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Aug 292024
Oct 022022
The blog was out for a day for Unexplainable Tech Reasons. Tech support gave up and said they couldn’t fix the problem – I couldn’t log in to either of my blogs, so I couldn’t edit posts, couldn’t make new ones. They gave no hope of the problem being fixed. And yet… here we are. Yay. They work now.
That said, I’m rather sick of the problems popping up with irritating regularity. So I want to examine options. One clear problem is that both blogs (the other being https://up-ship.com/blog/) are on the same host, so if something mysteriously appears to plague one blog, it often plagues the other. I need to separate them.
I’ve tried – and hate – Discord, Facebook and Twitter. I *like* the WordPress blog, if for no other reason than I’ve grown accustomed to it. So what I might do is get new “Unwanted Blog” and “Aerospace Projects Review Blog” WordPress blogs, hosted elsewhere, then simply park a “this blog is now over yonder” post at the top of each of the legacy blogs. If someone has suggestions along those lines, by all means drop a comment.
Mood: annoyed.
Aug 252022
Pulse Jet engine from a V1 Flying Bomb fired up on Feb 6 2021 at the Military Aviation Museum near Virginia Beach
Jun 262022
testing…
Feb 092022
For those who have been asking, and those who haven’t, earlier today I contacted tech support about a security issue. You could access the site with an “http” but not an “https;” you’d get a warning about the site being unsecure. The fix was, supposedly, a simple activation of an SSL or some such. woo! Now… it seems to be *completely* inaccessible. I’ve been on hold with tech support for a long while now. Bah.
Jun 262020
In January I signed my very first book contract, for a heavily illustrated aerospace history text Yet To Be Publicly Described. The manuscript and all the diagrams were due to be turned in to the publisher in July. And then… Commie Cough comes along, book stores close, supply chains collapse. Perhaps surprisingly, the book was not cancelled, but instead delayed by one year. Sigh, oh well, okay.
So today, I signed a *second* book contract with the same publisher. This is for a slightly smaller text on a different subject, but similar in idea: a boatload of aerospace diagrams. Book One looks to have around 180 diagrams; Book Two will top out somewhere in the area of 120. This one has a due date of January, 2021.
If you like the US Aerospace Projects publications I’ve put out, then you’ll go bonkers for these books.
An aside: for public discussion purposes, the first book is “Book X.” The second book would thus be either “Book Y” or perhaps “Book XX.” In which latter case if and when I sign a third book contract, that would should prove quite interesting.
Sep 112019
As time goes by, I find more and more unhappy customers… not because I’m turning out a crappy product or not filling orders, but because the emails i send out are directed into spam buckets. I *assume* that this is because the emails have one or more, sometimes many, HTML links in them, and the spam filters read them as, well, spam. But an email exchange usually fixes that right up.
One problem that I can’t seem to fix, however, is orders from the “free.fr” email system. Multiple machines, multiple email systems, all messages sent to “free.fr” addresses bounce back as undeliverable because the system has, through presumably the same process as he spam filters, decided that these messages are spam, and has successfully blocked me out. So if you have a free.fr email address and don;t get a reply from me, *ever,* contact me via a *different* email.
Sep 112019
So… is everythign working again?
Aug 082018
A 1959 NASA depiction of the Ernst Stuhlinger “Umbrella” ship. This design was nuclear-electric, the electricity powering a bank of ion engines providing a trickle of high ISP thrust. The large circular “umbrella” was the radiator for the nuclear reactor, located at the far end of the “handle.” This design is a little different from the usual depiction with the crew compartment divided into two semi-toroidal segments. Normally this design is shown with a single torus with a maximum diameter much smaller than that of the radiator; here the crew compartments are shown to be relatively gigantic. I assume that this is artistic license as it also depicted the crew compartments as having *vast* circular windows in the floor. The crew compartments would spin (apparently independent of the rest of the ship) to generate some amount of artificial gravity to keep the crew healthy.
Sep 222017
A piece of NAA concept art from the late 50’s or very early 60’s depicting a “space taxi.” Such devices were a common staple of space station thinking well into the 60’s, though it’s difficult to tell just how serious of a design this one was. The canopy, for example, seems an odd choice. The shape of the bubble and of the hatch indicates that this was not designed to hold pressure; the fact that the pilot is shown in a full space suit backs that up. It would make it difficult for the pilot to enter and exit the craft. And of course, the taxi is shown without reaction control thrusters, making it rather difficult to maneuver the thing. Very likely this is an artists fantasy done purely for marketing, showing people things they expect to see. Note, for example, that the space station appears to be cribbed directly from the Collier’s series. And if the station was rotating, that door would be in the *floor.*
