Daily Archives: 6/22/2004

More Paper Crafts

Cape Penguin, modelled in PaperFor reasons which escape me, Yamaha has a really nice webpage on paper crafts, which include patterns that you can download and build. These include not only cool motorcycles, but also animals like the Japanese macaque or the yellow-eyed penguin or the Cape penguin, pictured at right.

The patterns are all available as PDF files which you can download, print, cut and assemble. Neat! The motorcycles are especially well done, it’s really incredible what you can do with paper models.

SpaceShipOne Still a Dangerous Ride

New Scientist is currently running an interview with Burt Rutan where he admits there was some potentially catastrophic failings in SpaceShipOne’s inaguaral space flight: a coupling collapsed when the rocket motor kicked in (the bang reported by astronaut Mike Melvill) and a brief period where the craft lost attitude control. Had this loss of control occurred earlier, it could have been “bad”.

The fellows at Scaled Composites have not announced when there X-prize attempt will occur. It’s clear that they have a few problems to work through, less the celebration of yesterday be turned into a catastrophe, and an astronaut be turned into confetti.

Universal Feed Parser

Mark Pilgrim has released a new version of his Universal Feed Parser. I have mixed feelings about the long term viability of this code, since it parses feeds which do not meet the specifications, which ultimately means that people never fix their broken feeds, but the specification itself is wooly enough that this is perhaps unavoidable. In any case, I’ve used it before, it works, and he seems to have done a lot of work generating test cases for it. Give it a try.

Alan Shepard – Project Mercury Freedom 7

I was pondering yesterday’s flight of SpaceShipOne, and decided to lookup the information surrounding the first American sub-orbital flights. Alan Shepard – Project Mercury Freedom 7 has most of the details. It’s interesting to compare the two flight profiles: Shepard pulls something over six g’s on ascent, and hits 11 on descent, whereas SpaceShipOne pulled about five on ascent, and just coasted down with very little excessive g-loading. The Mercury capsule required explosive bolts, parachutes, and a water landing. SpaceShipOne coasted to a stop on an ordinary runway, and allowed Melvill to wave to the crowd even before he stopped rolling. And of course, the Mercury Freedom 7 required a pressure suit, apparently without appropriate accomadation for urination…

Oh, and here are some plans for a paper model of the Mercury Redstone rocket.