Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 17

A new book out this month, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin, purports to reveal much that has been previously unpublished concerning the life of the first man in space. Judging from the user reviews there on Amazon, the authors do not buy into the conspiracy theories about his death in a Soviet test flight at age 34; they do, however, do some investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of his good friend and fellow cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, only 14 months earlier.

This NPR article has details of the Komarov account, along with a grisly photo of his charred remains, and what is supposed to be a recording of some of his last moments, screaming in rage and cursing the engineers (as some translators render the difficult recording) while plunging to his death in the fatally malfunctioning Soyuz 1.

Gagarin had been assigned as the backup pilot for the mission, and, according to the account, had enumerated 203 flaws in the spacecraft prior to launch; he sent a memo about it up the chain by way of a friend of his in the KGB, but that friend--and every other lesser official who saw the memo, supposedly--was demoted, and some of them were sent to Siberia; Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev insisted on the mission going ahead, as he was determined to score a coup in the space race by having the pilot of the Soyuz 1 rendezvous and exchange places with the crew of a second Soyuz module.

The Soviets could not make a space mission succeed by willpower alone, however, and engineering problems quickly became apparent, beginning with the solar panels of Komarov's craft failing to open once he reached orbit; this prevented some navigation and maneuvering systems from functioning correctly, and the craft could not orient on the Sun. The second Soyuz module, which could have repaired the solar panels on the first, was never launched--either due to a thunderstorm at the launch site, or because the first had so many problems, depending on which Wikipedia article you read. After five unsuccessful hours of trying to orient the Soyuz 1 with the main maneuvering rockets, Komarov tried the secondary system, and it failed. After two days in space, on his 19th orbit, he managed to put the craft into atmospheric re-entry with a manual retro-fire, but then the final failure occurred: the module's parachutes failed to deploy correctly, and on April 24, 1967, the Soyuz 1 plunged to Earth, killing Komarov. His was the first in-flight death in a human space program; the three astronauts of the Apollo 1 mission had perished in a cabin test on the ground two months previously.

The book alleges that Komarov had known the mission would likely be fatal, but had gone ahead with it because he felt that if he protested or begged off, his friend Gagarin would have been made to go--and die--in his place.

Grim stuff. To illustrate that death in the space race was not unexpected in those days, that NPR article also shows a speech that the Nixon administration had prepared in case Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin had not returned alive from the Moon.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 18

You didn't think mem training was all fun and games, did you? :P

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A*'s Facebook page is apparently popular enough now (maybe it had been for a while; I just found out about this trick :P) to have a nice short address. So instead of the boring old

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Supermassive-Black-Hole-A/155265446287

which doesn't exactly flow trippingly into the URL field, you can now get there with just

http://facebook.com/smbhax

How's that for progress!

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Somewhat ironically considering we're also at the 50th anniversary of the flight of Yuri Gagarin, whose death--along with a good friend of his 14 months earlier--may have been due to Soviet technical negligence and possibly sinister political maneuvering, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, in the Ukraine earlier this week for the observation of the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, took the opportunity to call for nations to work on rules for safer nuclear energy.

The article has a couple interesting factoids concerning the disaster:

"The Chernobyl explosion released about 400 times more radiation than the U.S. atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima. The U.N.'s World Health Organization said at a conference in Kiev last week that among the 600,000 people most heavily exposed to the radiation, 4,000 more cancer deaths than average are expected to be eventually found."

It also notes that the Ukraine is still $300 million short of the funds needed to erect a better containment structure over Chernobyl's ruined #4 reactor--it's planned to be the world's largest mobile structure, since it will be rolled into place over the existing concrete "sarcophagus".

Sad that the world's leading nations still haven't pitched in enough to make that happen. Speaking of sad notes left over from the Chernobyl disaster, here's another:

"Russia, Ukraine and Belarus have cut the benefits packages for sickened cleanup workers in recent years and the memorial events were overshadowed by their complaints for more aid. Prime Minister Mykola Azarov vowed Tuesday that benefits to Chernobyl victims would continue to be paid."

