pTrevTrevs

1974 in Spaceflight: Miscellaneous Orbital Launches: June 1974: Mariner 10 makes its second flyby of the planet Mercury. Having already corrected its trajectory to be coplanar with Mercury's orbit, this second encounter can make a much closer approach to the planet, skimming a mere 40km above the southern hemisphere... July: Helios-A launches aboard the first Titan IIIE/Centaur. Launch goes well, proving the new launch vehicle's capabilities, unfortunately a hardware failure on the spacecraft crippled its electrical system and left Helios with a critical power shortage. This effectively doomed the mission. Close-up studies of the Sun will have to wait for Helios-B's launch... July: Commercial contract satellite launched to HEO on Delta 2000: September: Seasat launches from Vandenberg AFB on a modified Atlas E/F. I don't care that I'm a couple years early, I wanted to do it now. September: Westar 1 launches to GEO, on another Delta 2000: In other news, Skylab 3 has been onboard the station during the last two months, but I'll save that for a dedicated post.

When you just absolutely have to spend your supply of Saturn V's in only three missions.

Darn, and I was looking forward to kitbashing this thing!

What exactly is the difference between the LM Taxi and the regular LM, other than some versions of the Taxi carrying three astronauts?

One thing that *may* have caused it (although I can't imagine why) is that I edited my persistent file to change a CM's texture variant from the clean to toasted variant while it was docked to Skylab, although that shouldn't have had an effect on the parts in the VAB, and it would have probably affected all the parts with the switch instead of just the parachute cover.

Don't know if anyone else has had this problem, but the Apollo parachute cover's Skylab texture variant doesn't look right. This is present for both the clean and toasted versions. On a semi-unrelated note I noticed that the sextant that's normally on the side of the CM opposite the hatch is removed on the Skylab variants. A small touch, but a neat one to see.

Apollo Applications was wild, man. Like "We've got a case of beer, enough cigars to burn down the Manned Spacecraft Center, half a pot of coffee, and all night to come up with a way to get Congress to keep funding Apollo/Saturn. Let's get to work."

Skylab 2: We Fix Anything! May, 1974: After a month of delays the Skylab 2 mission is finally given the green-light under a revised mission schedule. Rather than the 30-day mission originally planned prior to the accident, Skylab 2 will now perform a 20-day stay aboard the station performing repairs and running checkouts on the systems, in addition to demonstrating the experiment techniques which will be used by later flights. For the first time since 1968, a Saturn IB soars into the sky, the first one to launch from Kennedy Space Center. Commanding this mission is Melcas Kerman, veteran of both the Gemini 10/Centaur-MOL and the Apollo 12 flights. Uniquely experienced with both long-duration spaceflight and the Apollo hardware from these two flights, he is unquestionably the best-suited astronaut to lead this mission. Centaur-MOL was an extremely primitive station compared to Skylab, lacking such amenities as a shower, toilet, or individual sleeping quarters, as well as requiring its crew to enter the station via a treacherous spacewalk from their Gemini capsule to a crude inflatable airlock. Nevertheless, it allowed the Gemini 10 flight to remain in orbit for thirty days; a record which has remained unbroken and unchallenged, until Skylab, that is...

Are those APAS-75 docking ports? Would that system have been used if the shuttle were flying missions involving docking earlier, or would a new system have been developed like was done for Shuttle-Mir and ISS?

Interlude: Apollo to Skylab: January, 1974: Mariner 10 performs its first flyby of the planet Mercury, making it the first spacecraft to make a close approach to the innermost planet. This first flyby passes over the southern hemisphere at a medium-to-high altitude, and is primarily designed to match the heliocentric orbital inclination of the Mariner 10 spacecraft with that of Mercury to enable two more flybys later this year, both at lower and more optimal altitudes. Even still, this pass takes mankind's eyes closer to Mercury than ever before, and the spacecraft's grainy film cameras record the planet as it passes below. Also in January 1974, the Delta 2000 performs its maiden flight, carrying the Skynet 2A satellite to a geostationary orbit for the United Kingdom. It will be joined by Skynet 2B later in the year, together providing high-speed secure communications for the British military in Europe and Africa. April, 1974: SA-513, the last first-generation Saturn V, rolls to LC-39A for the launch of America's Skylab space station. At the same time, Saturn IB SA-206 is prepared on LC-39B to carry the station's first crew into orbit shortly afterward. Rhetorical question: I see everyone makes their Saturn ICs with the 1967-era roll pattern on the S-IVB. It seems more plausible to me that the Saturn IC would also have the Skylab-era pattern with the entirely white aft skirt instead. As I understand it, the change was made for better thermal protection, the same reason each flight-model Saturn V featured a white S-IC intertank structure as opposed to the striped one seen on SA-500D and SA-500F during testing.

Wait a minute… with a fairing that large the LUT’s crane couldn’t even rotate around to stack the vehicle in the first place!

Apollo 19, Part 2: End of an Era: I may have forgotten that I actually had the rest of these screenshots to post. Oh well, better late than never. At last, then, witness the exciting conclusion of Apollo 19's visit to Hyginus crater... I'm gonna keep it real with you all; I'm glad I don't have to send any more Kerbals to the Moon for awhile. I've enjoyed conducting my own Apollo program but it gets repetitive after awhile. Anyway, stay tuned for Skylab and AAP stuff.

