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That Easter Island head is an advertisement at the airport in Berlin. It's interesting to get off the plane and see it going around on the baggage claim, but finding out that it's really just an ad for a travel company is dissapointing.
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I am drooling. And it's unbecoming.
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Both cars are styled heavily upon the Jaguar E-Type, first released in 1961.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_E-Type
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Good point, Joe!
Jaguar though has pretty strange proportions...
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Well, someone's a fan of the big headlights...
...but then again, who isn't? ;)
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Volvo P-1800.
Perfect.
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I don´t like cars in general, but these are SOOO beautiful...!!!
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I agree the P1800 is perfect as well, especially considering you can get a restored one for around 15000. The tipo 33 is gorgeous but completely unobtainable.
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I wouldn't say that the Alfa is beholden to the E Type Jaguar. Its style is really evolutionary from the late 40's early 50's Disco series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa_Romeo_Disco_Volante, and you can even see some of these styling hints in the touring cars from the 30s like the great 2900 8c coupes. I would say if anything Jaguar was behind the times when you compare say the XJ120 to a Disco Volante, though I love the Jaguar for any other dozens of reasons.
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GeSchmidtt, indeed there are a number of similarities. Didn't know about the Alfa Disco.
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Joe, here is a link to a lot of historical Alfa Romeo cars that were either concept cars or especially reflective of a design from specific models. http://www.conceptcarz.com/view/model/6/Alfa%20Romeo/model.aspx
One great thing about Alfa is that they used a lot of different designers and were not afraid of taking chances. Not a great business model, but a treasure for us car buffs.
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The Porsche 904 Carrera GTS is (in my opinion) the hottest Porsche made.
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I really like that Type 33. I like the new Alfa C8 too. Why isn't the Ferrari 275GTB in on THE list? I would never say that the 904 wasn't a beautiful car, I've lusted for one since the day I first saw and sat in one. BUT, i would say that the 906 is more beautiful. And while we're at it, A Lotus Eleven was sensual as well. AND while the "E" type is beautiful, you must look back to the "C" and "D" types....They were truly "Sex on wheels". And those Elise's are seducing me at this very moment...Gotta go.......
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best looking [production] car ever is a 63 ferrari 250 gt lusso. period.
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The latest Alfa concept car, the Pandion, was at Pebble Beach this August. It is not as over the top as the BATs but the doors alone are worth a look.
http://www.autoblog.com/2010/03/03/geneva-2010-bertone-alfa-romeo-pandion-concept-reaffirms-our-lov/
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Hi Avi:
The 'busy-looking fella' is a binturong ('bearcat').
The 'magical forest creature' is, I believe, a Bearded Dickhead (not at all uncommon).
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'caracolonline.com expired on 11/09/2007 and is pending renewal or deletion.'
Bad timing, by the look of it.
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More pictures and explanations in english can be found
here.
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This was wonderfully entertaining to read through!
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About the similarities in the design. To my knowledge the space shuttle design itself was never classified. I remember hearing an interview with a NASA engineer who stated that if the Russians had asked for the schematics they probably would have been given them.
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I wish this was still in use. the entire system is more capable than the space shuttle and can lift more into orbit.
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All similarities end after external appearances. The main point of difference is that Space Shuttle is TWO-stage rocket -- first stage are solid boosters, while second stage is an orbiter itself. Buran-Energia is a three-stage rocket, Energia being a complete independent heavy-lift booster in the same class as Saturn V. Orbiter is just a payload (or a third stage at most), and could be lifted to LEO without ever engaging its engines, which are much smaller and less powerful that Shuttle's ones. It had much more sophisticated avionics compared to early shuttles, as it could land automatically, and it was also equipped with ejection seats for all of crewmembers -- something that Challenger crew would sertainly wish they had.
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khathi is essentially correct. The Buran was a principally different vehicle, similar in appearance only. It is significantly smaller the the Shuttle as well. To call the Energia a launch vehicle in the same class as the Saturn V is technically correct but deceptive. The Saturn V had a design capacity of 200 tons to LEO (It actually lifted 156 tons to LEO with Apollo 17.). I think the Energia could manage just over 100 tons. Still, I don't mean to belittle the Energia. It is an impressive launch vehicle. But it is unlikely the Saturn V will be topped any time in the near future.
