Finally after more then a year in development this production has finally hit the internet.
Alpha Cenauri Beckons is a video about the ECR engine (Electron Cyclotron Resonance). The ECR is the very latest in advanced space propulsion. Using solid state components it is expected to give about 1.5 to 2 times the power over other current in-space propulsion systems. The ECR will require less maintenance because it doesn’t use electrodes (which wear out during opeartion) to generate electron resonance plasma. The extra performance comes from the facts of science that electron resonance has a higher energy state with which to eject plasma particles through the engine nozzle. In ECR propulsion ions are ejected more axially imparting more thrust. Specific Impulse (Isp) is about 5,000 sec. with the potential to go to 10,000 seconds which gives about 50,000 m/s to about 100,000 m/s exit velocity. The ECR was developed from the Gas Dynamic Mirror propulsive device which conceptually can generate fusion propulsion when materials and technologies, such as improved heat-to-electricity, are advanced to support fusion. When such technologies and materials are so advanced, the ECR can be configured to generate fusion. This will open up the entire solar system to manned travel. It could even make manned travel beyond our solar system a possibility! Alpha Centauri Beckons!
This is my first HD production!
Thanks to Allen Goodman for the voice over, and Tangerine Dream for the music (Stratosfear 1995).
A few days ago I was helping out at the US Space Camp Davidson Space and Rocket Center. For those of you who are not familiar with this attraction, it is one of only 2 places in the world where you can view an actual historical Apollo Saturn 5 rocket. The Davidson center hosts special events, concerts, dinner events and fund raisers under the rocket which is laying sideways and suspended above the floor of the building such that guests can walk under its entire length and marvel at this wonder of engineering that took Americans to the moon.
One of the guests asked me a very interesting question which I will get to in a second. First a little background on the context of the question. In the museaum floor there is a silver looking trailer. It is the actual isolation chamber that was used to quarentine the Apollo 11 astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and “Buzz” Aldrin after they returned from the moon in the event that they might bring back some moon virus.
It turns out that someone called into the US Space Camp and informed them that they had one of the isolation chambers from the Apollo program on their property. The people at the Space Camp didn’t believe the caller because at the time they had records that showed were all of the isolation chambers were located. However, upon inspection it was discovered that sure enough the isolation chamber was real and it was donated to the US Space Camp. They did a full restoration of it and it is on display in the Museaum now.
There is a glass observation area just inside the side entrance to the isolation chamber and just to the left you can see what appears to be a microwave oven.
My guest friend asked me if that was a microwave oven, if they had microwave ovens back in those days, and if they did, if that was the actual oven that the astronauts used. This question perked my imagination so I decided to do a little digging. I first and went to look at the device in the isolation chamber and first noticed that the oven has a fine mesh over the inside of the viewing window into the oven. This to me was a halmark of a microwave shielding that is, to this day, in across the front of every microwave oven ever made. Second was the instruction manual nicely sitting on the top of the oven. It said in bright red letters, “Radarange - Amana Corporation”
So I did a little more digging online and discovered that Amana corporation started in 1934 as a refrigeration company according to the wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amana_Corporation
They released their first microwave oven in 1947. The wiki goes on to describe that Amana introduced a consumer model of the Radarange in 1967, well before the Apollo 11 flight in 1969. Since this model would have been avaliable at the time I have no doubt that NASA would have purchased one for the Apollo astronauts! The only question that remains is; Is that oven the actual oven that the astronauts used? I do not have an answer for this question, but I do have a possible hint. I don’t know of very many Radarange Amana Corporation microwave ovens from the 60’s just lying around, do you?
Well it’s been about a year since I’ve posted to this blog. There are a number of reasons for this.
1. I got married and didn’t have time to write blog posts or anything of that nature!
2. I couldn’t write blog posts for much of the time because I was in the process of migrating the entire site from one host to another plus migrating the back-end of the site from one master data management system to a new master data management system. This took a lot longer then expected because we had to back up the database of course then re-migrate the database to the new system, and finally deploy it in the new system plus a whole new testing phase and of course we ran into a lot of problems along the way. As is the story of my life.
For those of you who have been faithful to this site you might remember all the problems I’ve been having. Well I finally found an old friend who could really help me get things lined up properly. More about that later.
So what all has happened! Well basically everything has completely changed in my life! As I said I’ve gotten married exactly 1 year ago today. Today is also my birthday. In addition to that my wife just got a new job! Plus we just closed on our first house and finished getting moved in! So needless to say I’ve been SUPER BUSY!!!!
So you can expect that I have a lot to talk about, but of course I can’t fit it all into a single blog post!
hehehe
Hopefully we will have the new slide-show system online soon for the new SethEden.net site. Also the forums are nearly finished but they need some stuff to be updated so I’ll be working on that. We are doing some new templates for a new system we hope to roll out to the SethEden.netsite.
When all of this stuff moves forward then we should start to see tons of new content on the SethEden.netsite and I really can’t wait!
I hope to have a lot more stuff for the blog and I definately have a lot of updates to write about!
