Six daleks, labeled as “Pratt Whitney Rocketdyne engines” from the space shuttles Endeavour and Atlantis are invading being shipped to Stennis Space Center in Mississippi to be refurbished for use in NASA’s new project, the Space Launch System (SLS). Link -via io9

(Image credit: NASA/Dimitri Gerondidakis)

By developing new rocket technology on the land scientists hope to help aid in safer space travel. It sounds counter intuitive, however the group making the bid for the land speed record thinks it could lead to a breakthrough in safer space travel.

So says Daniel Jubb, who is the founder of military rocket motor company Falcon Project Limited (FPL), based in Mojave, California, and chief rocket engineer for the Bloodhound SuperSonic Car, which aims to reach a speed of 1600 kilometres per hour (1000 miles per hour) on the salt flats in Hakskeen Pan, South Africa, sometime in 2013. The current record is 1227 km/h, and was set in 1997 by the Bloodhound team’s driver Andy Green, in a car called Thrust SSC.

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When you drop Mentos into a plastic Coke container, you might have a rocket. Or it might not work at all. Or it might surprise you! -via I Am Bored

Rocket Pen Titan – $8.95

It’s a rocket! It’s a pen! No it’s Rocket Pen Titan from the NeatoShop!

Rocket Pen Titan is there for you when you need a break from overwhelming paperwork.  Bad work day be gone! It is time to count down and blast off to your fun zone.

Be sure you check out the NeatoShop for more fun-tastic Pens & Pencils!

The 40-foot-tall artwork offers a retro-futuristic, highly-stylized vision of space travel circa 1930’s-1940’s science fiction and is the latest in a series of temporary public art exhibitions sponsored by BRAF to enliven and activate public spaces. The sculpture will be accompanied by a companion piece, the Rocket Stop designed by Alan Rorie, which tells the story of the Rocketship’s exploits, providing route, schedule and other information. The installation will be illuminated for nighttime viewing. (Source)

Links: More pics at Coolorama | Official website of the Raygun Gothic Rocketship [warning: ticking sound]

The system of exploiting slave labor to assemble missiles began in 1943. It expanded dramatically after the August 1943 bombings of Peenemünde by the British Royal Air Force. The widespread destruction led the Nazi leadership and the missile staff to move underground and use forced labor. The chosen site was a mine/fuel depot near the town of Nordhausen in Thüringen. Slave laborers from the Buchenwald concentration camp came to extend the tunnels for an underground V–2 factory called Mittelwerk. The new concentration camp outside the tunnels was code named Dora and was later renamed Mittelbau. More than 60,000 prisoners were interred at Dora. Some of them built 6000 V–2 rockets between August 1943 and April 1945. They experienced squalid housing, starvation diets, and draconian discipline with frequent executions.

Tens of thousands of prisoners died at Dora. Others were sent off to death camps as their usefulness faded. When the US Army liberated Dora in 1945, they found 750 workers and 3,000 corpses.

Following combat units were teams associated with various American intelligence groups intent on capturing German technology and experts. The US Army collected parts of 100 V–2s from the underground factory and, under a larger program best known as Paperclip, brought more than 125 German V–2 missile engineers, scientists and technicians to America. The Army interrogated them to determine their involvement in Nazi organizations and war crimes. However the Army wanted their expertise for the Cold War, so officers sometimes consciously overlooked or buried incriminating information.

Similarly, the US–led Dora war crimes trial at Dachau in 1947 led to no heightened American understanding, in large part because the US media had lost interest in such trials. The Dachau proceeding tried guards, kapos and the Mittelwerk general director, but its convictions narrowly focused on individual cruelty to prisoners. US Army Ordnance shielded its German missile engineers from public scrutiny by preventing Wernher von Braun, the leader of the group, from traveling to Germany to testify. Afterwards the Army classified the trial records as secret to guard information about Mittelwerk.

The story of slave labor at Dora accompanies a photographic exhibit at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. The extensive website also includes many links to outside sources. Warning: some photographs may be disturbing. Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: Walter Frentz)

Someone mentioned that John Coker’s homemade rockets looked like crayons, so he ran with the idea. His crayon rockets were launched all together from a crayon box! Well, OK, half of them worked. See how he made them in this account of the adventure. Link -via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

Nasa officials plan to go ahead with the Ares 1-X test flight even as Barack Obama’s administration considers plans to shelve the Constellation programme through lack of funding.

A detailed review of Nasa’s future programmes recently delivered to the White House raised concerns that the space agency does not have deep enough pockets to fulfil its vision for a return to the moon. The review said the agency may have to abandon the Ares rockets and switch to a cheaper design. (Photo: NASA).

Here’s a rendering of an Ares launch.

YouTube Link

Story Link

On Saturday, a man in Maryland successfully launched a 1:10 scale model of a Saturn V Rocket.  The Saturn V is the rocket that took NASA astronauts to the Moon during the Apollo missions.  The launch of the 36 foot tall rocket also breaks the record for the largest model rocket ever launched.

– via wired

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by dalucero.

The mysterious boom and flash of light seen over parts of Virginia Sunday night was not a meteor, but actually exploding space junk from the second stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth, according to an official with the U.S. Naval Observatory.

The Russian-built Soyuz rocket lifted off Thursday from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to launch a new crew and American billionaire Charles Simonyi — the world’s first two-time space tourist — to the International Space Station. The spaceflyers arrived at the space station on Saturday.

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To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the first Star Wars movie, Polecat Aerospace built a 21 foot (6.4 m) long rocket shaped like an X-Wing Fighter! And they’re going to launch it in two days…

We decided to make the project to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the first Star Wars movie. Our club members are making several Star Wars based projects to fly at Plaster Blaster VI, or Plaster Wars.

We decided to make the project challenging in several ways. The first is just the massive size of the rocket. It is over 21′ long, with a wingspan of over 19′. We opted to use a cluster of four motors to emulate the "real" X-wing, and positioned the motors in the wing pods. The real challenge was to make the wings move in flight, from the "attack" position, or extended to the "landing" position, or folded. This proved to be quite a mechanical feat.

Link | More at Plaster Wars – Thanks Eugenio Martínez Sierra and Robert N.!