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Today is Google Meeting day for NewMars.
GW Johnson has been hard at work on several different (but related) studies.
We have a new Daily Recap PHP file available for installation in NewMars forum. I am hoping SpaceNut will be able to join the meeting so we can discuss how to get the feature installed.
Austin Stanley reported finding a series on Mars that he had described previously. The series appears to be available in PDF form if anyone is interested.
Systems check went well at 17:29 New Hampshire time.
We expect to open the Waiting room at or just before midnight UTC, 8 PM New Hampshire, 7 PM Houston, 6 PM Los Angeles and mid-morning Australia.
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The waiting room is open at 23:55:44
GW Johnson joined the meeting and we spent the next hour reviewing his recent work comparing standard capsules for re-entry at Earth with the new inflatable design that flew successfully in a test dive from Low Earth orbit. That design generated lots of data, and NASA reported good results. The design appears to have met all goals and even exceeded expectations in some areas.
GW's analysis included different radii for the two shield types, and a variety of re-entry velocities, based upon LEO, the Moon or Mars.
He produced graphs and documentation, and each graph was backed up by an appendix with the raw data from his entry analysis spreadsheet.
One area where we spent some time was in review of the shape of the tip of the heat shield. A spherical shape with a radius of 1 meter was one example I recall from the many designs we considered. I found a diagram on the Internet that helped me to understand the concepts, and GW indicated he might consider adding that feature to help readers who have not seen the War Head entry studies from the Cold War that GW has in (declassified) hard copy.
Next week GW will be returning to work on the Mars lander. He spent some time attempting to reassure me that a feature I am worried about will not be a problem, so we'll see how that shakes out in coming days.
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The waiting room is open at 23:53 ....
Today is Google Meeting day for NewMars.
GW Johnson has been hard at work developing papers on re-entry in general and the Mars problem in particular.
System check at 23:32 went well.
We are on schedule to open the waiting room at just before midnight UTC.
7 PM Houston, 6 PM Los Angeles and Seattle, 8 PM New Hampshire and (my favorite) mid-morning Australia)
That was an interesting meeting. GW and I called up his recent pdf document about the SpaceS staging (you can find it in the GW Johnson topic).
He had made a number of changes to improve the understandability of the diagrams.
We then spent some time talking about the design of the Mars Lander that is intended to place 40 tons on the surface without discarding anything on the way down. This has never been done, so it is quite challenging.
Finally we wrapped up looking at some software that might be helpful as GW gets further along with the lander design. The management of force flows will be similar to those experienced by landers that discard their heat shields, but in this case GW is planning to hang onto the heat shield during all phases of the landing. The engineering calculations to do all that will definitely be interesting.
If all goes well, NewMars will offer another Google Meeting next week at the same time.
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Today is Google Meeting day for NewMars...
In recent times, GW Johnson has reported on his numerous studies and projects...
The Mars Lander that does not discard material during descent has been a primary focus recently.
In parallel, studies of heat shield designs in the atmosphere of Earth are well developed.
Pending are similar studies for Mars, which has a thinner atmosphere with lest consistency.
Recently GW has returned to a familiar topic: Project Orion
In a (very) recent post GW estimated an optimum ship mass at 20,000 tons. This is up significantly from the 5000 tons that was contemplated for Project Orion.
That would be a very good use for some of the atomic bomb grade material collected on Earth.
*** System check at 17:12 New Hampshire time went well. We are on schedule to open the Waiting Room at mdnight UTC.
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The waiting room is open at 23:56
kbd512 and GW Johnson joined the meeting.
We discussed aircraft design, Mars lander design, and the challenges of trying to slow Large Ship at Mars using the atmosphere to provide resistance.
We scanned through RobertDyck's Large Ship topic, looking at images created over the years.
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Today is Google meeting day.
GW Johnson has made considerable progress on his Mars lander.
kbd512 may have updates on aircraft design.
As a bonus item, if we have time, GW reminded me we do not know details about design of the Orion space craft.
All the documents from that time should be declassified by now, but how many are online is a question.
We would like to know how the charges were delivered to the site of ignition, and how they were oriented so the shaped charges went where they were supposed to.
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Systems check went well at 1900 New Hampshire time.
We'll open the waiting room a few minutes before midnight UTC, 8 PM New Hampshire, 7 PM Houston ... mid-Morning Australia
Update: we are online at 23:58 UTC
This was another solid meeting ... We split the time between aircraft (and specifically the Wankel engine developed by John Deere) and the Mars Lander, which is approaching closer and closer to ready for machine level drawings.
GW spent much of the past week diving into the intricate details of a honeycomb shelf for the 40 ton payload.
He created spreadsheet pages showing the tradeoff between wall thickness and material strength and load capacity.
He studied steel, aluminum and carbon composite materials.
All this work is accumulating in a paper that is now up to 24 pages, and there are more to come.
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