Makes me wonder if at some point in the far-flung future the nuclear industry--assuming its still going--might be costing more than its making, due to maintenance on accident containment sites that have to be funded and maintained for a long period of time, or even more or less into perpetuity, like Chernobyl. But then again, nuclear reactors have better safety systems these days, and even something like the recent Fukushima accident is expected to be cleaned up in a matter of decades, maybe. (That Wikipedia article I just linked also has an interesting comparison with the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, where it was 11 years before the partially melted reactor core was opened, and several more years for cleanup to be completed.)

Then again again, even non-accidental nuclear industry work generates waste that has to be buried in perpetuity, which also costs a bit. Oh well maybe eventually it'll just be cheaper to launch it into the Sun--problem solved!

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Oh! I also had more storyboards from later in this episode to leak out, seeing as how I doodled 'em last night:



What's this? Our hard-as-nails galactic bounty hunter sipping tea in *my* hard sci-fi webcomic??? Hm well maybe she's practicing for the royal wedding. :PP

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 19

Turns out that today's (Friday's) launch of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer--an instrument that will be placed on the International Space Station to look for crazy stuff like antihelium and theoretical neutralinos in cosmic rays--(I blathered about this earlier in the week) has been delayed; according to the AP article, the launch was called off due to a few technical issues in its launch vehicle, the Space Shuttle Endeavour: "one of the two prime heaters for a fuel line feeding one of Endeavour's three auxiliary power units failed" and "another heater was acting up." Monday will be the earliest date on which they could try again, but it may take longer than that to get things squared away. It's to be Endeavour's last flight anyway as the Space Shuttle program winds down; Endeavour, first flown in 1992, was the shuttle that replaced Challenger, which broke up during launch in 1986, resulting in the death of all seven crew members.

The Wikipedia article on the Challenger Disaster is a morbidly fascinating read. The launch--scrubbed multiple times already due to bad weather and minor mechanical problems--took place on an unusually cold January 28th: overnight lows of "18 °F (−8 °C)" meant that launch temperatures would almost certainly be below the "redline" 40 °F (4 °C) temperatures established for the Shuttle's solid rocket boosters ("SRBs"). Check out how much ice had accumulated beneath the launch pad:


image by NASA (source)

Furthermore, they knew that they did *not* have data on how well the rubber "O-rings" sealing three of the joints holding the six sections of each SRB together would function in temperatures below 53 °F (12 °C); the O-rings were designated as "Criticality 1" components, meaning that their failure would result in the loss of the vehicle and death of the crew, yet they could not be assured of them functioning properly in the frigid conditions at the launch pad--this was all known going into launch.

The stresses of Shuttle launches routinely deformed the SRBs, pulling them apart at the joints, with hot gasses ("above 5,000 °F (2,760 °C)") seeping through; however, the O-rings would slip out of their grooves and seal the gap. They hadn't actually been designed to do that, but they did, so the specs were modified to account for it and consider it normal behavior.

All well and good in normal balmy Florida temperatures, then, but on the Challenger during the January 28th launch, the slipping and sealing action is thought to have been slowed by the cold hardening the rubber of the O-rings. Before they could seal the hot gasses in at one of the joints on the right SRB, they'd been vaporized.

That in itself might not have been enough to doom the mission, as aluminum oxides from the burned solid propellant actually gathered in the gap at the damaged joint of the right SRB and sealed it. Launch appeared to be continuing normally.

But 37 seconds into launch, the Shuttle was hit by 27 seconds of the strongest wind shear events ever recorded in the Shuttle program's history; they shattered the oxide seal, allowing the gasses to flow freely. By the time the Shuttle was clear of the turbulence, the leak was a jet of flame shooting out of the side of the booster. That lateral jet forced the SRB to start to pull away from the rest of the vehicle, and within ten seconds, this unexpected force, throwing other considerable forces of the launch out of balance, was enough to have torn the craft apart.

It did not actually explode: the large plumes of vapor seen in the breakup were the oxygen and cryogenic hydrogen fuel spilling out of the disintegrating external fuel tank. In fact, the crew compartment pulled free of the rest of the vehicle in one solid chunk, arcing a further five kilometers up through the sky on a ballistic trajectory; it did not begin to fall back to Earth until 25 seconds after the vehicle had broken up.

