Added 1 new A* page:
^ The auction for my big new A* ink painting is off to a pretty good start! That clickable banner there is my slightly less spammy way of bothering you about it. ; )
Futzed with the color for too long on today's page! Dang. Well, hopefully I'm going to learn not to waste a lot of time worrying about minute variations in saturation and value. : P
Anyway there was an interesting BBC article today about the European Space Agency funding research for a reusable rocket ship to deliver communications satellites and so forth into orbit; called "Skylon," it would consist of a rocket/plane part that would take off and land on runways, and a cargo carrier booster ship that would launch from the rocket plane thing, about 300 km up, to take the cargo to its orbital altitude, which would be more like 36,000 km up. In the concept art shown at the top of the article, Skylon has a really cool, sleek tapered look--don't let that fool you, though: Skylon would be a big thing to land on a runway: at 273 feet (83.3 meters) it would dwarf, say, a Boeing 767 airliner (200 feet long). Sure, NASA's huge Saturn V launch vehicles for the Apollo Moon program during the space race stood 363 feet tall, but they didn't have to come in for a landing.
The other big deal about the Skylon, according to the article, would be its "Sabre" engines, which would operate like regular air-breathing turbine jet engines at low altitudes, then switch to rocket power as the air got thinner higher up. Pretty keen--if they can get it to work! This study is due to run for a year, at which point they'll hopefully have a better idea of whether or not they can actually pull something like this off.
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