Tag Archives: NASA

Rockets of the Space Race: 14 rockets completed

June 02, 2012   admin   2 Comments

It’s amazing how time consuming drawing pointy cylinders can be!

With a reasonable variety of models nearing completion, I was able to finalise the process I use for creating textures and surface detail. This meant that I had to go back and slightly re-work all the models I’d done so far, which took a while…

It’s all done now, and the process of modeling is getting easier as I now know what I’ll be needing when it comes time to texture the surface of a rocket. Because of this, I’m able to “unwrap” parts while they are being created, before the models are complete, which is a big time saver.

I’m finding that the most time consuming process is still the research to figure out what the stages look like for some of these rockets. The early US ones are particularly bad, especially the vehicles that aren’t considered very successful. One source of information that has proved useful is the NASA technical reports website which provides scanned PDF documents of technical reports that were written when the vehicles were flying. Useful, but not great as photos in these documents look like they have been transmitted on an old black and white fax machine.

At least the line drawing survived the process fairly well.

I’ve yet to start serious work on the Russian launchers, so I’ll have to wait and see how much detail I’ll be able to find about those…

The app code has also been improved with some buttons added to control moving through the list of rockets and adding and removing of stages for the multi-stage vehicles. It’s still very simple and in now way representative of the final product, it’s just there to make it easier to test on my tablets.

Also, the rocket tally is now up to 14 complete of 32, so it’s getting close to half way now. Juno I, Jupiter, Juno II have been added in the last couple of days and work I’ve begun work today on Saturn I. It typically takes about a day to create a model, so there’s about two more weeks of work left… for the models anyway.

Here’s a couple of shots, the first showing stage 2, 3 and 4 of the Juno II rocket, with the gold coloured Pioneer 3 on top. Nothing too fancy there, just bundles of Baby Sergeant rockets (a small version of the military Sergeant rocket) securely strapped together. Pioneer 3 (or 4 – they were identical) is even attached to a single Baby Sergeant which is stage 4.

The second shot is the final version of the V-2, with a more natural colour scheme.

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Rockets of the Space Race: Atlas & Thor

May 25, 2012   admin   No comments

Two more models are now complete, including Atlas and Thor rockets. In both cases I’ve chosen to create models of the variants of these two launchers that did something interesting – for Atlas, I created a Mercury variant which launched the first American to orbit the Earth, while for Thor, I built the Able 1 variant which carried Pioneer 1, the first satellite launched by NASA after the agency was created.

Pictured below is the Atlas Mercury rocket, sporting my new shiny silver metal shader which will be applied to the other models I’ve created to make the metal parts look more metallic. This is the most complex model so far, taking approximately 18 hours to create, and as  usual, it can be disassembled into parts, including removing the retro rockets and escape tower from the Mercury capsule.

The polygon count totals 3,200 which is more than I was hoping, but there was a lot of detail on the Atlas that was simpler to create as polygons, rather than trying to fake it with textures.

With Atlas and Thor complete, there’s Delta, the Titan family, a few Redstone variants the Saturn 1B and Saturn V left to do for the US list. I’ve dropped Polaris from the list for now because I haven’t been able to find much more than a brief mention of  a possible contribution of guidance systems to other rocket and missile projects. If I can find something more concrete, I’ll add it back later.

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The race to the Moon

January 30, 2012   admin   No comments

The past few weeks I’ve been busy designing my new app, a game tentatively titled “The race to the Moon”.

It didn’t start out as a game, rather it was originally was just an educational app, but I wanted it to focus on more than just the moon landing and present information like a timeline of events, the 18-or-so major achievements, the rockets that were used, the spacecraft that were launched and the missions and programs that were run.

Unfortunately, the original design quickly turned into the plans for a boring reference work, and lets face it, libraries already full of dusty books that document this period of time. The worst part was that it would have been a turn-off to the people I wanted to reach: those of us born after the space race was over, and those of us who have since been numbed into unconsciousness by droning teachers in high school history classes.

I scrapped the original plan, but kept the information I had gathered and decided that the best way to present it was in the form of a game. Make it interactive.

After trying to fit my data into a couple of different game genres, I finally settled on a “click management” style, something easy to learn and perfect for touch screen devices.

The game will be set in the period from 1957 through to 1972 and you will be in charge of the US space program. Your task will be to manage the launch site and payloads in an effort to follow or even beat the real-world timeline.

The rockets you will have at your disposal are derived from the five rocket families that took part in the 18 primary achievements of the space race, including less famous events such as the first probe to land on another world. The payloads that that you launch will be based on the real payloads, from real missions and programs. The events that occur will be presented in the same order that they occurred in history.

Because it’s following the real timeline, you are competing against both the USSR and the real US space program.

At the end of it all I hope that I will have produced a work that will give players a better idea of  the incredible achievements in addition to the actual landing.

I’ve already begun working on a prototype, and there’s still a lot to sort out, but now that the idea is in place, work is progressing quickly.

There’s nothing much to see yet because I generally use placeholder graphics while in the early stages of a project. I’ll post screen shots once it’s presentable.

I realise the world is littered with boring educational games, but I think I can buck the trend and make something that’s both educational and fun!

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A new version of everything

January 20, 2012   admin   3 Comments

It’s barely been two years since the HTC Desire/Nexus One made a splash as the world’s first phone with a 1GHz CPU… and now we’ve got quad core 1.4GHz 1080P tablets on the way.

When I first started developing Solar Explorer, late in 2010, it was an absolute struggle to get it to run at an acceptable pace. Since then, both my development tools and portable devices have improved to the point where it’s no longer critical to optimise every little thing my apps.

Of course, it’s hard to break the habit of trying to constantly minimise resource usage.

