Atlantis

[selden]

bh,

Of course, shuttle models will still be desirable for historic reasons.

Any models of follow-on spacecraft would just have to be speculation at this point, except, perhaps, for the Soyuz.

The last time I spent time browsing the Web to investigate the space tranportation situation (a few months ago), the designs that had been proposed by NASA and the major aerospace companies were in a shambles. All of the existing test programs that I could find had been cancelled and the new proposals (e.g. something based on Apollo design concepts) were just pipe dreams.

However, there are quite a few small companies, especially those involved in the "X-Prize" competition (27 according to the X-Prize Web site), that seem to be developing reasonable designs.

Rutan's "Scaled Composites" seems to be going gangbusters, for example. See http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/. They're a ways away from full orbital capability, and may not actually be planning for that, but still...

And considering that they're commercial and sure to want all the free advertising they can get, they might be willing to provide some 3D models that could be modified appropriately for use with Celestia and Orbiter.

[bh]

Progress so far:


Thanks to TERRIER for the logos!! Great job! I've a little fine tuning to do and may have this ready for this evening...UK time. The next step is to link up with Orions MIR...maybe next week.

Sorry it's taking some time!

Regards...bh.

[bh]

Sorry...I'm having computer problems...maybe Sunday or Monday!

Regards...bh.

[bh]

Ok all done...many thanks TERRIER for the markings!!

You can get it off my shuttle page - the www button at the bottom of this post.

This week I'll be mostly eating Mir/Atlantis.

Added later...I've just been testing the model and there are a couple of errors...more haste less speed!! I've lost one of the cctv cameras and the USA logo on the port wing is too high off the surface. I'll try to fix these tomorrow!

I have it doing a fly-around with Orions textured Mir model and apart from the absence of any Soyuz craft (I'll add them of course) it doesn't look too bad.

Regards...bh.

[TERRIER]

This week I'll be mostly eating Mir/Atlantis.

.....Suits you, Sir!

Meanwhile, I've been having a look at the 2 line orbit data for mission STS-71, on the CelesTrak website. I have found some data that I like, and I wouldn't mind seeing how it looks;

Code: Select all

1 23600U 95030A   95185.25000000 -.00000499  00000-0  00000+0 0   211
2 23600  51.6451  72.2835 0003028 167.5446  69.3797 15.57133736  1001

From this I've managed to pick out the following info;

Inclination 51.6451
RA of Ascending Node 72.2835
Eccentricity 0.0003028
Arg Of Perigee 167.5446
Mean Anomaly 69.3797
Period 0.0642205
....Plus what I think is an epoch date of the 185.25th day of 1995!?

I used to have a converter that seemed to work with my spreadsheet ( I don't have EXCEL) for producing the rest of the SSC, but I seem to have lost it. I think it was possibly Grant who made it available.
Please can I have another copy?

regards
TERRIER

[selden]

http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/hutchison/spreadsheets.html

Grant's spreadsheets work with both OpenOffice and Excel.

[bh]

Sorry...computer probs again...hopefully tomorrow!

Regards...bh.

[bh]

Well I've been trying to improve the model and have given up...so I will carry on the the link up with 'Mir'.

Regards...bh.