SunlitZelkova

On December 1st we've got the US Marines activating its first helicopter squadron*. On December 17th, the B-47 Stratojet made its first flight. Considering the design went on to influence modern day airliners, this is an extremely significant event*. I had never thought to think the sound barrier was broken, the Spruce Goose flew, and the B-47 flew all in the same year. Crazy stuff! *Sources coming on the day of

November 2nd, 1947 - The Hughes H-4 Hercules, better known as the Spruce Goose, took flight for the first and only time. Howard Hughes himself was at the controls. Source- https://www.flyingmag.com/when-the-spruce-goose-took-flight/?fbclid=IwAR2ZwmbBPNmBr4kHpEElpHYlClCuLxAOJ35gvDRwzyY6VP4Dwou5H5yUszA By the way, this article is a great explanation of the whole history of the plane, in case you are unfamiliar with it or want to learn a little more. I’ll also add that the museum that now houses it is definitely worth the visit. Not only is there the Spruce Goose, but space stuff as well, like the unflown Mercury-Atlas 10 capsule and both a Titan II and Titan IV. Among the more eccentric aviation items they have are an F5D Skylancer and a Soviet-built MiG-17A (most in museums in the US are J-5s, Chinese license built MiG-17Fs). Other interesting space items present are one of the X-38 Crew Return Vehicle test articles, a PGM-11 Redstone missile, and a full scale replica of the Vega type probe.

The spaceplane (Shenjian?) may be coming back to Earth soon, along with the core stage.

Wow! I can’t believe it took me nearly 10 days to notice this. I need to get out of the Science & Spaceflight and Spacecraft Exchange sections and explore the forum a bit more lol. I am amazed we are getting so much for just 50 dollars, it seems like so little considering how expansive and sophisticated the game will eventually become. The only thing that worries me is having a proper amount of personnel to cover the huge influx of feedback. I’m sure they have that down though.

What @DDE said is a great explanation. I’ll tack on to it in case you are wondering why the idea of military operations around the Moon is even a concept worthy of discussion in the first place. Without turning this into politics, basically one side (side A) misinterpreted the scientific missions of the other side’s (side B) probes, and side B thinks side A is taking advantage of such poor analyses to establish a monopoly over speculative lunar resources. Also there are a number of potential military applications for cislunar space, like putting reconnaissance assets there out of reach of Earth orbit ASAT. Obviously placing a military asset somewhere invites attack, so there is a potential for combat around the Moon. So now theories are flying and accusations are trading and it is looking like the Moon could end up just like LEO did (a mess of lack of clarity and control and the ever present danger of a disaster in orbit).

One of the worlds I made for space what-ifs has Mengtian’s core stage slamming into the uninhabited Saudi desert. Many voices are raised over what happened but nothing really comes of it beyond harsh statements back and forth. It will be interesting to see if my fiction becomes reality!

So we really did get a Halloween surprise from CNSA. A spooky dead core stage hangs over the Earth, and no mortal knows when it will fall!

With zero knowledge of Chinese word play I have come up with turning “Tiangong” (天宮) into “Miangong” (面宮) and sending world class noodle dishes there (maybe with space grown vegetables added in). The pronunciation isn’t exact though, as you are certainly aware. Tian is Tiān and Mian is Miàn. I also need to gain more knowledge of Chinese dishes. Preferably direct first hand knowledge *licks lips*

It just occurred to me there has never been a calligraphy contest for an Asian language in space. There was never more than one Japanese astronaut in space so it wasn’t possible before, but with a trio of taikonauts on orbit permanently soon, I wonder if we will see one.

So if HLS (not HLS? The second one for regular access) is a dual provider program, what will the criteria be for either Starship HLS (obviously getting picked) and the other lunar lander over each other for a mission? It’s not like Commercial Crew where both vehicles have reasonably similar capability (barring the trunk) and can be swapped easily. Starship has much more capability than what little is known about the other potential competitors. That’s not even necessarily the fault of the other potential providers. It is just hard to match Starship when they don’t have their own SHLV. Makes me wonder if we might have seen proposals to launch HLS designs on SLS if it had the cadence to do that.

If you wish upon a shooting star falling core stage!

At separation from Mengtian, about 42 degrees. But I’m not finding any orbital updates. It seems we have fallen into a slight malaise since Wentian.

Yes I think*, yes, and yes, except I don’t know about flying wings**. Apart from having a low stall speed, having a lower speed overall can be beneficial in the right hands. Po-2s flown as bombers during WWII were difficult to shoot down because the max speed of it was near the stall speed of the German fighters. When North Korea used them in the Korean War, US Navy pilots flying their F7F Tigercats had similar issues. *I think this is what wing loading is, not sure for sure. **Flying wings may be their own beast. The YB-49 had poor performance, and presumably the YB-35 had similar issues. B-2 shouldn’t count as it is fly-by-wire. Yes, because you get the above mentioned benefits at a cost. The A6M Zero had a very low stall speed for an aircraft of its class (with very low wing loading!), but was difficult to control at high speeds and could not out run or catch up to American fighters using boom and zoom tactics (at least once the F6F and F4U arrived). There are ton of factors that go into an aircraft being effective though. The Zero wasn’t as controllable at high speeds as the F4F, but USN pilots also practiced world class tactics like deflection shooting and had better coordination overall, along with the benefit of radar direction. I bet if the Americans had had Zeros and the Japanese the F4F, the outcome would have been the same in air battles over the Pacific (assuming the Americans still had radar).

