notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

Multiple exposures of a Gemini-Titan launch, 1966, posted to Flickr by x-ray delta one (via, via)

March Madness: NASA Style by NASA Goddard Photo and Video on Flickr:

Launch madness will hit the east coast in March as NASA launches five rockets in approximately five minutes to study the high-altitude jet stream.

The launch window begins March 14 and runs through April 4. ATREX launch info: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/missions/atrex-launch…

To read more go to: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/missions/atrex.html

(via)

livelymorgue:

March 4, 1968: “Don’t call them paper dresses,” began a report about a line of disposable dresses that could be reimagined as posters. The one seen here features Cape Kennedy. Another? An Allen Ginsberg poem. “The intent is for pretty  young things to buy them on impulse and wear them to the beach or parties,” the reporter wrote. “Matrons, stay away.” Photo: Arthur Brower/The New York Times 

I love the idea of the Lively Morgue posts, which combine archival photographs with the more ephemeral scribblings on their reverse. Obviously, the picture I reblog is going to be the one with the rocket in it.

crookedindifference:

50 Years of the Space Program

On May 25, 1961, [JFK] stood before Congress to deliver a special message on “urgent national needs.” He asked for an additional $7 billion to $9 billion over the next five years for the space program, proclaiming:

“First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

Picture and caption from the JFK Library.

unknownskywalker:

Mach Diamonds

Discovery rockets into the blue sky above Launch Pad 39A after liftoff on the STS-133 mission in Feb. 25, 2011. Beneath Discovery’s three main engines are blue cones of light, known as shock or mach diamonds, which are a formation of shock waves in the exhaust plume of an aerospace propulsion system.

Mach diamonds forever.

(via mission-to-mars-deactivated2011)

From Vandenburg AFP’s photo gallery: “A Delta II rises above the clouds as Staff Sgt. Eric Thompson freefalls over Lompoc June 7. The instructor with the 532nd Training Squadron planned his skydive to coincide with the launch carrying the Italian Thales Alenia-Space COSMO-SkyMed Satellite”.

Unfortunately, the site doesn’t have a good way of linking to the image (in fact, I suspect the page link above will stop working eventually), which has led to the picture doing the rounds labelled as a Shuttle, rather than rocket, launch. It’s still pretty spiffy, though.

Space Shuttle Discovery Soars Over Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World. Well, you can’t fault it as a description.

The second photo, of the remains of the exhaust trail lit by the rising sun, is also pretty spiffy.

NASA image of the day: Ares I-X at the Launch Pad, before its test launch today, “between 8 a.m. and noon EDT”.

The Technium: Was Moore’s Law Inevitable?

Of course, it kind of weakens his argument, but I still find it odd that Kevin Kelly doesn’t admit anywhere in this post that the speed curve for rockets he posted turned out to be wrong.

OK, fine, it predicted the first satellite launches and Apollo, but then it broken down catastrophically. The fastest a human has ever travelled was in 1970.

Kelly does address the reason later on:

In this microcosmic realm energy is not very important. We don’t see exponential improvement in efforts to scale up, to keep getting bigger, skyscrapers and space stations.

Multi-stage chemical rockets are the only way we have to hoist payload. Unless and until we shift to nuclear rockets or tease out of particle physics some magic method of propulsion, they’re the only way we have to get to the Moon, and Saturn V and Energia are as big as we’ve made. As Charlie Stross says:

Stick a LEM on the moon and bring the contents back? Easy. Increase the mass that the LEM brings back? Very expensive — the price goes up as the sixth power of the weight you’re returning from the lunar surface (because you have to loft the heavier LEM into Earth orbit to begin with).

This doesn’t really invalidate Kelly’s argument. I just found it a bit of an odd omission.