Posts Tagged A Fine Ship
Focus: 30 years of the Space Shuttle Program Celebrated, Infogragphed. To End.
Posted by mistergroonk in Holiday, Science, Space, USA on April 12, 2011
That fancy patch you see above is to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Space Shuttle program and, sadly, its coming retirement.
On the morning of April 12, 1981, the shuttle Columbia, strapped to an enormous external fuel tank and a pair of solid rocket boosters, lifted off on its maiden voyage–and launched a new era in the Space Age. Never before had there been a spacecraft that could be used over and over again, that could land on Earth like an airplane–a glider, specifically.
That flight lasted 2 days, 6 hours, 20 minutes, and 53 seconds, in which time Columbia traveled 1.07 million miles, reaching an orbital altitude of 166 nautical miles. The two-man crew consisted of shuttle commander John Young and pilot Robert Crippen.
To date, the five spacecraft in the shuttle fleet have conducted more than 130 missions and traveled a cumulative half-billion miles–that’s a lot of commuting into Earth’s orbit and back.
- STS 1 Historical Press Kit (PDF)
- NASA’s Space Shuttle section
- When the space shuttle was new (photos)
Informative infographic below the cut.
Read the rest of this entry »
Today in Star Wars: The Firey Death of Garven Dreis.
Posted by mistergroonk in Art, Artist on December 27, 2010
MedicMike dropped this in our email with little explanation.
The unknown artist had this to say:
“Garven Dreis? Who is Garven Dreis?!?” – tcha, the name of this brave pilot, who gave his live in the battle of Yavin, is not very well known, but his callsign Red Leader is! This little diorama shows the very last scene with Red Leader in Star Wars – A New Hope… the plaque shows his last words (so to speak…)
As we were unsure if this was inventive or just plain lazy, we asked MedicMike. Of course he cleared up everything with the simple statement, “At best, it’s an inventive way to be lazy.”
Indeed.
One more view below the jump.
A Fine Ship: Student Creates Human-Powered Ornithopter, Flies Like a Bird
Posted by mistergroonk in Technology, The Future on October 21, 2010
HPO Flight from U of T Engineering on Vimeo.
Father-Son Launch HD Camera and iPhone Into Space Using Balloon, NASA Expected to Call Soon
Posted by mistergroonk in Just Freaking Neat, Space, Technology, Tutorials on October 13, 2010
Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.
Our inner Space Bastard will not stop smiling at this.
The team was headed by Luke Geissbuhler and his 7-year-old son Max, who found the camera about 30 miles from the launch site in upstate New York. At its peak, the balloon reached an altitude of about 100,000 feet and battled 100-m.p.h. winds before it burst, sending the camera and iPhone hurtling back to earth at rates of 150 m.p.h. A specially designed parachute attached to the capsule eventually slowed it to about 15 m.p.h.
If you want to learn how they did it so that you can do it yourself, they’re writing a book!
Please recall, faithful reader, this is not the first non-government funded pictures of space.
Official site:http://www.brooklynspaceprogram.org/
A Fine Ship: Dassault Aviation’s Civillain Suborbital Spacecraft
Posted by mistergroonk in Space, Technology, The Future on September 10, 2010
Dassault Aviation wants to put civilians in space, too, and it plans to accomplish that with this air-launched reusable hypersonic vehicle. Based on NASA’s X-38 experimental plane, this one will launch off the wing of a commercial aircraft flying at about 25,000 feet, rocketing its six passengers at Mach 3.5 up to 62 miles high.
via dvice, dassault aviation