SunlitZelkova

I'm small in the picture but here's yours truly! (Spaceplane aerodynamic glide demonstrator for scale)

As I mentioned in the previous post, I will now be posting the pics of JAXA project concept art that was on display at Chofu Aerospace Center outside of Tokyo. First up is a concept for a Hypersonic Transport (HST). It would be capable of flying from Los Angeles to Tokyo in 2 hours. Cruise speed would be Mach 5. Here's another view. I wonder if someone will try to make this in KSP Next up we have a quiet supersonic aircraft. Emission-free aircraft. I wonder why I am writing the names again when they are already in the picture... And finally a compound helicopter. These are all concepts being pursued by JAXA at this time. Unfortunately, however, JAXA does not have a lavish aviation budget like NASA does and are unable to build any demonstrator aircraft at the moment. Hopefully JAXA's data can at least contribute to improving the work being done at NASA! We also have some different concepts and proposals for experiments in space debris removal. I hope you enjoyed!

I watched The Last Jedi again last night, and I really don’t see what is wrong with the Holdo maneuver. Ramming abandoned ships as a tactic was already established in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and it is a natural last ditch desperate move. I don’t think it raises questions about “why they don’t ram all the time then”. Star Wars already has these types of questions. Did the existence of the magna guards raise the question of why the CIS didn’t just build those instead of battle droids? Did the A-Wing crashing into the bridge of the SSD raise the question of why the Rebels didn’t just use Ohka-style suicide craft? An idea I posited about using fighter sized projectiles equipped with a hyper drive, escorted up close to an enemy ship and then fired away, exists even without the Holdo maneuver. So while Star Wars still has consistency issues with its technology and tactics, these are just inherent to the series rather than especially caused by TLJ. Something I noticed about it is that the First Order attacks the Resistance base with air support, in contrast to the assault on Hoth where the snowspeeders reigned supreme. It’s a nice “tactical” touch, considering the sequels removed the nice detailed, WWII inspired dogfights with proper fighter formations.

I saw it a couple months ago but I don’t recall seeing any artillery pieces in it Yeah, if The French Dispatch was a “love letter to journalists” as Anderson himself described it, this was a love letter to theater. I liked the setting. The 1950s is one of my favorite time periods aesthetically, so it was great! I also loved the music faintly playing in the background in so many scenes.

I don’t see it working. Let’s say someone wants something in San Francisco, but the SF blimp doesn’t have it and the Los Angeles one does. Does the Los Angeles blimp abandon its post and fly north? Why do that when it would probably be more economical to… use existing warehouses and trucks? And pizza sales would never pay for the cost of operating a blimp. It too would be uneconomical.

The N1 was actually just fine, and they made improvements in every launch. If the KORD engine control computer hadn’t malfunctioned on the 4th flight, it actually could have made it to orbit on the remaining engines it had. It’s been speculated the N1 would have finally had a successful flight if the program wasn’t cancelled in 1974. It’s been compared to Proton, which also had many early launch failures but later became a reliable vehicle. I don’t think the alarm needs to be sounded here. Starship-Superheavy’s development might look a little like the R-7, Proton, or even F9 landing attempts, but eventually it will succeed- like all those other rockets did.

Is this going to bring about any actual change though?

At the time the author wrote it, he was still trying to explain his religious experiences of 1974 with pseudoscientific theories like thought transference. I don’t recommend it unless you are a big fan of the author (Philip K. Dick). He actually canned this project, it wasn’t published in his lifetime and was only a first draft. Note that in the novel he did end up publishing after reworking Radio Free Albemuth, called VALIS, he decided to make the proponents of the “satellite theory” insane, while leaving it an open question as to whether anything he experienced was real. In contrast, Radio Free Albemuth establishes an “end all be all” set of facts and reality.

Sudden access to space resources- not that they have the means to actually access them, only identify them- would not make India an economic superpower or raise the standard of living. Russia is the second largest producer of oil in the world (or so claims my quick Google search) and yet it does not have a widespread high standard of living (not even before current events caused economic havoc).

Yeah, I didn’t notice that tweet until after making my post…

As a kid, I remember STEM not being a thing pushed in schools until about 2013-2014. So I’d assume we didn’t recognize the value of engineers and scientists until around that time. The 2000s thus remained similar to the past century, where things like athletic ability and “mainstream” education for business et al was exalted instead. The quality and high popularity of MCU movies may have had a big role in normalizing geeky stuff. It showed Hollywood that successive sci-fi movies could make money and gain a big following. Thus we got more sci-fi movies, and now kids and teens are all about that sciencey stuff.

It can take years to analyze data and publish a paper on it… With Chang’e 5, it took months to get the first scientific paper released on the samples. I don’t see any sign of Indian malpractice.

https://x.com/nukestrat/status/1699443848538190175?s=46&t=Jd73T2beq0JLNtwTy1uR5A Wow. This wasn’t any old Minuteman test. It was a test of the MIRV option, with three warheads! Currently under treaty regulations, each missile only carries one warhead. But due to current events… A sign of the times to come?