This is a thread to share updates on the status of the core stage of the Long March 5B LV that launched the Mengtian module on October 31st, 2022. This has been created because sharing of news has picked up quite a bit on the CNSA thread compared to when Tianhe was launched, and therefore the core stage merits a separate thread to avoid losing Mengtian and other CNSA related news in the flood of core stage updates- it took 10~ days or so for the core stage to reenter the first time and attracted quite a bit of discussion.

Caught the stream two minutes before launch! Crazy to think that not counting Xuntian (a free flying element) the baseline configuration of Tiangong is basically complete now. From here on out it is more akin to how the ISS continues to evolve (2011-present with Nauka and what have you), whereas up until now (or a matter of hours from now until docking) was 1998-2011 (first element launch to “completion”). ——— Here is a thread for discussing the core stage and sharing updates on its orbit. Please take discussion about the core stage here so as to avoid cluttering the CNSA thread.

In theirs and everyone else’s defence, there was a fair amount of corruption and bribery going on. That’s bad, but it’s not “I sincerely think this is a great aircraft” bad!

China sort of did this with Tianwen-1. The Long March 5 rocket did not put the spacecraft into Earth orbit, it launched on a direct trajectory to Mars. This is just a guess, but I think China probably did this due to the trauma experienced with Fobos-Grunt (which also carried Yinghuo-1, China’s first attempted Mars orbiter) getting stranded in its parking orbit rather than any technical necessity. Now this is just some simple (dumb?) reasoning based on KSP, but launching directly would involve getting to orbital velocity + trans-*destination* injection velocity anyways, so why not go to orbit? I’m sure there are other issues I am missing, or we would already be doing this.

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/ataglance/2286/ Oh my god NHK-World! It’s not a “new” rover! Ignoring that line, that link has a 1 minute video with some footage of it driving around during D-RATS 2022. That’s Hoshide Akihiko and one of the engineers wearing their EVA suits.

I’m curious, what is your rationale for single launch architecture over multi-launch? There’s nothing inherently wrong with multi-launch missions. The only reason it was rejected in the 60s was because of the unreliable technology of the time and Apollo being based around a timeline- landing before 1969- rather than efficiency. If we are going to do a single launch architecture, I think it would make more sense to put Orion and a lander on top of Super Heavy with modified upper stages derived from Starship. The lander would likely be pretty bare bones though, so really the architecture we have now isn’t too bad. The only thing I would change is having crew launched on Dragon and board Starship HLS in LEO rather than rendezvousing in lunar orbit. This presents some issues with redundancy (I don’t think Starship has anything that could serve as the “Aquarius” to the “Odyssey” in the event of an anomaly) but these could be solved.

http://hopsblog-hop.blogspot.com/2016/01/fact-checking-neil-degrasse-tyson.html?m=1 I imagine you have seen it before, but here is a link you might find interesting!

It’s been geolocated by OSINT people on Twitter, and it apparently comes from a training exercise. It was reportedly in Belgorod, and slammed into a power line. I don’t know how reliable such estimates are though.

I would like to give a very big thanks to the responses from y’all. I am creating a number of worlds to bring about spaceflight and military what-ifs, and a great many of them end in human extinction triggered by nuclear war and climate change, so these info and perspectives are great!

https://falsesteps.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/the-orbiting-primate-spacecraft-the-cape-flying-monkeys-apollo-applications-program-part-iv/ The neat thing is, the 460 kilometer orbit this thing was intended for is totally feasible for Dragon. How high can it maximally go up again? Or the thing could be fully automated like Cargo Dragon. I’m sure it would be possible to move whatever you want to bring back out of the main module and into the return capsule remotely.

It’s apples to oranges. The DC-3 was designed for a very different mission set than the Space Shuttle we got. The DC-3 existed at a time when the Space Shuttle was not expected to take part in space station assembly because the Saturn V would launch S-II sized monolithic modules, it wouldn’t launch space telescopes (these might have been built in to the station or perhaps launched on the Saturn V itself- imagine a telescope with the S-IC diameter!), and it didn’t need to have cross range capability because it was envisioned as a wholly civilian vehicle with no military participation (beyond the usual connection between NASA and USAF/USSF).

There would be many ground detonations in a full scale war. The US has 400 ICBM siloes, so if Russia launches 3 warheads at every site to ensure destruction, that’s 1200 ground detonations across the Midwest. Of course, some may fail. But would the debris/dirt be carried that high and remain so high for so long? Nuclear explosions occurring in a span of less than a minute are hardly comparable to Krakatoa erupting for five whole months. And the huge wildfires in the US, Australia, and Siberia are providing good comparisons for how masses of burning cities might affect climate. Note that a dry forest is certainly better fuel for a fire than a concrete city, and cities likely would not burn as long as forests. If the wildfires did not cause catastrophic cooling how are cities supposed to?