Ok, so about my friend who is helping me get this site sorted out. This is a friend that I’ve known personally for about 23 years now! He is the best friend I’ve ever known and probably ever will know in my entire life! With so many years experience as friends he is like a brother to me and I’m like a brother to him indeed I probably know him better then his own family knows him. ;-D
My friend has been in the website and web-apps business for a good many years now and I decided to bring him in as my web-dev manager! It turns out it was the one best move that I could have ever done, I just wish I could have done it sooner. My friends name is Eric and his web/biz development company is StableIT.com. http://StableIT.com http://StableIT.biz
He has also helped me to totally revamp the OrbiterSimLandsat.com web page. www.Orbitersimlandsat.com
As you will see we have a whole new interface and design! We’ve also totally revamped the back-end of that site, added support to hosting seed-files for Orbiter distribution through torrents, and there is a whole lot more going on right now!
That’s all the time I have for today, so I hope you have as wonderful a day as we have planned!
Have you ever had the problem where you click on the “My Computer” and you get the Explorer window that shows all the drives, but it also includes the “Folders” window off on the left, you know the one that you get when you click the “Folders” button next on the Explorer Navigation Bar at the top.
Or maybe your the type of person who WANTS the “Folders” window to be displayed on the left.
Either way, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. I prefer NOT to have this “Folders” window active because it gets in the way when I’m viewing a folder as thumbs such as a picture gallery or video gallery. Over the last few weeks I’ve had my computers rebuilt here at the office and they always seem to come back with this “Folders” window as the default, as in I open a folder or “My Computer” and I get this Folder view on the left. For me it is VERY annoying!!! Furthermore, closing the window EVERY SINGLE TIME is not a feasible solution because it is also annoying and time consuming when you have to add one extra click to EVERY SINGLE WINDOW you open! So I went hunting for a solution today! After several hours of hacking the Windows Registry I found the solution that didn’t require digging into the Windows Registry at all.
All you have to do is open an Explorer window and click the
When I was a kid in 1885…I mean 1985, my dad got our family a new computer. The computer my dad got us was called the “Amiga 1000″.
Shortly after that we got the “Flight Simulator 2.0″ from Electronic Arts game company. This was the program I used to learn how to fly in the computer simulator. I loved this simulator, there wasn’t much else I could do in those days because this was the very best technology that was available at the time. So I would fly in the simulator ALL the time! In fact I loved it so much that I would setup chairs in my bedroom so the neighbor kids could come over and become passengers in my simulated airline.
My bedroom was in the basement of my parents house and that’s where they kept the computer. So we had lots of space down there and when all the neighbor kids came over then my sister would dress up as a stewardess and cater to them with hors doeuvres.
Yes I was a super geek even then!
A few years later a new game came out called “F-18 Interceptor”. Wikipedia lists the release date as 1888…I mean 1988. I got my first volenteer job at Shawnee Mission Medical Center around 1991 because the summer of 1992 I went to Bakersfield California to work with my uncle for his masonry company, and the summer of 1993 I got my first real job working for Taco Bell near my house.
So between 1988 and 1991 I spent a lot of time flying F-18 Interceptor, esspecially the carrier landings. This video game had a system to log your flight hours, and 1991 I would have been in 7th grade. So by 7th grade I had already logged well over 7,000 hours of flight simulator time.
Just a few weeks ago my friend Craig Russell of Americans In Orbit-50 Years decided to take me up flying with him from the local airport here in Huntsville Alabama. After we were in the air, he told me to take the controls, so I did and it was the coolest feeling I ever had! Craig could tell immediately that I had a lot of experience because I had such an easy hand on the controls. That’s because I had already trained my mind and muscels how to fly an airplane as early as 7th grade and even before then! Craig has a long and distinguished flying career because he used to fly for commercial airlines, so Craig has something in the ball-park of 9,000 hours of actual flying time. He was very surprised to learn that I had 7,000+ hours in flight simulators even before 7th grade! Now everyone laughs at me because they find it funny to imagine a little kid sitting at a computer flying a simulator all hours of the day and night! So much as even starting a simulated airline in the basement!
I will admit this is a little amusing, now that I think about it.
Some of you may ask, why didn’t you go into avation for a career in the first place?
Well this is a good question, I loved the idea of flying, being free above the world without a care. But I also recognized that it would get boring really quick as a job, because the cockpit would become my office and I would just be sitting behind the controls all the time flying from point A, to point B and back again. This didn’t appeal to me at all, I would have prefered to be in a fighter jet, or testing new airplanes. It was impossible to get into testing new planes unless you had some flight time in a higher performance fighter jet of some kind, and the only real way that a kid could get into that would be to join the airforce, and I wasn’t about to do that! Likewise it was mostly impossible to get into really flying fighter jets if you had eye problems like me. So I knew this was not an option for me. I decided to get into Electrical Engineering and become as smart as I could and educate myself on everything that I possibly could about science and physics. This was also an area that interested me. So that was the direction my career took.
