Shuttle Launch

In keeping with the theme of my last post, here is an extraordinarily detailed, slow motion video of the Space Shuttle lifting off with commentary.

Space Shooter

Here is a spaceship and the related elements I’ve created to put in a simple space shooter game I’m trying to create in order to learn both Flash and a bit of Actionscript. It’s very slow going, but I’m making progress. I could simply cut and paste from one of the hundreds of example tutorials out there and have a workable game in a relatively short time, but I’d like to understand as much as I can in order to make the game conform, at least a little bit, to my vision.

Flash Moon Landing

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in the process of learning Flash. It’s starting to get fun finally, as I get to the stage where I can actually create what I visualize beforehand.

The most important technique that I’ve learned and show in this demonstration is a nested animation. Even though they use the same Illustrator file, you can see that the frame by frame animation of the flag-planting astronaut is a bit jerky when compared to the moonwalker. This is because I only used 2 frames: a left foot step and right foot step.

The moonwalker however, consists of both a motion tween, and a nested animation of the individual leg and arm elements. The nested animation uses 8 keyframes in just over 2 seconds, so the movement is much smoother.

Some of the other things I’m finally starting to get a respectable handle on that you see in this movie are: masking and motion tweening (the alien jumping out of a crater), easing in and out (the LEM landing and taking off), frame by frame animation… and how to upload SWF files easily to a WordPress blog and put them just where I want them.

Space Pilot

From the Los Angeles Times: “Robert M. White was a 38-year-old U.S. Air Force major and record-setting test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in 1962 when he joined the elite ranks of America’s four astronauts.

But Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard, Virgil Grissom, John Glenn and Scott Carpenter went into space seated atop ballistic missiles and returned in capsules that parachuted onto the ocean.

White did it as the pilot of a rocket-powered X-15 research airplane, flying nearly 60 miles above the Earth’s surface and completing a conventional landing on Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base.

His out-of-this-world adventure earned him the distinction of being the first pilot to earn a winged astronaut rating by piloting an airplane in space.”

Photo credit: NASA

This Day in Flight

Sputnik 7 -This was the first Soviet attempt at a Venus probe. The probe was successfully launched into Earth orbit with a SL-6/A-2-e (Molniya 8K78) launcher. The launch payload consisted of an Earth orbiting launch platform (Tyazheliy Sputnik 4) and the Venera probe. The fourth stage (a Blok L Zond rocket) was supposed to launch the Venera probe towards a landing on Venus after one Earth orbit but ignition failed, probably due to a fault in the power supply to the guidance system.

This Day in Flight

The ESSA-1 satellite provided cloud-cover photography to the US’s National Meteorological Center for the purpose of preparing operational weather analysis and forecasts. The spacecraft was designed and configured exactly the same as NIMBUS-1. The total weight of the spacecraft was 912 pounds. The spacecraft was an 18-sided polygon, 42 inches in diameter, 22 inches high and weighed 305 pounds. The craft was made of aluminum alloy and stainless steel then covered with 9100 solar cells. The solar cells served to charge the 63 nickel-cadmium batteries.
The two cameras were mounted 180-degrees opposite each other along the side of the cylindrical craft. The “cartwheel” configuration of the TIROS 9 was selected as the orbital configuration of the operational series of ESSA satellites. Therefore, a camera could be pointed at some point on Earth every time the satellite rotated along its axis. The spacecraft operating system was the same as on the TIROS 9. The craft was placed in its planned Sun-synchronous 98-degree inclination retrograde orbit. The satellite spin axis was rotated using the magnetic attitude control system into an alignment perpendicular to the orbital plane and tangent to the Earth’s surface. ESSA-1 was able to view the weather of each area of the globe, photographing a given area at the exact same local time each day.

ESSA — NASA Science