The compartment was intact, but it isn't known if the crew survived that rise, and then the plunge toward the ocean, or for how long; the last message caught by the voice recorder was pilot Michael J. Smith's "Uh oh" a half-second after the SRB first wrenched to the side under the force of the escaping & burning gas jet. When analyzing the wreckage of the cabin, it was found that some electrical control system switches on one of Smith's control panels had been thrown, possibly indicating he had--futilely--tried to restore power to the detached cabin. Furthermore, three of the four Personal Egress Air Packs--emergency oxygen systems capable of supplying six minutes of breathable air--on the flight deck had been activated, indicating that at least two of the crew members, other than the pilot, had been alive to activate them after the cabin broke off from the rest of the vehicle. But they were only meant to provide air in case of something like noxious gasses in the cabin, and so were unpressurized; if the cabin had lost pressure, which seems likely, then they would have been useless. In any case, there was certainly nothing the crew could have done to save themselves, and the cabin smashed into the ocean at "207 mph (333 km/h)," with a force of "well over 200 g," far beyond what the crew compartment, let alone the crew, could survive.

It's rather shocking to think about--and this isn't even in retrospect, since these ships are still being flown!--but the Shuttles have no ejection system. All previous manned U.S. space vehicles had ejection systems--none of which were ever used--but while multiple ejection systems had been discussed--and at one point even installed--for the Space Shuttles, in the end, they were all rejected as impractical, of limited utility, or too costly. Although I suppose there would have been little chance of an escape system working in the Challenger disaster, when the cabin was tumbling at who-knows-what angle, it's still disheartening to know that there is simply no escape option during a launch procedure.

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Guh still disheartened now that I've written all that. But anyway I hope you'll find the depiction of space in today's A* page to be a bit better, or at least an interesting attempt. I think it's getting somewhere, although I broke some of my own rules on this one, such as using a bit of Gaussian Blur. :P Other than that, the background was pretty much all done with Gimp's airbrush tool at various settings. Oh, except for the larger nearer stars, which are little radial Photoshop gradients.

More storyboards and rejected storyboards for later in this episode! It's a mad, mad tea party you know:



^ For future reference, that one's in the episode 13 gallery, newly available from the "episodes" top menu item.

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Also, as usual I've neglected all week long to invite you to take a look at the latest page of my weekend fairy tale comic, "The Princess and the Giant," which you will find clickably linked from this inviting teaser banner thingy:



And there'll be an even newer page of it going up on Sunday.

Have a nice weekend!

So. Are we going to ever find out what happened to Vero?

Oh... hi Arioch! Nice to see you step away from Outsider occasionally! :)

Hey, welcome to the forum! :D

You know, I was actually just thinking about Vero the other day; for some reason I got a silly idea about him and a later important plot section and was all like "say, I could bring him back as--" but then I realized that would be terribly cheesy. :P So I can only say that I currently have no plans to revisit poor ol' Vero, and the end of episode 10 was basically constructed as one of those mean dangly endings where some vital things are cruelly left up to the reader's imagination. I didn't mean it to be as cruel as it perhaps has been, because I figured putting another character in as the episode-heading name for the following episodes would make it clear that the previous character's story was done, but in retrospect I guess it doesn't actually make that very clear, especially since Vero's end is first time I've done it. Sorry about that!

:) Well thank you! I really enjoy your comics.

The minimist, somewhat, abstract artform for A* is BEAUTIFUL in its stunning story-telling! Same goes for the Princess and the Giant... LOL! Love them both!

I only asked about Vero cause for sometime he 'seemed' to be the story main character... though obviously that's not the case now. He seemed a ...decent person with strong admirable convictions. Its always a sad thing when such men die or find nothing but defeat. To simply know if he died would suffice.

I expect how it played out both he and Selenis dying, Vero of massive radiation poisoning and Selenis of a gun-shot wound. Vero unwilling to accept immortality under Selenis' terms. Vero passess out as his body slowly shuts down. But Selenis in her 'hard as nail's - diehard fashion' manages to pull herself into one of the cloning chambers and managaes to initiate the copy process for her synaptic patterns in time to set the cloning factory to begin the process of cloning her a new body.

