Sunday Funnies
Mood:  rushed
A flashback today. I drew this one in 2003 and only lately found it as I was digging through my old sketchbooks. Sorta tells you how long I've been thinking about doing this, I guess.

-Scottie

ScottLand
Mood:  silly

The Lost World
Scientists have discovered a Lost World, which would make Conan Doyle proud on a mountainous Indonesian Island which has apparently never shuddered under the footsteps of mankind. There aren't any dinosaurs (yet) but there are new species of plant, insect and animal being discovered daily. Biodiversity of a kind unimagined even in the Amazon. Large mammals naive of the danger posed by the two-legged interlopers. An arboreal kangaroo thought almost extinct, a strange egg-laying mammal, all have been seen for the first time since the 19th century.

Wow.

Follow the link and be entranced as I was.
And they say the Earth's surface has no secrets left to uncover.

This... this is amazing!

Scott

The Final Frontier...
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: Still watchin' MacGyver on DVD...
For further reading if you're curious about more on the Spaceramp post...

Is the Shuttle Grounded Forever?
A discussion about the workability of modern Space Travel
Mars Direct at Scientific American

There's an interesting point brought up in some of these articles regarding a trip to Mars. Simply put, Martian surface Gravity is roughly 38% of "Earth Normal", whereas the gravity on the moon is roughly 17% Earth Normal. Excluding atmospheric influences, the Apollo moonlander(s) only had to generate a relatively tiny bit of thrust to take off relative to what it would require to take off on Earth and return its astronaut payload home...

So how are we going to get back from a planet with a denser atmosphere than the moon, which is our only extraterrestrial return-trip experience? A mars lander can't be blocky like the lunar lander. It'll need to be at least somewhat aerodynamic. The lander will pretty much need to be a proper reusable spacecraft in its own right, just to overcome the forces pulling on it as it tries to relaunch for the homeward trip!

Just to reach Low Earth Orbit (125-700 miles altitude give or take), the space shuttle has to exceed 15,000 mph (partially due to the density of the Earth's atmosphere). On the moon it was less than a sixth that, so simple boosters were all they really needed to get off the ground... how are we going to do that coming back from Mars? We'd have to carry sufficient fuel for an atmosphere launch, build a gantry or ramp or runway or whatever and take off again, facing many of the same problems (actually, about 38% of them, I suppose) a space launch faces taking off from Earth.

A sticky wicket and that's no lie.

Some serious people are considering the possibility of what I'm going to call 'disposable astronauts'. People we can send up and not come back! Yes, astronauts sent to explore another planet with no expectation of return, living out the rest of their natural (?!) lives on another planet, researching their new home and presumably sending back regular reports.

That sounds horrible but at some point, we're going to make the attempt to colonize an extraterrestrial environment beyond the International Space Station. This means people living, dying, and being borne off-planet. Mayhaps it's high time we got used to the idea?

I wouldn't want to do it, but then... I have to admit, I've always been intrigued by that last great feat in mountaineering... being the first to summit Mons Olympus on Mars, the highest peak in the solar system!

Eat yer heart out Sir Edmund Hillary!

-Scott

Just add Astronauts and a Waylon Jennings soundtrack
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: MacGyver Season 4
It has been said more times than I care to count that the space program owes as much to HG Wells as it does to Einstein. And the internet was created first in the minds of such visionaries as William Gibson and Phillip K Dick decades before it was made true by thier fans who said "What a cool idea, let's do it!"

Now the trouble begins, not with the ubergeeks who grew up reading cyberpunk and watching Bladerunner (and Star Wars, and Star Trek and... and...) but with the kids who... well, didn't. What abou the kids that idolized Evel Kneival? What happens when the kids who lived for their Hotwheels and Matchbox cars and harkened to the horn of General Lee grow up? What marvels will they introduce to the world? What ideas will the Dukes of Hazzard inspire?

Nascar? Monster Truck Rallies? The next obvious step in the evolution of the Space Program?

Say that last one again.

I give you: The Skyramp! Some brilliantly oddball engineers who'd watched Bo & Luke Duke jumping over Miller's Creek in the General Lee one too many times said "What if we built a way that you could jump into orbit!?" Then they set out to do it. And if that doesn't scare you... this will. They succeeded. Well in theory anyway. if nothing else a whole bunch of them banded together and formed Skyramp.org. It's impressively argued, though I'd be curious to hear the more engineeringly inclined (Kristin?) chime in on this.

It is possible that using existing technology, the future of space travel won't have to involve tiny spaceplanes duct taped to gigantic solid fuel rockets, or Apollo-like rockets bursting away from the gantry in a plume of fire and brimstone. Rather they could be launched Jetsonlike from a ramp, reaching speeds in excess of Mach 1.3 before they ever leave the rail. The ramp would be at a 75 degree angle up a mountainside or - more likely - up through an underground tunnel to keep the excessive G-forces off the astronauts. A downward launch could mitigate some fuel expenditure using gravity and you'd never need the $500,000,000 in rocket fuel per launch! You could fly to the International Space station for less than it costs to fly to Japan!

All of these things exist already, they just need to be put together and tested. Existing rocket sleds used by Lockheed and Northrup Grumman to test aerospace parts (not to mention pilots) for G-force strain can already reach the speed of sound and beyond and they haven't really pushed the technology as far as it will go. With a magnetic levitation system reducing friction on the rails to near zero (in use in Swiss metrorail, whose tunnel-trains exceed 300 mph!) and no worries about having the brake at the end (since you're wanting to fly off the end of the ramp) all the tedious mucking about with rocket boosters and tons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen would be eliminated! Sounds to me as though - once again - the simplest solution might just prove to be the best one.