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>> This "Buran" is mothballed in
>> storage, most of the others are
>> effectively destroyed.
It no longer exists either. The roof collapsed on it back in 2002.
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khathi: ejection seats would not have helped the challenger crew - they (still) would have been incinerated at the speed they were traveling.
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Well, Saturn V COULD've been topped -- if the whole Energia-Buran project wasn't scrapped, that is. You see, Energia was a highly scalable design, and you could've easily bolt up to a four additional fist stage boosters (IIRC, some of the pics even show this config, sadly, it was never really flown) effectively doubling its capacity -- up to 175 tonnes. But you are right, LEO capacity for standard config was just 100 tonnes, 20 tonnes less than for Saturn V (which could lift just 120 tonnes to LEO, not 200).
Another point -- the orbiter that was destroyed in 2002 was OK-1K1, the very same that was flown in 1988. Another one, OK-1K2, one that should've fly manned mission, was never completed and is still mothballed in Baikonur, IIRC.
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Objection! Crew capsule remained intact after orbiter disintegration, and remained intact (and crew alive, albeit with at least several crewmembers inconscious) until the final strike into the water. Had it been equipped with ejection seats, crew could safely eject during "drop" phase.
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I am sorry to disappoint you, but the Baikal story is a well done 1st April joke, by Vadim Lukashevich, the webmaster of buran.ru - the most comprehensive website on Buran project.
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There were advanced plans to improve the Saturn V as well. One was to stretch the tanks and add a sixth main engine for a total of 9 million pounds of lift-off thrust. Another was to add solid, strap-on boosters. Yet another of the more ambitious proposals was to separate the main engines from the tanks and parachute them down for re-use. I actually knew one of the engineers who helped develop the F-1. He said that the only reason the engines were not re-useable was because they were at the bottom of the Atlantic. The engines were actually designed to be able to be used five to seven times. But, alas, so many good ideas never to be tried. Sigh.
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Can't view the pictures in their original form, Flickr just says private page. Any chance of a fix? Cause these are great.
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Fedor... images fixed
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"khathi: ejection seats would not have helped the challenger crew - they (still) would have been incinerated at the speed they were traveling."
According to:
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/investigations/q0122.shtml
The Challenger was at 46,000 ft travelling at 1.9 Mach when the disaster struck.
According to:
http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg14920124.300-please-keep-your-seat.html
The Zvezda K-36 ejection seat of the Buran allows cosmonauts to eject at 30Km (98,000 feet) and 4 Mach.
Columbia disaster... that's another story.
Thank you for the pics. I've been fascinated by space ships since I was a child and this is the first time I see Buran from inside. So I'm very grateful :)
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''Pre-launch moving of "Buran" and "Energia" on rails''
The last two photos are of Proton, not Buran or Energia.
Proton is a much smaller rocket (A medium one). You can also see the 6 outer tanks and 6 engines attached to them, no central engines, very different from Energia's 4 boosters and 3 core engines.
I'm surprised nobody noticed yet.
Proton is a sixties design, still flying today, commercially, although they just had one launch failure with the second stage just after staging.
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Great collection, to add:
Ultimate Buran collection area on NASASpaceflight.com is here:
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=636&start=1
and on their L2 section they have hours of never before seen video.
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On early Soviet shuttle concept TM pic:
Twin-tail space shuttle, two stage to orbit:
the perennial favorite of Popular Science magazine covers.
The only thing missing is a wheel-shaped space station.
Note what appears to be a flight engineer behind the cockpit,
and either a political officer or a flight attendant in the next
compartment.
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I remember sitting infront of the TV and watching the launch of Buran/Energija live!
I was a small boy at that time (from former GDR, east germany) and it was a huge event for me...
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hb - great link, thank you!
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One reason they might have decided to have it horizontal when transporting to the launchpad is that it's possible to accelerate much faster. The angular momentum on an already erected rocket is so much greater that any acceleration beyond a bare minimum risks damage or even toppling the rocket.
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One of the Buran's was stored for a couple of years in a shipping yard in Bahrain (Persian Gulf). I was visiting the yard and saw a space shuttle type of craft, found later on the internet that it was one of the Buran's. The wings where taken off but you could enter the Buran trough a opening in the hull. Took home one of the smaller panels from the cockpit as a souvenir.
Last thing I heard that is will be transported to a museum in Mannhein, Gemany.
Martijn(Netherlands)
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The 'German museum' mentioned here several times, is the Technik Museum, and the Buran is shipped to the Sinsheim location of the museum. See http://www.technik-museum.de.
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Correction, that should be the Speyer location of the Tecknik Museum...
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Martjin, Daap - I'm glad it's in the good hands now.
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One of these shuttles is in Australia. It was at the worlds fair, and the russians didn't have the cash to fly it home. So it still sits there to this day.
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Anon, the one that was in Australia -- it's the very same that finally arrived in Germany some time ago. The company couldn't make profit by using it as an attraction, so they've shipped it to warehouse in Bahrain and just let it sit there.
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Regarding the Shuttle and ejection seats, there *were* ejection seats on Columbia, for her first few flights, before the system was considered flight-qualified. There were two ejection capsules, similar to those found on SR-71 Blackbirds, and intended for use if the vehicle was nearly finished with its reentry and about to ditch -- a landing off of a runway is not considered survivable.
But they're problematic. For one thing, they are very heavy. For another, you need a path for the ejection seats to take. For structural reasons, that could only be provided for commander and pilot. It is simply not done to have ejection seats for only two of the crew, so once the crew grew above two, the ejection seats were deactivated and eventually removed. No other Orbiter had them but Columbia.
Would such seats have saved the Challenger crew? Forgiving that they could only have been effective for CDR and PLT, it is still by no means clear that a safe ejection could have been achieved. Most likely, they would have ejected directly into the fireball. And it's not a flight regime where you'd ordinarily want ejection seats -- in all other failure modes, ejection seats during a Shuttle launch will be fatal.
It's not as clear as it might seem. Wayne Hale (former Shuttle program director) has a fascinating series of posts on Black Zones in his blog that goes into this problem in more detail.
http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/waynehalesblog/
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One more thing -- there are some very cool pictures in there. Two are of Proton rockets, unrelated to Energia-Buran but to this day, the heavy-lift workhorse of the Russian rocket fleet. More interesting are the pictures of what I presume to be Polyus, the payload of the "other" Energia launch. Energia flew once without the Buran. It carried a space station called Polyus on its back. Little is known about it, as it was a military flight. It may even have been nuclear powered. What *is* known is that although the Energia performed flawlessly, Polyus' own engines failed to inject it into the proper orbit, and it ended up in the Pacific Ocean. Very sad.
One piece of Buran-related hardware did eventually fly: a docking compartment for Mir. It was modified with Apollo-Soyuz Test Project unisex docking adapters and installed on Mir by the Space Shuttle Atlantis. The newly-constructed Orbiter Docking System was designed to mate with it, and it was used throughout the Shuttle-Mir program. Its legacy lives on in the ODSes in each surviving Orbiter, and in the Pressurized Mating Adapters aboard the ISS.
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Calli - great info, really enjoyed it. Will include more interesting shots in Part 2.
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Actual the engines of the Saturn V will probably be used in the successor of the space shuttle.
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In regard to the Control Panel, those are what all Space Shuttle controls look like. It's not necessarily old, it just looks old.
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Calli, Polyus was a Prototype Unmanned Laser Battlestation. Gorbachey didn't even know what it was till he showed up for the launch and was then briefed on what it really was. Since he was then trying to shoot down the US's SDI program diplomaticly and publicity wise ... the USSR suddenly having an on orbit working example would have been *Bad*. Especally since he knew the USSR's ecconomy couldn't support building a full on orbit presence that the system would require. Also, the Polyus's engines didn't fail to inject it into orbit. Since the Polyus was, for engineering and/or aerodynamic reasons, mounted with it's tail section forward. The Polyus's RCS failed to stop it's reorintation at 180 degrees but let it spin a full 360 degrees before it's engines fired and did a dandy job of aborting the mission into the Pacific.
mz, moving the rockets out of the assemblly hall to the launch pad horizontly has been the way the USSR/Russians have always done it. All their infrastructer is based around it. When, or if, they ever looked at vertical intergration and rollout it most have not made sence to them since they believe firmly in the engineering proverb "If it ain't broke, don't mess with it".