So I'm curious about the plausibility in real life of part of a novel called Radio Free Albemuth. In the book, an alien satellite has been orbiting Earth for thousands of years, being responsible for various religious phenomena in the past. It isn't discovered until the 1970s, and then the Soviet government, with approval from their American puppet president, proceed to blow it up using an interceptor satellite. Would it be possible for an object to remain in Earth orbit for that long- effectively being a second satellite of Earth prior to real artificial satellites- without being detected during the early days of the Space Race? The satellite is past GEO (it took "two or three days" for the interceptor satellite to reach it) and it's characteristics are otherwise unclear. Would it be possible to build it utilizing some material making it less visible to telescopes and radar? Given it is an alien satellite, I suppose there technically could be some undiscovered physical process and materials being used to shield it from Terran eyes.

175 centimeters.

Happy late B-day!

I'm not sure if that's the exact definition of survivorship bias. Is all car travel dangerous because 1 in 1000 people die in a car crash? Or were the trips that succeeded actually quite safe, and one actually dangerous due to some hidden factor? Vice versa, I would say Apollo in eight years was, with hindsight, and in a technological sense, not lofty. Whereas a Soviet Moon landing in five years was. But actually I wouldn't say that. I have realized that I never meant Apollo alone was not lofty, but that in comparison to the Soviet attempt or the original Shuttle timeline, it was not lofty. But anyways, I think that is besides the point. My word use was wrong. Rather than "lofty goals" I was listing "short, optimistic timelines". This definition, of course, has some issues too, because depending on the context Apollo could have been a short timeline project too. And of course, Mercury and Vostok were completed in much shorter time than Apollo itself. So what I was actually listing was basically just "that other Moon landing program that tried to get there within five years" (the Soviet L3 lunar project). The Space Shuttle should be dropped as an example because development of a space plane is very different. *deep breath before trying to get back on topic* Thus based on the past example of the Soviet attempt to get to the Moon, Artemis III in 2024 or 2025 was always just a dream even with SpaceX's break-things-and-move-fast development style. Therefore there shouldn't be much worry over being "late". Only if things start to slip past 2029 would it be concerning.

Perhaps, but not at all long enough to give India some kind of “lead”.

Perhaps I was using the wrong word, but I defined “lofty” as “having proven to have been impossible to complete [on time]”.

With hindsight it’s pretty clear that not only was the US fully capable of putting a man on the Moon prior to 1970, but the Soviets also had no chance at beating them. Politically lofty? Yes, as you said no one has had the will to go back for 50 years. I’ll concede it was very lofty to get Congress to continue to fund it especially when the Vietnam War was a big priority. Technically lofty? It was cutting edge technology for sure, but as to whether that means it was somehow absurd for it to be built by 1970, I personally think no.

I was listing lofty goals. Kennedy’s challenge was not a lofty goal because it gave the US almost a decade of time to complete it. Whereas the Soviet Moon project and Shuttle had five years or so.

Here's the post! We ended up visiting Chofu Space Center instead!

So in a thread in the lounge I mentioned I was going to visit the JAXA Tsukuba Space Center, but we had a change of plans and ended up going to the Chofu Space Center in Tokyo! Here are the pics. This is the outside of the facility. It is the HQ of JAXA and is the location of some test facilities. The main attraction on display at Chofu is AFLEX, one of the test articles used during the H-II Orbiting Space Plane program in the 1990s. Here's a cutaway of the different parts. And here is a depiction of the test flight profile. Also on display were a number of models of JAXA's past and present fleet of flying testbeds. As you can see, this one was utilized for VTOL research in the early 1970s. The center had a number of different concept art on display of their current development projects. I don't want this post to be too long so I will post them in a few days. The center was small, but great fun to visit. They had some kiddie displays showing off how jet engines and wind tunnels work, and although it was closed on the day I went there, there was a spaceflight simulator too.

Moon in 2024 and then 2025 was always a fantastic date. Note in the history of space projects, we have two examples of attempts at such predictions: A) Soviet government orders a crewed lunar landing to occur in 1968, with development starting in ~1964-1965 (loosely similar to the original Artemis timeline) B) NASA begins planning for Space Shuttle missions in 1978 following the beginning of formal STS development in 1972 (earlier timelines had the Space Shuttle getting approved right after Apollo 11 but flying in 1975!) In reality, the best shot the Soviets had at a landing was probably around 1975-1976 after the improved N1F flew, so it would have taken them about a decade to fly to the Moon. Shuttle took until 1981 to fly, so also nearly a decade of development time. I'd say Eric Berger's take in Ars Technica that Artemis III won't happen until 2028 is a best case scenario, and realistically it will take until 2029 or 2030.

Next Generation Crewed Spacecraft "獵戶" and Crewed Lunar Lander "河鼓" lolololol. On a more serious note, I'm excited for these to finally get names. Off the top of my head I think it would be cool to have names based on the Qixi Festival story, but the names of the two characters (Zhinu and Niulang) literally simply mean "weaver girl" and "cowherder" and thus aren't great if you don't know the context.