Then, however long it takes, later Selenis steps out of the clone chamber beautiful and deadly, as always, finds Vero... and of course smiles that sexy, wicked, ironic, smile of hers...

Is he dead or still alive just enough for her to ...'preserve' him for later use...?

Not really important the answer...but it would be ...'closure'. :)

Whoa, that's awesome! I did not see that twist coming. :D Man, if I run into some more people with neat conclusions for episode 10's "fill in the blank" ending, I'll have to have a writing contest or something for it, I dunno!

Vero certainly was the main character, but when I started A* I always had the idea that it would encompass multiple stories, and as I got to know Vero better, it was clear that part of his decency was that he was not some crazy adventurer type who would want to be in life and death situations indefinitely; also there seemed to be a sense of fatality about him even from the beginning. So I knew that his story could pretty much only go through his discovery of the reason behind the accident that killed Sig, and then it would need to wrap up--and it was becoming more and more clear as I thought about it that he was getting himself into a situation from which there could be no escape, and he, being perhaps not an adventurer but still heroic in his way, would realize that and still continue. So...hm, I guess tragic heroes are some of the best heroes, would be a way of looking at that. (That was a really poorly written sentence, yay!)

And Selenis knew it too, but she had her way out of knowing she'd have a clone with most of her memories succeed her (although somewhat crucially, *not* the memories of the black system, because her long-range transmitter, which sends her sensory information back to her home base, where they're saved as memories, had been damaged in her battle against Fizer's squadron off Pyrite--which she knew, so she didn't really want her current clone to die if she could help it), so with that "out" she couldn't be a tragic hero even if she wanted, unlike Vero.

Oh! But then I liked the idea of leaving his ending a little open, because when he gets to what he thought was the end, he finds that nope, there's maybe a way out, kind of. But it's one he doesn't seem to think very highly of--cloning--so we're left with the semi-moral question for him of would he / wouldn't he: does he still want to live, does he want to live like that, would he spend his last moments trying to understand unfamiliar technology, or would he just say "nah" and let it end.

Of course you could say that it's pretty clear that he almost certainly dies--the question is whether any clones of him survive. ;) (Man I need to stop being mean! But see I have way too much fun playing with these questions. =P This turned into a really self-indulgent post! Sorry about that but thanks for the awesome comments that enabled it. :))

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 20

Ohh, such a Monday. Always tricky drawing a new character, but here she is! This goggled gal will be showing up a few times this episode for somewhat contentious conversations with our deadly anti-heroine--but she wouldn't hit a girl with goggles, would she?

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Have you ever googled goggles? Well...neither have I. But I did notice a sort of increase in Google traffic to A* this weekend, and doing a bit of investigatory googling, noticed that this site is now on the first page of hits when you google "supermassive black hole." Yay! Of course, that means I'm potentially standing in the way of people trying to learn about supermassive black holes, which isn't so great I suppose...but hey, I got the Wikipedia page for 'em linked from my "about" page, so there. :P It's edutainment! Wait...

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Instead of going to bed like an intelligent person one night this weekend, I stayed up scribbling this:



Yeah, I'm not...really sure. It's *almost* like an "ancient" (not to mention sorta violent) version of the Princess character from my weekly fairy tale comic, The Princess and the Giant, so maybe that's it. Anyway, there it is! And for future reference, it's in the episode 13 gallery, accessible from the "episodes" link in this site's top menu.

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Speaking of comics drawn in lieu of sleep, this afternoon I happened across a webcomic series called The Crepusculars, which is basically a bunch of 24 hour comics (that means a series of comics drawn in a single 24-hour period--there's some day each year where a lot of people do that) from years past by the author, skorpen, and they're wonderfully silly and inventive adventures. You might enjoy them! Also, I recommend looking up "crepuscular," which as it turns out is an actual word, and a pretty nifty one, too!

Super-late start today, so this next page will be along some time in the wee hours--ah, just like the old days! =p

(Oh, but if you need something to tide you over, there's this guest pin-up I did for the "Hot Mess" webcomic that has just gone up on their site. I'll cover that properly in the real newsy update to come here.)