A," which personally I would have been dying to say anyway (hm actually I probably would have said "I claim this land for Spain," just for historical purposes).
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Gosh I was so occupied with science this week that I forgot to post my usual alluring link to my weekend fantasy comic, "The Princess and the Giant." Check out the latest page by clicking this handy preview image:
and if you like that one, there'll be a new one going up on Sunday, because that's the day I update that comic. Yep.
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| Launch week and impact nerdery | Dec 17, 2010 10:31 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:It's kind of been rocket launch week here in the A* news ramblings, and while I've been maintaining that one you've seen one rocket launch, you've kind of seen them all, the question is, have you seen them up-close, in slow motion, and from multiple angles? That's what these NASA imaging technicians have put together for us, of Space Shuttle launches; their commentary about the various things going on during each split-second of the launch sequence is pretty interesting too (I didn't know the Shuttle's exhaust was shooting into a pool of water, for instance), although they also spend a lot of time nerding out over their cameras. ;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2VygftZSCs
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And more pertinent to this last page of the comic, and coincidentally enough a site a non-reader linked me to today: with Impact Earth you can enter various parameters like density, diameter, and speed to simulate the effects of an asteroid hitting Earth. With the help of a sphere calculator (since Impact Earth only lets you enter speeds up to a paltry 72 km/s, so I had to figure out how much additional weight I had to compensate with) I tried having it give me its projections for what this impact on Paralt in our A* story here would do.
The way it handles input and results could be a lot better—certain things tend not to agree, and really they should have some kind of visual feedback, too—but it does give some results that seem a little more solid than others, like impact crater size (73 km across, 1 km deep—hm that seems a bit shallow, ah well), how much ejecta would land on an observer at distance x (3.5 cm on someone 1000 miles away!), what magnitude earthquake it would feel like at distance x (9.3 at 1000 km!), what the airblast would be like (150 mph at 1000 miles...but that doesn't apply on Paralt, since it has no atmosphere to speak of), how often Earth has experienced an impact of this magnitude (once every 28 million years?) and so forth.
Hm actually their calculations for Earth's atmosphere may have cushioned those figures a bit, too, but you can't disable it, and past a certain point it stops telling you what the atmospheric adjustment is like, so ah well. Still kind of fun to mess with, in a horrible sort of way.
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| Russian cosmodrome rents going up! | Dec 16, 2010 8:31 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Is Proctor pimping this hairnet, or what?
Space stuff keeps happening! It's been kind of busy lately. A three-person crew consisting of an American, Russian, and Italian just launched in a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan to rendezvous with the International Space Station. This "Expedition 26" mission is pretty routine stuff, but the article had some interesting details about the deal with Russia's space agency that gives NASA the use of their big Soyuz-equipped Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan: "A round-trip ticket to the space station in 2011 and 2012 will cost NASA as much as $51 million, up from the current $26 million. The price will jump to $56 million in 2013 and 2014." Now we can see why NASA is so anxious to encourage the development of the commercial space shuttles I've been mentioning in the past few days!
It also gives me a chance so show the more modern version of that old Soviet flared thruster cowling design style; here's a photo of the launch:
image by NASA (source)
The harpoon-like nose is kind of neat, too!
NASA has a video of the launch; again, once you've seen a rocket launch, you've pretty much seen 'em all... Lots of lens flare from the thrusters in this night launch. And also near the end it switches to the crew saying "nominal" repeatedly just to make sure everything's okay, and you can see how they're so packed in with supplies for the station that they can barely move! Too bad they didn't show them during launch, though, so we could see how they stood the stress of all that thrust; well, I guess that isn't really photogenic. :P
And while I was trolling around NASA's site I also noticed other space news yesterday/today: having been in orbit around Mars for 3,340 days, NASA's Odyssey probe has just set the record for longest operating time on Mars. Woo. Anyway they've compiled a video of Odyssey mission highlights that's kind of a handy way to catch up on what that thing's all about.