This is a direction NASA should not ignore. I would hate to look back someday and see that this was an obvious idea we missed. All of the systems you hear spoken about to replace the retiring Space Shuttle program sound like steps backward or sideways. This would be a cheap alternative using largely extant technology. So why not at least try it?

I - for one - would love to see it. Besides, how cool would that be? Daisy Duke in space!
(insert wolf-whistle here)

"Just some good ol' boys,
never meanin' no harm
beats all you never saw
been in trouble with the law (of gravity)
since they day they was borne..."
-Waylon Jennings

----------------

Credit (or blame) where it's due: I first read about the Skyramp over on the SchlockMercenary blog and that inspired me to check it out. If you like smart space and science humor (and some fart jokes thrown in for good measure) I recommend Howard Tayler's web comic Schlock Mercenary.

Introducing... The Hoverdeck!
Mood:  d'oh
Incidentally, we may have recovered pretty quickly from the tempest, but my father in law up in the Hood Canal area expects to be without power until at least Wednesday!

Out here on the island, the storm blew the rain away at least temporarily, so I got to spend some time outside in the sun. That meant I could spend some time on the deck project.

Rather than tear the whole thing out and start over, I decided to save some money by removing the eyesore built-in benches and planters which were made the place look tres 1975 (which I suppose it is, but still...) and replace any bad planks and the rotten front step. I decided to start with the step, because it seemed like the easiest part of the task. Pull off the bad one and nail down a new one. Easy peasy.

Ever industrious (and looking for a reason to bust out the power tools) I set to with a will. I sliced up a new board for the step and turned to address the old one. It was so rotten I didn't even need the prybar, it just fell apart around the nailheads (sheesh!). It was only then that I realized that the stringers were rotten too. No problem, I can replace those too. I'm a handy guy, no problem, right? The guy that owned the house before us was no carpenter, that's for certain.

I pried the stringers off and beheld a sight no homeowner wants to see. After a momen'ts shock, I realized that I was looking at a 4x4 post that was supposed to be holding up that section of the porch, but was rotted away a few inches from the ground. By pulling away the skirting and employing my handy flashlight I discovered that our deck was basically levitating! The dork hadn't placed any of the posts in sandy holes, up on concrete pilings, pre-formed blocks or even bricks! The daggum thing had been built just sitting on the dirt!!! Over half the pilings were rotted away and just hanging there like little 4X4 wooden anchors!

Perhaps I shouldn't say the man was a complete loss. The thing feels solid when you walk on it, even now. It didn't sag, squeak or do any of the things that might have tipped me off that it was basically unsupported! Like I said, the front deck is - for all intents and purposes - a hovercraft!

Removing the flowerboxes and bench and hauling away that debris took the rest of the daylight I had left. So at the moment I have a cinderblock for a front step and yellow police tape cordoning off the most dangerous part of the porch. Next weekend we get to spend a romantic weekend building a new deck.

Oh joy!

At least the new one won't be painted battleship grey. We're going to stain it. And it will be seated firmly on preformed concrete bases, in accordance with county building code!

Sigh.
Scottie

Sunday Scottland
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: 2112

Riding the storm out...
Mood:  a-ok
We've survived the worst of the storm. I was just commenting over on another site that the National Weather Service has apparently decided we're in an El Nina cycle. I've been told that the Farmer's Almanac agrees. (Who are those people, anyway?) So more wet weather for those of us up north and dry and hot for the rest of America for the summer.

Ick.

I don't want you to think we rode out the storm huddled in a corner of a bomb shelter or something. Nope! We went to Tacoma and grabbed a burger and bummed around at the Home & Garden show at the Tacoma Dome. Other than getting buffeted on the bridge by the crosswinds (white knuckles on the steering wheel) the day was pretty un-eventful.

Sunday comics will be up in a minute. I'm waiting for the color to dry. By the way; I'm not promising a comic a day, it's been crappy weather so I've been at loose ends when I would rather be doing things that require electricity, so I've picked up the pen. Can't say it'll be like that a whole lot... unless El Nina says otherwise, of course. (grumble)

Scottie & Kris

ScottLand

I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees...
Mood:  irritated
Now Playing: What was the old Washington Irving thing about thunder and bowling?
A quick post while we still have electricity to run this machine...
We've been without power for the better part of today into last night. If any of you left a message on our machine in the last 24 hours, it's gone. Our battery backup wasn't up to the task on that one.

The windstorm is apparently the worst to strike the Puget Sound region in 50 years, though it's nothing beside the storms we were used to back in Missouri and Nebraska. It took part of the corrugated roofing off our back porch last night. (not a pleasant noise to wake up to) The real fear isn't the roof of the porch, though, I can fix that. Unfortunately, the humous layer is relatively thin in Washington; meaning that those tall beautiful trees we're surrounded by have a relatively shallow rootsystem holding them upright. Last windstorm - which was susbstantially milder than this - saw a tree down that completely blocked the road in front of my house from the forested lot across the street. I had to go out and clear it with a handsaw and that wasn't much fun.

They really are beautiful trees... when they don't fall on your house, anyway.

Just keeping everyone posted... I'll sign off now, the power's fluctuating again.

Scott & Kristin