Here is the Brilliant Pebbles anti-missile vehicle just after cocoon (“life jacket” here) separation. The kill vehicle is shown as a multi-stage vehicle with four drop-tanks; this capability usually isn’t shown. However, it would certainly allow for blisteringly fast interception speeds.
Lawrence Livermore National Lab artwork of the Brilliant Pebbles anti-missile satellite within its protective “cocoon.” Compare to artwork HERE. Dimensions remain elusive.
Until December 18, the AIAA is selling 25 books for $25, and ten books for $10. Some good stuff here at some pretty substantial discount. You don’t have to be an AIAA member to get the discount.
NOTE: I have no relationship with the AIAA, and don’t make a nickel off these sales. So.. if you want to buy stuff and still feel like you are Supporting The Cause, feel free to navigate to Amazon.com through the “Search’ box that’s to the upper right of this page. i get a tiny fraction of the sales prices for items purchased via search & referral. I suggest buying stuff like laptops and computers and cars and such. So long as I’m getting a small percentage, it might as well be a small percentage of a large dollar value…
The Aircraft Designers: A Grumman Historical Perspective
Michael V. Ciminera
$39.95
NOW $25!
Meeting the Challenge: The Hexagon KH-9 Reconnaissance Satellite
Phil Pressel
$39.95
NOW $25!
Space Shuttle Legacy: How We Did It and What We Learned
Roger D. Launius; John Krige; James I. Craig
$49.95
NOW $25!
Augustine’s Laws
Norman R. Augustine
$39.95
NOW $25!
100 years of Flight
Frank H. Winter and F. Robert van der Linden
$69.95
NOW $25!
Have Blue and the F-117A: Evolution of the “Stealth Fighter”
David C. Aronstein and Albert C. Piccirillo
$59.95
NOW $25!
Advanced Tactical Fighter to F-22 Raptor: Origins of the 21st Century Air Dominance Fighter
David C. Aronstein, Michael J. Hirschberg, and Albert C. Piccirillo
$49.95
NOW $25!
Aerodynamic Principles of Flight Vehicles
Argyris Panaras
$49.95
NOW $25!
Voyager Tales: Personal Views of the Grand Tour
David W. Swift
$74.95
NOW $25!
Hans Von Ohain
Margaret Conner
$54.95
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Road to Mach 10: Lessons Learned from the X-43A Flight Research Program
Curtis Peebles
$39.95
NOW $25!
Eleven Seconds into the Unknown
Curtis Peebles
$39.95
NOW $25!
Blazing the Trail: The Early History of Spacecraft and Rocketry
Mike Gruntman
$39.95
NOW $25!
The Rocket Company
Patrick Stiennon and David Hoerr
$34.95
NOW $25!
Rocketdyne: Powering Humans into Space
Vince Wheelcock
$39.95
NOW $25!
Space Exploration and Astronaut Safety
Joseph N. Pelton
$49.95
NOW $25!
Shades of Gray
L. Parker Temple III
$49.95
NOW $25!
Unmanned Aviation: A Brief History of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Laurence R. Newcome
$44.95
NOW $25!
Starting Something Big: The Commercial Emergence of GE Aircraft Engines
Robert V. Garvin
$39.95
NOW $25!
The Power to Fly: An Engineer’s Life
Martin Ducheny and Brian Rowe
$39.95
NOW $25!
Aerospace Engineering Education During the First Century of Flight
Barnes McCormick; Eric Jumper; Conrad Newberry
$89.95
NOW $25!
The History of North American Small Gas Turbine Aircraft Engines
Richard Leyes II; William Fleming
$49.95
NOW $25!
Methods to Extend Mechanical Component Life: Lessons Learned with Space Vehicle and Rocket Engine Components
Dieter Huzel
$44.95
NOW $25!
The Engines of Pratt & Whitney: A Technical History
Jack Connors
$49.95
NOW $25!
From Rainbow to Gusto
Paul A. Suhler
$39.95
NOW $25!