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| Of rocket launches and aerospike engines | Dec 15, 2010 9:39 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Well I was going on about the successful launch/landing test of the private SpaceX "Dragon" capsule via their "Falcon 9" rocket last week, and it turns out they put a video of the launch on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ci9xIgNZM
Kind of neat because there's a camera on the rocket, facing backwards, so you can see the ground getting smaller and smaller, then the thruster stages falling away, and (best part) the nozzle of the second stage thruster heating to red hot, then cooling almost immediately when the engine cuts off. And here's a fun game: count how many times the controllers say "nominal." :P
NASA also made a video of the launch—it doesn't have a on-rocket cam, but it does have the launch in hi-def. Although really once you've seen once rocket launch, you've seen them all—except for the ones that go appallingly wrong.
While I was double-checking that "nozzle" was the correct term for that bell-shaped thingy around a rocket's exhaust port, I came across aerospike engines, which instead of having a bell-shaped nozzle have a sort of inverted bell spike shape; the idea is that at low altitudes—where you have high atmospheric pressure—the atmosphere acts as the other side of the bell, and eh anyway you end up getting better fuel efficiency or something. Okay that's boring, but the point is they look neat; here's a "linear" type
image by NASA (source)
and the really spiky "toroidal" type
image by NASA (source)
which kind of reminds me of certain old sci-fi ship styles from like the 50's or something, of which I can't seem to find a good example right now. :P Anyway, funky look.
That linear one is interesting too because it was developed for the X-33 experimental space plane by Lockheed Martin, to do basically what the SpaceX Falcon 9/Dragon combo is doing, except it was going to have all its fuel on-board—which I guess is why they were messing with aerospike thrusters, to get the best fuel efficiency—so it wouldn't have to use disposable thrusters for launches.
Remember how last week I'd use 10% as the approximate pre-fuel weight of the ship heading toward Paralt here in A*? Well turns out that for the X-33 they did indeed figure that the ship without fuel could only make up 1/10th of the total weight—and they just couldn't construct a fuel tank both light and strong enough to fit that parameter. So the federal project was canceled in 2001 after well over a billion dollars had been spent on it by NASA and Lockheed Martin.
Aerospike technology has actually been around since the '60s, when a company with the awesome name Rocketdyne was the major supplier of rocket engines for the US space programs, and this continued up into the '70s, when they were selected to supply the Space Shuttle's main engines—and aerospike designs were considered for that.
Various design difficulties have held aerospike thrusters back from actual practical use, but Lockheed Martin continues to tinker with them. Will their time ever come?
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Ooh and I keep forgetting to pimp the updates I'm doing to my oft-neglected humor comic "One Off" this week. The third and last (for now) one will be going up shortly, here's a preview and link to the One Off site:
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| Staring into your sooooooooul | Dec 14, 2010 9:56 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Couldn't seem to improve that last one with grays, so you get it naked and unshaded. I tend to think it's a good sign when that happens, but who knows, maybe it just means I'm bad at shading. :P
And if you're wondering why Proctor looks 80 years old, well, we aren't all at our perkiest during the multiple G-forces of a rocket launch. I won't try to make excuses for the hair net, though.
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Over the weekend I got a bit of inspiration to update the comedic webcomic series of mine, "One Off," for the first time in over seven months. :o I have three new strips for it, which I'll be rolling out through Wednesday. This preview of the second one, which isn't quite up yet, will lead you to the comic if you shoudst click upon it:
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OH MAN I almost forgot to mention the nifty YouTube link trick I accidentally came across today!
Instead of sending someone a YouTube video link in the usual format, ie
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZWmrfgj0MZI
(that's Massive Attack's "Unfinished Sympathy" video by the way), do it like this
http://youtube.com/v/ZWmrfgj0MZI
and it will come up full-frame in their browser window, without YouTube's logo and comments and all that UI around it.
- Doesn't work with videos that have embedding disabled.
- The "view full screen" button isn't available.
- Doesn't autoplay (which may or may not be good).
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| Secrets from episode nine zillion! | Dec 11, 2010 7:28 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Remember how I have that art show at Caffè Fiore in Ballard through the end of the year? Well it's been a month since the opening party, and that means its time for another one, since the art world seems to operate on a monthly basis, regardless of whether or not your show is running multiple months. So I'll be chillin' there tomor--er eh tonight, that being Saturday the 11th, from 7 to 9 pm. There might even be free chips or something! (Last month there was free crackers and cheese, cookies, and wine! It was quite the blowout. They may be repeating that output, I really have no idea! :o)
So drop by and say hi if you've got nothing better to do with yourself on a Saturday night--apparently I don't! :P (Oh wait I do have to come back home and draw my Sunday Princess and the Giant comic, I guess. :ppp)
This entry needs more pictures... Eh well I made a banner-sized thingy out of that desktop I made yesterday:
For some reason this reminds me that I actually couldn't get to bed last night because far-flung A* plot points were invading my head. I guess that's how a lot of my story ideas come along, actually: unexpectedly and at times when I'm supposed to be doing something else. It's pretty good stuff, too! Like, a whole 'nother layer of corruption and deceit, a major switcheroo for the main character... Man I wonder what episode number that's gonna be around. Eh... 16-ish? Hm probably at least a few more. Sheez I got a lotta episodes to do!
