Category Archives: Models

Suborbital is Next to Useless for Point to Point Travel

Posted on Tue, 2008-11-04 by gravityloss

Spacetransportnews has a link to another in the long list of nontechnical space dreams. Earth’s radius is about 7000 km. The Van Allen belts start somewhat above 500 km from Earth’s surface. Hence, ballistic arcs have to be either very … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Demotivation, Models, Motivation, Science Links, Spacecraft, Suborbital | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Living on a Finite Size Planet

Posted on Thu, 2008-10-09 by gravityloss

FAO published some numbers on fishing today: Global marine catches have been stagnant for over a decade, hovering at around 85 million tons per year. Meanwhile fisheries productivity — measured in terms of catch per fisher, or per fishing vessel … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Climate, Colonization, Demotivation, Global, industry, Models, Motivation | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Babysteps Are Good

Posted on Thu, 2008-10-02 by gravityloss

In a sense, having low resources can be seen as a good thing. You don’t end investing a huge amount of effort into some architecture, approach or solution, which proves to be a dog, but which you can’t then get … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, engines, industry, meta, Models, Motivation, RLV:s | Tagged | 2 Comments

Ridiculous Electric Vehicles

Posted on Wed, 2008-10-01 by gravityloss

The state of the auto industry is quite sad. Take a look at these electric vehicles from Chrysler. You won’t get far by picking a stupendously inefficient vehicle architecture (A SUV, Jeep or a big sports car) and sticking it … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Climate, industry, Models, RLV:s | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Neglected Space Technologies, Part n

Posted on Tue, 2008-09-23 by gravityloss

Didn’t know there was a blog about space tethers, by Kirk Sorensen no less. Toss payloads from LEO to GTO or towards the moon (to EML2 perhaps). Without fuel, since the tether can re-spin with electromagnetic thrust using the Earth’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Models, Science Links | Tagged | Leave a comment

Congratulations to Paul Breed

Posted on Mon, 2008-09-22 by gravityloss

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikaxvvFq0Ks] Unreasonable Rocket

Posted in Models, Motivation, RLV:s, Suborbital, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

TrueZer0 Lunar Lander Challenge Team

Posted on Tue, 2008-09-09 by gravityloss

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5AVvV91M4o&eurl=http://www.truezer0.com/] Truezero is using metric units (I hear liters mentioned on one video)! That must save a lot of trouble, compare that to Flometrics’ engineering students measuring flow rates at gallons per minute. 🙂 Truezero has a quite different approach … Continue reading →

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Thorium MSR Design Possibilities

Posted on Mon, 2008-09-01 by gravityloss

There are a huge array of design possibilities for a Thorium molten salt reactor / liquid fluoride thorium reactor, but this post takes a very simplified approach to map a small part of the fascinating and diverse landscape with a … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Climate, Colonization, ISRU, Models, Motivation, Science Links, Thorium | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Respect

Posted on Mon, 2008-08-18 by gravityloss

Continuing on the theme of science, policy and think tank input, Nexus 6 has an extremely good concise reference to the subject.

Posted in Climate, meta, Models, Motivation, Science Links, Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

A few videos

Posted on Sun, 2008-08-17 by gravityloss

A few RC airplane videos from Slowflyer at Metacafe (wordpress doesn’t allow embedding Metacafe stuff): Pulsejet Fast jet Scale F-20 jet Quad rotor platform There’s some lightning outside. Visible on instruments too. I am about 60 km or one sector … Continue reading →

Posted in engines, Models, RLV:s, Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment