From the page: "This document (Volume I, Volume II, and Volume III) presents a compilation of industry-wide methods in aerospace strength analysis that can be carried out by hand, that are general enough in scope to cover most structures encountered, and that are sophisticated enough to give accurate estimates of the actual strength expected. It provides analysis techniques for the elastic and inelastic stress ranges. It serves not only as a catalog of methods not usually available, but also as a reference source for the background of the methods themselves. "

Could be very useful. First open source astrodynamics code I've seen.

From the page: "The Java Astrodynamics Toolkit is a library of components to help users create their own application programs to solve problems in astrodynamics, mission design, spacecraft navigation, guidance and control using Java or Matlab."

An open source distributed lunar mission? This sounds pretty cool, reminds me of the Artemis Project.

From the site: "Our research and technology will be open-source, we are privately funded, and one of our specific goals is to reach out to the community and educational systems to spread interest, enthusiasm, and involvement.

1. All aspects of the mission plan and hardware will be open source. This information will be publicly available.
2. A strong media presence will be a priority.
3. Mission hardware will be light and geared toward continuity from one mission to future missions. Saving costs and simplifying the mission and hardware.
4. Access to all scientific data and acceptance of outside research proposals will be encouraged.
5. Privately funded with no government advocacy for any country or dependency on government funds (though they can be sought just like any other company).
"

Some of these DOE training manuals are excellent! Condensed references on management, thermodynamics and fluid flow, elecrical science, classical physics, instrumentation and control, mathematics, chemistry, material science, engineering symbology, and much more! PDF format. It's like a complete undergraduate technical degree!

Cool, a full-featured free/open source model rocket simulation package that'll run on Linux! Might be a good basis for a more advanced simulator for sounding rockets and nanosat launch vehicle simulation with a bit of work.

From the site: "OpenRocket features a full six-degree-of-freedom simulation, realistic wind modeling, a multitude of different components including free-form fins and canted fins, clustering and staging. "

This looks useful.

From the page: "CEA is a program which calculates chemical equilibrium product concentrations from any set of reactants and determines thermodynamic and transport properties for the product mixture. Built-in applications include calculation of theoretical rocket performance, Chapman-Jouguet detonation parameters, shock tube parameters, and combustion properties."

The best fluidics site on the net. Both usable and broad. Covers pressure drop, fluid flow, pipe diameter and air flow calculations.

From the site: "Pipe flow calculation web site offers fluid flow calculators for pressure drop calculation, pipe diameter calculation, control valves sizing, air flow calculation, Venturi tube and orifice flow, Reynolds number calculation, pressure drop in natural gas line, lpg pipe sizing calculator, Prandtl probe, thermal energy calculator and more... "

With the proliferation of minimal Linux distros, I expect to see more and more of these multi-boot images.

From the page: "One interesting feature of ULTILEX is that you can install it with ease on USB flash device and save the changes you've made durign the live session on it. You can modify files and even install/remove modules and all your changes are saved on the USB flash. "

Nifty $99 palmtop Linux machine running on open hardware. Seems powerful and rugged enough, just not sure about the tiny screen...

Nice collection of yetro space artistist conceptions. Would love to see more! Nice collection of related links.

A very nice collection of early rocket and satellite paper models.

Great place to track down mission specific space hardware, though it's biased toward manned space.

Wearable computers have come a long way, continue to get cheaper, more powerful and easier to build, leveraging Moore's Law, open source and the internet. This article shows a fairly straightforward path, using Linux and Beagle Board.

Msiegel sent this great collection of classic kite designs my way and I had to share!

Does what it says on the label. Downloadable PDF.

Cool looking open source retro cross-platform game. Windows/Mac/Linux (.debs or source). No apparent dependencies.

I just spent the evening exploring a wealth of Saturn V (F1) main stage engine photos spread across several locations. Without a doubt, this is the most comprehensive resource of F1 photos I've expect to ever encounter on the web. The site still lacks the Smithsonian and New Mexico's F1 engines to be complete, however. If he does make it out to New Mexico, I'd gladly buy him dinner, drinks and a movie for the privilege of hearing his stories.



From the site: " The unused Saturn/Apollo hardware was distributed to various museums around the country, “relics of the heroic age of manned space flight.”

-- W. David Compton"

Nifty Javascript calculator for fabricating conics.
Calculates given .

While the D-Drive may not be new, it'd be ideal to control the carriage advance on a lathe. Infinite selection of thread pitch, for example, without changing gears. Via msiegel.

Yes, we should be colonizing Mars, I'd go, given the opportunity. However, I'd much rather see humanity move to the asteroids, where we're not trapped in a gravity well again, like here on Earth. There's a famous Heinlein quote that says “Reach low orbit (LEO) and you’re halfway to anywhere in the Solar System.”