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| Hey it's sort of an A* desktop | Dec 10, 2010 8:24 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:I wanted to do a sketch of Selenis so I don't get rusty drawing her while all this Proctor & Mar action is going on, and it ended up being this
the full size version of which could be used as a super-high-contrast 1080p A* desktop, if you want to have a really hard time seeing anything else on your computer. :o
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Did you know I'd forgotten to draw Selenis' little forearm thruster pod on one page in episode 10? D'you know which one it was (and just weren't telling me?? :P)? Okay okay, it was page 147, the little rascal...which I have now subtly edited so that either she *does* have the forearm pod, or...just a really fat forearm. Anything is possible!
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| Laser magnum Opus | Dec 09, 2010 5:28 AM PST | url |
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Added 4 new A* pages:Okay, I think I figured out who Mar looks like. A certain bloomin' penguin
perhaps?
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Space news! The private space transport company SpaceX successfully launched and landed their SpaceX Dragon capsule; it went up from Cape Canaveral on their "Falcon 9" rocket, took two spins around Earth, and made a soft splash landing in the Pacific, west of Mexico. So it's nice to see that private industry has caught up with where NASA was about 60 years ago. ;) The "Dragon" was unmanned for this test launch, but the plan is that it will ferry people/supplies up to the International Space Station once the US's Space Shuttle program ends in 2011: the next flight will be a fly-by of the ISS, then an actual mission carrying cargo and crew to the station; SpaceX has a $1.6 billion contract "to provide 12 spacecraft with cargo capacity of at least 20 tonnes to resupply the International Space Station (ISS) through 2016."
Another company, Orbital Space Corporation, has a $1.9 billion contract for eight launches—from Virginia, rather than Florida—of its Taurus II rocket, also starting in 2011.
So, go private space industry, I guess! And where's my darn flying car?
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In other private space / science news, private lasers are getting more dangerous. Watch out, Falcon 9! :o
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| Hey lookit this other stuff I drew | Dec 08, 2010 7:23 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:A couple unused storyboards--these were preliminary ideas for yesterday's pages 61 and 62, respectively:
And there's this unrelated thing I drew over the weekend:
(That's being kept in the A* episode 11 gallery, for lack of a better place to put it. :P)
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| But how many Shoemaker-Levys is it? | Dec 07, 2010 6:44 AM PST | url |
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Added 3 new A* pages:So how big is big? I actually did some math for this, because I wanted to make sure the threatened impact was threatening enough. The non-relativistic formula for impact energy (how big the kaboom will be--for speeds of 14% light and above you apparently need to use a more complicated formula) is
kinetic energy (joules) = 0.5 x mass (in kilograms) x velocity (in meters per second) squared
Proctor told us the speed of the approaching ship: 10% light speed, ie 30,000,000 m/s. Then he says the ship is 10x the size of a "Galaxy-class freighter." How the heck big are those? Well, I thought I'd see how it would go if we say one of those is about the size of a modern supercarrier, or roughly 100,000 tons, which is roughly 100,000,000 kg. What a nice round number to work with! So this ship is ten times that, *but* if we figure it's burned up its fuel accelerating to that speed, and its fuel took up say 90% of its mass, then it's down to 10% of its starting mass, which is then the 100 million kg figure we already had. Man estimating is cool.