With this in mind, I decided to do one more quick update of both Solar Explorer and Exoplanet Explorer, completely re-creating the background galaxy texture used in HD mode. The new version features more detail, has stars scattered through the sky and it’s also 50% larger than the previous one so it should look better on big screen devices.

While working on the background graphics, I decided to re-size the splash screens for both to 1280×768. I also increased the colour saturation and replaced the dull galaxy image in Exoplanet Explorer with something more colourful, a Hubble shot of the Andromeda Galaxy.

Thanks again to NASA for providing so many great public domain images from Hubble.

In terms of app functionality, there’s been some minor bug fixes and I’ve modified the options menu in all versions to save changes immediately after applying them, rather than when the app quits.

I also performed an exoplanet update this morning, merging in changes that were made to the Encyclopaedia yesterday, and it all went nice and smooth.

With all that out of the way, I think both apps have reached a point where I can leave them alone for a little while and stop bombarding you with new updates.

Time to focus on something new!

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Oh NASA, why do you hurt us so?

September 16, 2011   admin   1 Comment

Space Launch VehicleYesterday, NASA announced yet another “new” shuttle replacement project, called SLS or Space Launch System (was an acronym really necessary for that?).

Looking like a photo-shopped Saturn V, the new launcher offers three to four times the lifting capability of the now retired Shuttle, which had to struggle into orbit with an airframe on it’s back.

Unfortunately for NASA, it’s only a matter of time before this get cancelled, just like every other major project they’ve started since the International Space Station.

Even as I write this, grubby little bank CEO’s are no doubt placing more bets. Win or lose, they’ll take home a juicy bonus, and if it goes bad, the tax payer will clean up the mess.

Too big to fail? NASA certainly isn’t.

The US Government will cut NASA’s budget like it always does, and NASA will come up with a new launch vehicle, probably inspired by some other success of the past.

Why do you play this game NASA? You tout launch vehicles, crew capsules, and missions to the Moon and Mars. All the while Congress or a change of President always sabotages you.

It’s time to stop wasting resources on half finished projects and focus on what you do best: robotic science missions that are ready to launch as quickly as possible, before the executioner can kill them.

Leave access to space to the entrepreneurs.

They’re ready to fly.

Robotic science missions.

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Good luck Juno

August 02, 2011   admin   No comments

Another update for Solar Explorer, and I’ve been extra busy this time.

Apart from a minor fix, I’ve added some more planet structures for Mars and Jupiter and tweaked the update I did last week for low resolution phones.

While adding the extra detail to Jupiter, I found out that we really don’t know much at all about the almost-red-dwarf in our Solar System.

NASA is planning to launch the Juno probe to Jupiter on the 5th of August to fill in the blanks, so I decided to pre-empt the launch and put Juno into space early, in Solar Explorer.

Juno has quite an interesting design with the three solar panels making it very distinctive, though I do have to wonder why solar power was chosen since Jupiter is so far from the sun.

As usual I’ve done my best to peel the thermal foil off the spacecraft so you can see what it looks like underneath.

For a spacecraft, Juno is also a 3D modeller friendly shape, unlike Voyager and Dawn which have bits poking out everywhere. The more shapes in a model, the slower it runs on the device, so it’s a lot of hard work for me to work out what to simplify to keep the speed up while keeping the overall appearance of the spacecraft intact. It would almost be easier to accurately model the spacecraft down to the smallest detail, but then if I did that, Solar Explorer would be all but unusable on the typical device.

In a future release I plan to include labels on various parts of the spacecraft to make Solar Explorer more informative, but for now it’s enough to push ahead with more spacecraft for the full version and expanding the detail on the planets and moons.

I also see that we’re starting to get more images from Vesta. Once we’ve got it photographed from all sides, I’ll update the Vesta model to look more realistic, but it may be a little while yet before we get the full picture.

In closing, I’d like to ask NASA to do me a favour and make sure Juno gets off the ground safely, or the only space it’ll ever see will be inside my model Solar System!

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Goodbye Shuttle, you won’t be missed

July 25, 2011   admin   No comments

As a child and a science-fiction fan, I was swept up in the romanticism of the Shuttle, and recall vividly watching Columbia blast off on TV, back in 81. With it’s futuristic plane like design, it promised to usher in a new era of easy access to space.

Unfortunately, the Shuttle turned out to be a bit of a dud.

It was supposed to be so many things: cheap to run, reusable and safer.

It turned out to be too heavy, required a long and complex tear-down between launches, and if anything went wrong then there was little chance for it’s crew to escape.

The worst part is that just as NASA was relaxing it’s rules and allowing civilians to fly, the first such passenger was lost with the Challenger, which I also vividly recall seeing on the TV one morning. This incident turned public opinion against the program and set back civilian  participation in space exploration by years, at least in the US.

Fast forward twenty years and the NASA manned space programme is all but a memory. Repeated attempts to construct a replacement for the aging workhorse either got canned by a change of Administration or Congress cut the budget to ribbons to pay for tax cuts, bank bailouts or just plain pork barrel projects.

All the while, the expensive Shuttle fleet has eaten away at what was left of NASA’s resources.

With the retirement of the Shuttle, the future is finally looking a little more futuristic with the private sector finally being invited to participate, now that there’s no other option.

It turned out that there really was a demand for civilian space travel, as demonstrated by the Space Station “holiday” packages that the Russians pioneered. Virgin Galactic is on the scene now, albeit offering what is little more than a very tall roller-coaster ride. More importantly, companies like Space X are offering genuinely cheaper and safer access to space (though nothing currently flying in space is prettier than the Shuttle).

At least NASA’s unmanned space program is still leading the way with projects like Dawn and the incredible Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers… though I have to wonder how much longer it will be before Congress kills that off too…

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