I would like to thank Craig for giving me my first experience flying a real airplane! The other day I helped Craig upload a new video for AIO50 that was aired on a local TV station here in Huntsville for the Americans In Orbit-50 Years event at the Davidson Space Center, US Space Camp. Get a load of these kids in the video!…Awesome!! I love it!
Thank goodness I don’t have any business operations on my site, so it doesn’t really matter. The network engineers at my host, I really want to thank them for the extra effort on shutting these jerks down!
There was a report released recently on Information Weekly
A few weeks ago I got in a conversation with someone about HHO gas and was told that because the gas is mixed and if it’s under pressure it becomes volitile. The person telling me this said that it would become EXTREAMLY unstable, so much so that it would be comparable to nitroglycerin. A single breath of air or tap of the finger or so much as looking at it sternly
I just wanted to inform everyone that some changes have been made to the forum and the blog on my site. In case you haven’t noticed, all users registered on the forum are now also registered on the blog and all users registered on the blog are now also registered on the forums for my site. I’ve also updated the graphics for the login and reg. pages. A number of additional security measures have been put into place to keep the spammers and hackers out. This has proven to be most effective! Dan also added a useful and much needed Nav-bar to the forums.
All of this is special thanks to my new friend and part-time employee Dan Meeks. I had to bring Dan in because all of this has grown beyond the scope were I could manage it all by my self. Dan is an amazing web programmer and brings a lot of skills to the table. I want to thank Dan for the incredible work and efforts that he’s made on updating the site and making sure that everything works together so well, all without breaking my bank account. (Completely… )
If you want to hire Dan to work on one of your projects, let this stand as a professional recommendation. You can reach him on his Rent-A-Coder page here:
But please, if your going to hire Dan for one of your projects, don’t give him to much work, as I still have more stuff for him to do on my site first.
Just the other day I was working on a document at work that was very important! I had several places to back-up the document to because of different versions of the software that I was working with at the same time. I was in a hurry and saved the file then went to copy it to the other folder for the other version of our software. I knew I would be over writing the other older version, however, I accedently selected from the wrong window. I selected the old file and did a drag-n-drop to the new folder. Since I was in a hurry I didn’t check the expected pop-up request to over-write the file. I just clicked yes. So the old file just destroyed all the changes I just worked so hard to make on the new file.
How many of you have made this exact mistake so many times?
Your choices, well you could go out and download some trialware product that will not let you actually recover anything unless you pay. Or you could just out-right buy some comercial solution for undeleting the file really fast. You’ve just got one file you want to undelete and your in a hurry to recover it. You don’t need some massive corporate solution with a big price tag on it, and your under the gun to get this document out the door so you don’t really have the time to redo all the work you just did.
The solution I found is called NTFS Undelete. This is a simple, easy to use and FREE Undelete package that will scan a particular folder or drive and give you the option to navigate some folders or files that may have been deleted and recover them, or copy them to another drive.
I installed this thing and was able to recover my document for FREE and without even rebooting!
I just got this summary from an old friend in Minnesota:
Ben Huset president of the MNSFS - Minnesota Space Frontier Society
This is a sumary of a great man who passed away this week: Konrad Dannenberg
Written by Greg Allison of the Huntsville HAL-5 chapter of NSS - National Space Society
Space Pioneer Konrad K. Dannenberg passed away on the 16th of February 2009 at the age of 96. He was not only one of the last of the Von Braun’s original rocket team, but one of the most active publicly. In the 1920’s Dannenberg began his rocketry career developing mail rockets after a lecture by Max Valier inspired his interest in space. Mr. Dannenberg designed the injectors of the A4 “V-2″ rocket. Dannenberg went to Ft. Bliss Texas as part of Operation Paper Clip to advance US Army missile development. Later he transfered with the rest of the German Rocket Team to Redstone Arsenal next to Hunstville Alabama where he became a manager on the US Army’s Jupiter and Redstone missiles. He joined NASA when the Marshall Space Flight Center was formed and became a key member of America’s first program to land people on the moon. Mr. Dannenberg rose to the position of depty director of the Saturn V Program, developing the largest rocket ever flown.
This earned him NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal. After retiring from NASA in 1973 Dannenberg worked extensively with young people to foster their interest in space. He was an instructor at the US Space Camp, and led the way for student flight experiments on space shuttle Get-Away-Special (GAS) canisters. As a man of vision, Dannenberg was active in the World Future Society. He was a charter member and served on the Board of Directors of the L5 Society, parent society to the National Space Society. Mr. Dannenberg played a critical role in starting Huntsville’s chapter the Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (HAL5). He called HAL5’s first meeting. Dannenberg was a major advocate for Newspace. He was an advisor to the Canadian X-Prize Team that sought to build an uprated manned V-2. He was there in the Mojave when Burt Rutan’s team won the X-Prize and later presented NSS’s Von Braun award to Rutan. Dannenberg’s career spawnned the entire space age. He inspired many young people to seek careers in space, science and engineering. Many engineers were inspired to excellence by the example Dannenberg established both in his areas of technology development and public service. Konrad Dannenberg set the bar that we should all strive to meet. Those of us that were honored to know Konrad will dearly miss him.
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