0.5 x 100,000,000 kg x (30,000,000 m/s)^2 = 45,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules
So the impact energy would be 4.5e^22 joules, which is a lot. To put it in numbers that might correspond to something I can understand, according to this table, it's equivalent to about 22 million conventional thermonuclear warheads, or two Shoemaker-Levy impacts; Shoemaker-Levy was the comet that broke apart and hit Jupiter in 1994; it was going "only" 60,000 m/s, but consisted of dozens of fragments, some as large as 2 km across, and Wikipedia says the largest of its impacts was equal to 600 times the world's nuclear arsenal, and created a dark spot in Jupiter's atmosphere twice as wide as Earth--and there were at least several other similarly sized impacts from other chunks, some of which are seen here (the biggest one was "G"):
image by NASA (source)
So two Shoemaker-Levy's--although still only about 1/10,000th of the energy necessary to boil off all of Earth's oceans and atmosphere--should be pretty dangerous to an inhabited planet, one would think, and that's about what Paralt 27-2 is facing here. :o
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| Maximum style points | Dec 04, 2010 6:48 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Finishing up Rocket Week here in A* news blurghing, I came across the Soviet/Russian Soyuz family of rockets, the workhorses of that successful space program, which have been around since the good old days, and that explains why they look so darn cool: that retro-hip Soviet space style! I'm totally not kidding; just check out the flared thrusters on these babies (these are all by NASA, taken at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan):
image by NASA (source)
image by NASA (source)
image by NASA (source)
image by NASA (source)
I love how the rocket nozzles are that bright Soviet red. :) The Soyuz ("Union") line has been around since '66, derived from the earlier Vostok ("East") line, which launched for instance the Luna probes starting in 1958; I've posted this before, but I'm doing it again just to finish off the Soviet space style point: the Luna 2--first craft to the surface of the Moon (1959) was just so awesome-looking:
image by NASA (source)
It's the Pac-Man of space probes, I tell ya!
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| ARE SPACE SHIPS SPYING ON YOU? | Dec 03, 2010 7:19 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Spaceship stuff happened today! Or space *plane* stuff, anyway. I happened across this article saying that the Air Force's top secret X-37B "space plane" had landed successfully at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California after 220 days in orbit, doing they won't say what, except that it's "space shuttle kinds of activities," which really could mean anything since the Air Force ran top-secret Space Shuttle missions for years from that same base (more on that below).
Speaking of space shuttle activities, the unmanned X-37 was originally a NASA project (under the name "X-37A"; with the Air Force, since 2004, it's "B"), and in fact it looks a lot like a miniature Space Shuttle; with a 14 ft wingspan it's about 1/5th the size of the Shuttle, and only 5% as heavy. In fact, under NASA, where it started out in design phases in 1999, it was intended to go up in the Space Shuttle's cargo hold, but the Air Force has redesigned it as "B" for launch in disposable rockets. Here's the little thing back on April 13th, being prepared for loading into the Atlas V launch rocket (not as powerful as the old Saturn V's I was talking about yesterday) that would fire it into orbit nine days later:
image by USAF (source)
Looks like it's got a booster module on the back there; you can see a guy behind it at the bottom for scale. According to this spaceflightnow.com article, the X-37 unfurls solar panels (the Air Force's X-37 fact sheet says they're "Gallium Arsenide Solar Cells with lithium-Ion batteries") to power itself in orbit, rather than relying on battery power like the Shuttle, and that gives it a long mission life--the Shuttle only stays up for a week or so, but this first X-37B mission was over seven months! And it wasn't all that secret; amateur spacewatchers even claim to have spotted it cruising around up there (not-very-detailed purported video of it!). Here's a diagram of the X-37 on space.com.
Here it is posing cheekily on the runway; I think this might have been before its final heat tiling / painting:
photo by USAF (source)
Those angled tail fins are called "ruddervators." :P
That spaceflightnow.com article mentions some interesting stuff about the history of the Air Force's attempts to get a reusable space vehicle. They were involved with the Space Shuttle's earliest conceptual designs in 1971, and up until 1992, they even launched Space Shuttles from Vandenberg on top secret polar orbit missions with classified payloads. :o That stopped after the Challenger shuttle disaster, and wouldn't you know it, the X-37 shifted from NASA to the Air Force after the Columbia shuttle disaster.
But the Air Force's space plane endeavors go way back to the beginnings of the Space Race even. In the late 50's through early 60's they were working on the X-20 Dyna-Soar (for "Dynamic Soarer," since it was to be capable of return flights, unlike the single-use rockets otherwise in use at the time)
NASA photo of an X-20 mockup (source)
but the project was canceled before construction started, due to problems over finding a launch rocket for it, and because the Air Force was unable to explain why they needed such an expensive reusable space vehicle (presumably they've come up with some more convincing arguments in the succeeding decades!). (And their attempt at a manned space station, the Manned Orbital Laboratory, was also canceled in the '60's for similar reasons.) But lessons learned in the X-20's development were put to use later for the Space Shuttle.
