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Down toward the end of the Wiki article there's a fairly lengthy discussion of proposals to re-boost Skylab for later use by Shuttle crews.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab


These...

That's one reason I am kinda sad to see optical altitude tracking slipping out of use -- altitude calculation is a great hands-on way to teach kids basic trigonometry. I sailed through geometry and...

The HBOMR has the best assembly of calculations used in stability determination.

It's far easier to get one of the design programs (RockSim, OpenRocket, SpaceCAD) to check out your designs for...

Great looking rocket and awesome vid.

I always love it on an onboard video shot as the rocket is coming down, spinning around and you see several hard/hazardous objects in the potential landing...

Far too often the ONLY aspect of rocketry which gets public (i.e. teevee) exposure is the, "yeeee hawww!! let's make things go boom!!" slack-jawed yokels.


Someday, somehow, one of these HPR...

I'm fightin' gravity and gravity always wins.
I'm fightin' gravity and gravity always wins.
I've been doin' it since I was a young kid and I come out grinnin',
But I'm fightin' gravity and gravity...

I am already neck deep in unbuilt kits but those are awesome deals, I have a feeling I am going to buckle and order one of them. The 22-pack has several Centuri-design kits I built back in my teenage...

Cuaron directed "Children of Men" which was pretty awesome, I like Clooney in most of his movies, so I suppose this could be good.

Seems to be lifted to some extent from "Marooned" (as Shread...

I had one. Got it in 1970 when I was 12. It turned out real nice looking, although certainly not as crisply masked as stuff I built when I was older.

Somewhere along the line in all my moves it...

Argh. If I ran into a guy like that in any capacity -- as a student or a parent/guardian of a student -- I would hang the dude's rear end from the nearest tree.

I would go straight to the powers...

Bringing it back to earth would have been massively more difficult than boosting it into a higher orbit. You would have to build a heat shield bigger than the entire station and also figure out how...

I always thought on the final Skylab mission they should have boosted it up into as high an orbit as the Service Module SPS engine could take them and see if they could buy a few more years of...

On a historical model which really did have such markings? Fine.

On an "alternate history" model such as the Luft46 stuff? OK.

On "sport models" with the Nazi symbols as decoration?

Well, in...

"Bertha Butt'' could be a Big Bertha BT-60 nose section mated onto a BT-101 cluster motor section.

Little in the middle but she got MUCH BACK.

http://youtu.be/KaOC9danxNo

Space Oddity:

Guitar and vocals recorded by Chris Hadfield on the ISS.

Pssst. Hey buddy, you wanna just carry this bag across the street?

Jim of course has tons of experience with groups so I would definitely follow his advice.

From the kids' group launches I have seen or been involved in: if you have only one launcher (and more...

No doubt they could get plenty of volunteers who would say, and probably believe in their own minds, they were 100% fine with the one-way concept.

But it is inevitable some of these people, over...

No way in the world a one-way mission plan ever gets significant public support.

Like it or not, a one-way mission is, in fact, a suicide mission -- even if the eventual method of death turns out...

I'd be leery of a kitbash session if you are trying to introduce kids to rocketry with no previous experience.

I think it's a good principle to instill into kids that while you are still in the...

They should have had Brent Spiner be the guy who drives off at the end of the clip.

Kids around the world always love to see rockets go up.

If they learn how to do it safely it is a great thing.

I would guess by the time these kindergartners become adults we will be making...

The "Apollo family" looks awesome and should be a big crowd pleaser.

You probably want to get as accurate a list as you can of how many club members/demonstration assistants you are likely to have...

Well, if you can get permission to conduct an actual flight that would obviously be better, but if you are going to run a program on July 20 that almost demands an Apollo-Saturn V model.

If you...

Sheer speculation: reports I have read say a substantial part of the cargo was vehicles: if ONE was not bolted down securely, broke loose as the plane was in steep climb after takeoff, and crashed...

For school rocketry programs and entry-level rocketeers, I think it's much better if they are told:

"You wanna know which rules you can bend? None. End of discussion."

Oh, there have been the people who want to do away with all the "silly safety rules" all the way back to the very first days of rocketry.

But it seems more and more in the last couple of decades,...

From the timing between the flash of the explosion and the arrival of the sound wave (less than a second) this guy could not have been more than 1000 feet from the plant.

Way too close with a kid...

Good for you. The screw-offs may think you are just being a big meanie and a party pooper, but when they pull some stupid stunt and somebody gets hurt, everybody has to pay the price (probably with...

Good points.

While every launch doesn't have to be as regimented as a NARAM or a major club launch, every launch with a school or youth group should use a LSO/RSO system in which all rockets are...