Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 11, Page 75
• A* Episode 11, Page 76

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:

[embed]Q-ci9xIgNZM[/embed]

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:

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 11, Page 77
• A* Episode 11, Page 78

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 here; 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.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 11, Page 79
• A* Episode 11, Page 80

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. ;)

[embed]W2VygftZSCs[/embed]
(source)

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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.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 11, Page 81
• A* Episode 11, Page 82

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.

so. rad. so rad how youre panning things out. loved the jump in time too, entirely unexpected.

Glad that worked. I worry about how easy it is to pick up on time jumps without some kind of narrator breaking in with "Two years later" or something, but I'm trying to avoid that type of thing as much as possible since I think it breaks the immersion a bit.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 11, Page 83
• A* Episode 11, Page 84

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.

I was under the impression that the reason that comics used zip a tone was for printing purposes, and was in fact what we (the print shop class I was in hahahha) used to call a half-tone....

Then again, I guess that half-tone technique became a look of its own that people used for artistic purposes - Im thinking of those kitschy posters that are one panel of a comic, like this Lichtenstein which sold for 42 MILLION F'n DOLLARs Nov 11 this year:



Maybe there's something to this whole zip a tone thing eh?

Oh yeah I didn't write that very clearly; what I mean to say was that they probably had to close up shop there in the early '90's because the toning was being done digitally. Webcomics use halftone effects simply for visual effect, not for printing purposes.

The dots Lichtenstein used were specifically Ben-Day Dots, which were slightly different from regular halftones in that they did not vary in size, but just in spacing, which I guess created a slightly bolder effect.

For that $42 million piece, that's might be something like $200 a dot! :o

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 11, Page 85
• A* Episode 11, Page 86

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!