Spaceship for Planetary or Asteroidal Exploration

On 6/7/2010 3:10 PM, tom Donnley wrote:
On Jun 7, 12:16 pm, Pat wrote:
On 6/6/2010 10:56 AM, Dr J R Stockton wrote:

A truss is unnecessarily heavy.

Use instead a pole or two, braced with crosstrees (spreaders) and
shrouds in the fashion of a mast.

That's just what I did on my model:http://www.starshipmodeler.com/gallery/pf_disc.htm

That model is so kewl. It's probably closer to how an actual discovery
class ship would like than the clean and sterile designs in scifi
movies. Dont suppose you ever did a writeup to go with it ??

Actually, the name is coincidental to the one in "2001" due to the fact
I had a leftover 1/72 scale Shuttle orbiter decal sheet around; although
given the fact that the one in the book went to Saturn, you could
picture NASA naming it that, in the same way the first Shuttle was named
after the Enterprise from Star Trek, and the second one after the Apollo
11 CSM.
The two Titan landers happen to have the same names as two Star Trek
Constitution class starships - Intrepid and Valiant - for the same
reason...a leftover decal sheet.
Probably the most oddball parts on the model are the crew areas on the
two small landers used for landing on airless moons after being taken to
them by one of the nuclear-powered tugs.
The crew areas are HO scale garbage dumpsters. :-)

Pat

On 6/7/2010 3:16 PM, tom Donnley wrote:

That story always gave me the willies. I cant imagine what they must
have felt up there. Probably a critical moment in the whole program,
if armstrong wasnt there (no offense to the other pilots) and the
mission was lost who knows what would have happened to the program.

Armstrong got criticized by Monday-morning quarterbacks for shutting
down the whole RCS system leading to the emergency reentry.
The crew assumed the problem was with the Agena, not the Gemini, and the
fact that the spin rate greatly increased once they had cut free from
the Agena came as a major surprise for the crew.
Given just how fast the spacecraft was rotating when they did that, if
he hadn't done that in very short order the crew could be rendered
unconscious by the building G-forces or the whole retro and equipment
modules could have ripped free from the Gemini reentry module, leaving
the astronauts stranded in orbit. IMHO he did exactly the right thing
given the situation they were in.
Video of the incident shows just how rapid the rotation was; start at
the eight minute mark:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmM8f...eature=related
One thing the incident showed was all that training on the dread NASA
nausea-inducing MASTIF simulator hadn't been in vain; once the RCS had
been shut down the crew were able to cancel the spacecraft's coupled
spin and roll oscillations in short order:
http://www.thoughtequity.com/video/c...1337335_010.do
Trainee astronauts hated that thing, but got so good at it that they
could cancel out rotation in pitch, roll, and yaw simultaneously,
standing still as the whole thing spun around them like some sort of a
carnival ride from hell.

Pat