The Ascender 26 airship is moving forward in leaps. We’ve built a external stiffener frame out of carbon tubing. We did an inflation last weekend to verify it’s position.
Last night we continued sewing frame sleeves on the Ascender 26. The team also repackaged our main flight controller into the Ascender 26 configuration. We did two shock tube firings, both at mach 2.2 and lastly we flipped over the submarine in order to mount the magnetic drop weight system.
“Sunspots vary in size and tend to range between 1.500 – 50,000 km, making some larger than Earth.Observed with the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope (SST). The SST is operated on the island of La Palma by the Institute for Solar Physics in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias. Observations: Göran Scharmer and Kai Langhans, ISP. Image processing: Mats Löfdahl, ISP”
It appears like the interest in such items is increasing. I’ve long thought that many baby boomers who grew up in the post-Sputnik “Space Age” of the 1960s would become nostalgic for those days and start collecting space memorabilia as a hobby in their retirement. Can’t prove this is actually happening but it’s a good a theory as any!
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See also the Spacefest VI(a HobbySpace advertiser) in Pasadena, California May 8-11, 2014. There will be a memorabilia auction and also an exhibit hall with space memorabilia and collectibles as well as space art.
CS co-founder and co-leader Kristian von Bengtson recently split from the organization in a dispute with the other founder Peter Madsen. Von Bengtson has indicated that he will start a new group to develop his ideas for spaceflight but haven’t seen a website for it yet.