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El VentureStar sí que era un lanzador revolucionario. Deberían volver a trabajar en él.
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awesome photos! also woth noting that the Antonov Ukrainian built carrier plan is actually bigger and with larger payload capacity than the airbus A380 - a pretty impressive achievement too!
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I never saw those photos of the being-built Buran before, almost brings a tear to my eye. Makes you wonder how many 100s of billions did the Russians waste on this and other programs as you can see from other 'closed' projects. Some part yes they are not wasted as it helps tech research, but all that money spend to build the storage, superstructure, etc etc wow sad
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'Climb inside to experience rickety-looking Soviet computer panels and monitors.
It takes guts to fly into space with these...'
Rickety-looking?! The smug condescension, so typical of writers in the decadent West, towards anything and everything associated with the Soviet Union, is sickening. What, exactly, is 'rickety-looking' about it? Be specific, I want technical details here, not just another 'oh, look, analogue instrumentation'! (By the way, analogue dials are in no way that truly matters inferior to fancy LCD screens; they just represent different approaches to the display of information).
Need I remind you that, at this moment in time, the United States doesn't even have a manned space programme, whilst the only space station in orbit is serviced by (surprise, surprise) cosmonauts. The U.S. shuttle fleet was extremely expensive and accident-prone, whilst the Soviets abandoned their own shuttle programme because they realised that the current Soyuz system was more than adequate for the tasks they had in mind.
The Soviet philosophy regarding space travel has always been 'if it works, and works well, stick with it'. They have never been obsessed, as those in the West obviously are, with all of this flashy 'state-of-the-art' nonsense, their understanding that the constant and continual push to 'upgrade' creates an ever-more costly and bug-prone (and yes, 'rickety') space-transportation system.
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Well said Peter! The stereotype is sickenning. Great post and amazing blog but dont do this BS biased writing. Please
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How would you ever retrieve three wet cats 28 separate times for this photo shoot? That takes some serious catnip.
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apparently they spent some time bringing the cats back to senses :)
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The Nazi UFO photo is not a fake. Read some of it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_UFOs and check the external links - they were building such hmm vehicles? as I have seen on Discovery Channel they were supposed to work on hovercraft-like fans only capable to lift them more than few inches above ground :) Similar small saucers have been built more recently and some of them even work in a limited way.
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hi,
the plane on photo is almost Kalinin K-7. In this 3d it has a lot of cannons which is not true.
here is link to Russian page on
wikipedia:
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Snow Snake looks like Andy Goldsworthy's work
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p.p.s. as i just read in other blog here is the link to the page with more pictures of this "K-7" from the creator. Much more! :)
K777 (russian language)
via
Hectop
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And now check out the Snow Patrol Video for „Open your eyes“...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l5ipSldZNI
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Just thought of this movie three days ago for the first time in years! Found it on YouTube and was going to blog about it, but you beat me to it!
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"It was my film, and I was fully prepared to take the risks"
Very kind of him to assume anyone he could have hit was prepared to take his risks with him.
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In the name of Love?
Well, I'd call them and tell them I was gonna be 5 minutes late...
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As an automobile enthusiast and a lover of my wife; that was and is one of the most beautiful films that I have seen and heard in my life.
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Paris looked so quiet and deserted back then... Even at that time of day, nowadays this stunt would be impossible to perform. There's ALWAYS too much traffic to do something like this now.
Of course he was a selfish, reckless bastard. But sometimes, one needs to be... ;-)
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For a fascinating article on a cross-USA drive inspired by this movie, see
http://www.wired.com/cars/coolwheels/magazine/15-11/ff_cannonballrun
31 hrs, 4min at >90mpg AVERAGE speed.
Raises the same kinds of ethical questions.
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You should see the "Getaway in Stockholm" movie. At least first 3 parts.
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I wonder what Googlemaps says it takes to drive this.
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Its a mercedes but its not real sound... Sound from ferrari...
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In the interview he talks about the one turn he aborted (at Rue Lepic) because another garbage lorry was in the way...you can notice it in the film at about 6:15. He had to divert through the Cemetery and was afraid of running out of film. Amazing stuff...j'aime Paris!
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There's a pretty good quicktime version of the film
here, as well as lots of good info on the facts about the filming, as revealed by director Claude Lelouch himself.
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