This is now understood to be a massive understatement. The past couple of decades have seen the intersection of chaos theory with orbital dynamics, resulting in the discovery of "gravitational potential manifolds", AKA the Interplanetary Transport Network. Effectively, once you reach an Earth-Moon libration point (not too far from LEO), (where their gravity pull balances), you can reach pretty much any place in the solar system with relatively trivial energy; given enough computing power, time and minor propulsion nudges in the right direction.

The Harvard Classics, originally known as the "Five-Foot Shelf", is often considered the best collection of ideas produced by western civilization. These works have passed into public domain and Project Gutenberg hosts a free download. Go ahead, become enlightened!

From the page: "The Five-Foot Shelf, with its introductions, notes, guides to reading, and exhaustive indexes, may claim to constitute a reading course unparalleled in comprehensiveness and authority.
—Notes on the Lectures by William Allan Neilson"

I foresee a future in which I spend a lot of time exploring this website...

From the site: "The ISFDB is a community effort to catalog works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. It links together various types of bibliographic data: author bibliographies, publication bibliographies, award listings, magazine content listings, anthology and collection content listings, and forthcoming books. "

Organised by category. Links to those with a web site.

From the site: "Mail-Order Gardening Resources - The home gardener's one stop to find all the mail-order gardening catalogs in the US and Canada - over 2000 of them! Check here first to find the company and see its ratings for quality, service, price and breadth of varieties. Plus links to mail-order companies outside North America, and other gardening-related sites."

The most gorgeous two wheeler I've seen.

Sandia National Labs has some excellent wind power resources online.

Exhaustive collection of important dates in space history, easily the best I've ever seen.

So how far can it carry a coconut? To go from airspeed, mass and wingspan to range, check out The Simple Science of Flight for it's application of the Breguet range equation to biologics.

From the page:
"We now need only plug in the numbers:

U ≈ 3fA
f ≈ 15 (beats per second)
A ≈ 0.22 (meters per beat)
U ≈ 3*15*0.22 ≈ 9.9

... to estimate that the airspeed velocity of an unladen European Swallow is 10 meters per second."

Looks to be a little clunky, network must be manually configured, for example. Still, I've got to give this a try!

From the page: "Welcome to LiveAndroid, a LiveCD for Android running on x86 platforms."

I'll be visiting the PCU offices tomorrow. I've saved a bit of money and am looking at investing much of it in a credit union.

Careful letting the genie out of the bottle, or in this case, the five gallon bucket. What's next, a portable Arc of the Covenant hacked from a wheelbarrow?

HOWTO: generate several thousand volts with water droplets and soup cans.



From the page: "It is possible to build a very simple high-voltage generator which has no moving parts and is powered by the energy of falling water. By dribbling water through some old soup cans, several thousand volts magically appear. The magic lies in the fact that water (as well as everything else!) is made of vast quantities of positive and negative electric charge in perfect balance. It's not too hard to cause an imbalance. Water normally has zero net electrical charge because it contains equal and opposite charges. "Kelvin's Thunderstorm" is a gravity-powered charge un-canceller. "



Thanks to Stock Trader for stumbling this great physics lecture video my way. Someday, I'm going to use for a project, and I already have one in mind.

Real people doing good. That's my idea of a hero, costumes make them even more super.

From the page: "It is the epic tale of Master Legend, a "real life superhero" who is just one of the many people around the country who assemble homegrown Bat Man lives, with personas and costumes and utility belts and sidekicks. And yes, this is all true."

DIY 3 axis CNC driver board. Single sided construction, 5-6 amps. Parts list, schematic, PCB mask in PDF, everything you need.



From the page: "This board is one single sided PCB which is capable of being manufactured by the DIY'er. It utilizes a DB25 connector that is configured to use a standard DB25 cable assembly for PC connection. It is capable of handling stepper motors with power supplies up to 35V. The MOSFET drivers are capable of very high current drive (>20A). However depending on the PCB material shouldn't be used at currents greater than 5 or 6A, without beefing up the traces from the FET's to the connector."

Seems to be a very handy writing tool, Free/Open Source, of course!



From the page: "StorYBook is a free, open source story writing software for creative writers, novelists and authors that helps to keep the overview over the strands when writing a book, a novel or a story.



StorYBook assists you in structuring your book. Have all your data in one place. With StorYBook you can manage chapters, scenes, characters and locations and assign them to the related scenes. "

Why would Dell lie to protect Vista?

Just what I need to control my greenhouse project!

HOWTO: store and germinate pecans from seed.



From the page:

"Dry Storage is required for the nuts as soon as they are harvested..."

"Stratification is the period of time from drying to planting..."

"Pre Soaking is used to stimulate germination..."

Good semi-technical introduction to starting pecan trees.



From the page: "Let's plant a pecan from seed."