The alternate timeline where instead of being obsessed with going to the moon (beta vibes) NASA hops on that Sigma grindset (based and breadpilled).

This is correct, and I’d also like to note that the 200-series S-IVBs themselves were a fair bit lighter than the 500-series one, mainly because of weight reductions in structural areas like the forward and aft skirts. This is according to Stages to Saturn, which I’m reading through at the moment. Maybe if that could be reflected in some way it would alleviate the problems so many are having with Saturn IB’s performance.

I'm actually glad you pointed this out; I hadn't updated my BDB install in awhile and wouldn't have known this otherwise. Now that I do, the cogs in my head are starting to turn; cooking up a nefarious scheme that even the most unhinged AAP planner might balk at...

I used to live in Huntsville, always made sure to keep my membership pass for the USSRC current. Sometimes I'd just go there and stare at all my favorite artifacts; the Saturn I, Apollo 16's CM, the recovered fragment from Skylab's oxygen tank... God I miss it so much...

I suppose you could always ask @benjee10 for permission, and if not then maybe @Invaderchaos will adopt them as part of SOCK-Recolored.

Do you make these custom textures yourself, or is it some trickery with Conformal Decals I'm seeing? Either way, a man needs to know if you're ever gonna make them public...

Apollo 19, Part 1: The Final Act: It is December, 1973. For the last four years, manned missions have departed for lunar space on an average of every six months. With each mission to the Moon's barren surface, the limits have been pushed, the standards have been raised, and the extent of our knowledge has been expanded. Some of the most incredible building projects in history have been organized just to see this program to completion, from the massive Vertical Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral, to the sprawling factories across the country used for construction of the great Saturn moon rockets and their payloads, to the global network of tracking stations to ensure a steady connection with the crew of a spacecraft thousands of times further away from home than any previous explorers. Manned lunar exploration itself has seen growth few had ever imagined during the eight landings. The ghostly black-and-white images of Apollo 11's single moonwalk have given way to crisp high-definition color television, controlled live by a technician on the ground, recording the astronauts of later landings as they traverse the picturesque landscapes of lunar mountains, collapsed lava tubes, and craters the size of small cities. The role of the third member of an Apollo crew, at first regarded as something of an afterthought or a necessary odd-man-out, has evolved into that of a unique lunar explorer in his own right, operating a ship with an entire suite of specialized scientific instruments for studying the Moon in ways that his comrades on the surface simply cannot. For all the magnificent advances of Apollo, however, it must come to an end eventually. Apollo 19 will be the last manned mission to the lunar surface for the foreseeable future. The plans prepared for American spaceflight in the 1970s and 1980s are much more limited in scale, focusing on long but frequent stays in low Earth orbit. At first, this goal is to be pursued through surplus Apollo hardware, consisting of the Skylab space station and the three Apollo spacecraft and boosters set aside for its crews. Soon, however, this will give way to two avenues of advancement; the first taking the form of purpose-built Apollo hardware such as the Block III command module and Saturn IC booster, the second coming later in as a reusable spacecraft known as the space shuttle. While the majority of NASA prepares itself for a decade of asceticism and frugality, however, a small but dedicated team of technicians, astronauts, flight controllers, and other specialists focus on ensuring that the final lunar landing embodies everything that Apollo was meant to represent... The landing site for Apollo's final mission is Hyginus Crater, a small but fascinating feature located in the region of the Moon known as Sinus Medii. Two features cause Hyginus to stand out to site planners and geologists: first, the sinuous rille which bisects the crater running roughly northwest to southeast, and second, the noticeable absence of a raised rim and rays of ejecta which would both be typical of an impact crater. Clearly, it was no asteroid that formed Hyginus, in fact the feature is much more like a caldera; the remnant of a magma chamber after it has been emptied out and collapsed during a volcanic event. For most of the Apollo program the search for evidence of lunar volcanism has been the primary motivator for landing site selection, and if scientists' suspicions about the Hyginus formation are correct, it could represent the holy grail of volcanic activity on the Moon, the perfect capstone to end Apollo's already stellar legacy.

So let me get this straight; you've replaced KSRSS with regular RSS but scaled down to 2.5x the size of normal Kerbin anyway so that a certain visual mod would work right? It looks really great! Were you able to move your existing saves over to this new format or did it break them?

Guess I can’t blame you. I’ve been working on a kitbash for myself and only after poring over orthographics and clean-room photos have I realized that the orbiter is a way more complicated spacecraft than it looks. Not to mention the fact that I don’t think BDB even includes the solid kick-motor PVO used to enter Venusian orbit…

This is a joke, sure, but that WIP picture of Pioneer Venus is ticking me off. It’s so close yet so far!

delete this

Anybody else ever had this problem with the Skylab airlock? I was able to enter the station through the hatch but couldn't exit from it. Also an unrelated problem (probably related to Kerbalism, not BDB) is that the nitrogen usage on the station is waaay higher than it should be. I'm losing literally hundreds or thousands of liters per minute unless I shut off access to every nitrogen tank onboard. I know some people here also use Kerbalism in conjunction with BDB so I figured I'd ask this here as well.

I'm sorry, but I never expected to see the words "classic" and "Atlas-Able" in the same sentence, no matter the reason. Thank you for supplying my nightmare fuel for tonight.