Apparently the Air Force is pretty happy with the X-37B, though, since even before its successful landing from orbit, they'd already ordered a second one, scheduled to start test flights in 2011. So if you ever spot a tiny space ship tailing you in your rear-view mirror (or maybe through your sunroof, rather), it very well could be one of these little X-37Bs!
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| Only 10%? Pfft! | Dec 02, 2010 9:09 AM PST | url |
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Added 3 new A* pages:I've spent a lot of time agonizing over that "10% light speed" figure; the top speed of a ship in space is limited by the maximum velocity of its exhaust, and on the web there are numerous different estimates of what the top exhaust velocity for various types of rocket engines would be.
There have been a number of indications so far--as early as Proctor's "radioactive exhaust" remark in episode 2--that the standard engine type in A* is nuclear--of some sort. Our contemporary (I mean 2010) science seems (I mean according to what I can find on the internet) to dictate a maximum of 5% light speed for nuclear fission engines. Fusion is rated faster--around 10% light speed--but I don't really want to rely on fusion, since the possibility of it ever being practical for something like rocket engines is still quite iffy.
But you can slice fission (hah, didn't see that one coming) a number of ways; for instance, nuclear "pulse" propulsion proposes moving a ship forward by detonating a series of carefully controlled nuclear bombs behind it, essentially. Project Orion was a nuclear pulse ship design that received a good deal of planning and attention in the '50's--that design was rated at a maximum of only perhaps 0.001 percent light speed, but some sources--perhaps optimistically--estimate that with presumably reasonable advances in technology, a nuclear pulse drive could achieve exhaust velocities near 10% light speed. (This Wikipedia entry may be the most concise account of all that.)
So that sounded encouraging, and anyway 10% is a nice round figure. 10% light speed is about 30,000 kilometers per second. By way of comparison, the Saturn V rockets, the huge workhorses of the US during the Space Race of the '60s-- Wait let's have some pictures of them, they're so cool looking (as usual I'm swiping these straight out of the oh so convenient Wikipedia entry :p):
Apollo 4: the first Saturn V
image by NASA (source)
A montage of the various Saturn Vs
image by NASA (source)
The Saturn V stage 1 boosters dwarf their creator, German-American Wernher von Braun, a pioneering scientist employed by the Nazis in their rocket program (such as the V-2s) until the US smuggled him to the States in Operation Paperclip; here he became the father of much of our successful space program
image by NASA (source)
The "interstage" (between stages I and II) falling away during launch of the Apollo 6 mission
image by NASA (source)
--right, so those huge things, using chemical rather than nuclear power, achieved a maximum exhaust speed of...oh man math...specific impulse 421 seconds times Earth surface gravity, 9.81 m/s² iiiiiis...just over 4 kilometers per second, or about 0.0014% light speed. So 10% light speed is pretty serious business!
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| Santa, Transformers, etc | Dec 01, 2010 12:41 AM PST | url |
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Added 3 new A* pages:Maybe Santa's coming early this year! :o
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Thanks to WendtWerks for adding A* to their webcomics links archive. :) Links from readers' sites are like gold to webcomics--GOLD I TELL YOU! =D
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I came across the JFK Presidential Library's really elaborate, semi-interactive animated CG presentation We Choose the Moon, which lets you run through the Apollo 11 moon landing mission step-by-step, from launch to leaving the Moon to return to Earth; at each stage of the mission, you can cue up appropriate archived photos and footage, and view the craft from several computer-generated angles, with smooth animations in between that really give a good sense not only of the size and complexity of the space ships, but also how small they are relative to the space around them. Also, it's really good at demonstrating how the various modules disassembled and reassembled; I hadn't realized, for instance, that upon leaving Earth orbit, the lander and command modules, freed from their boosters, disengaged briefly so that the lander could flip around to a braking configuration--then they linked back up in this alternate configuration!
Just like Transformers or something...well okay, maybe not quite like that, but still, pretty neat, and very nicely rendered on that site in full-screen, streaming video.
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