Experiments in Aerodynamics
S. Langley
$29.95
NOW $10!
Skycrane: Igor Sikorsky’s Last Vision
John A. McKenna
$39.95
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Hired Minds
Bryan Gardner
$19.95
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Terminal Chaos: Why U.S. Air Travel Is Broken and How to Fix It
George L. Donohue; Russell D. Shaver II
$29.95
NOW $10!
Space: The Fragile Frontier
Mark Williamson
$39.95
NOW $10!
Rocketeers and Gentlemen Engineers
Tom Crouch; Buzz Aldrin
$39.95
NOW $10!
The Superpower Odyssey: A Russian Perspective on Space Cooperation
Yuri Karash
$49.95
NOW $10!
Centennial of Powered Flight
Gerard Faeth
$24.95
NOW $10!
When the Airlines Went to War
Robert Serling
$24.95
NOW $10!
Advice to Rocket Scientists
Jim Longuski
$19.95
NOW $10!
Take this for what it’s worth:
An expert from the China National Space Administration’s Lunar Exploration Programme Center… added that the moon is the Earth’s only natural satellite, and it can be transformed into a deadly weapon. Like the Death Star in Star Wars, the moon could hypothetically be used as a military battle station and ballistic missiles could be launched against any military target on Earth.
Various weapons testing sites could also be established on the moon, the source said.
Welcome to Project Horizon V 2.0.
For those unaware, Project Horizon was a 1959 US Army study of a moon base for military purposes. Included in that was the use of the moon as a missile base. The idea is not *entirely* ludicrous: a missile base on the moon would be several days away from a strike launched from Earth. So if Nation A launched a first strike on Nation B and Nation B has a lunar base, then Nation A can expect a rain of ruin from the moon a little later. However, the US decided that Polaris missile subs were cheaper.
Just a reminder…
After hiatus, I am again offering cyanotype blueprints of various aerospace subjects on paper. These include the V-2, the Saturn Ib and V, the NERVA nuclear rocket, the Super Hustler, and many more.What says “Merry Christmas” better than a gift of a hand-made, awesome-looking large format cyanotype blueprint of a launch vehicle or nuclear bombardment system?
See the complete list here:
http://www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/catalog/cyan.htm
And while I’m not at liberty to go into the specifics, I recently provided a number of these to a certain ongoing major TV series to be used as set dressing/props. The episodes will air sometime early next spring, I believe. They should look marvelous…
Seemed to go reasonably well. Some reports later that my audio faded in and out… I can only assume that my phone was either on the fritz, or perhaps the phone line itself was a bit screwy. Anyway, you can download it in MP3 format here:
http://archived.thespaceshow.com/shows/2134-BWB-2013-12-02.mp3
If you have a question raised specifically by the interview, you can ask it either here, or at the Space Show blog:
http://thespaceshow.wordpress.com/2013/12/03/scott-lowther-monday-12-2-13/
One minor correction: I was asked what the first US bomber was. I seemed to recall that the US dropped bombs from biplanes during the Pancho Villa expeditions of 1916; I was close, as there were Curtis biplanes modified to drop small incendiaries sent to Mexico, but the bombs were not dropped.
A photo of dubious quality showing Phil Bono of Douglas standing next to a surprisingly large display model of the ICARUS/Ithacus intercontinental transport rocket. The photo was taken at the “Travel ’67 Show” at the Cow Palace convention center in San Fransisco. According to poster art found on eBay, this was held Feb 24 – Mar 5 of 1967. I haven’t been able to find out more about it, though it would seem that it must have been a convention about the future of transport. One can speculate that the facility was filled with representations of supersonic transports, monorails, high-speed trains, sleek cars with ridiculous fins…
More on the ICARUS/Ithacus, along with the related ROMBUS space launch booster, can be found in Aerospace Projects Review issue V2N6.
Reminder: I’ll be on tomorrow, December 2, at 2 PM Pacific time (3 Mountain, 4 central, etc).