scottmanley

Coming Soon..... Stowaway

In 2015 Joe Penna AKA MysteryGuitarMan contacted me about a movie he was writing about a crew headed to Mars, asking if I could offer some technical advice about space stuff. I jumped at the chance to get involved in a project like this and over the last few years I've been answering questions, sometimes doing the math and offering suggestions on how to make the story they wanted to tell work.

I don't want to spoil anything that isn't in the trailer, but we do get a few glimpses of the ...

Improvising And Ad-Libbing OSIRIS REx

I rarely write scripts, usually I'm working from notes and bullet points, and sometimes that means a lot of cutting of moments where I start saying things and then realise I shouldn't be saying it, or, rewinding to say something else first. 

With the recent OSIRIS REx video I think my heart was very much into the subject and this is the single take I recorded, with practically no edits in the final version.

Behind the Scenes - Making Fuel Injector Animations

In my recent video on fuel injectors I made all the animations using a particle effect filter that's intended to look like a blood spray, here's a quick rundown of how I did this and for those who want to use the animations they're alll here:

https://youtu.be/pcvDUGttbug

Black Hole Raytracing

I've sorta become addicted to building out a proper black hole raytracer to do an updated version of my 360 video showing what it looks like to fall into a black hole.  I started with code from this page as a reference  http://www.madore.org/~david/math/kerr.htmlbut since then I've added a bunch of features I'm going to need, like 360 cameras and intelligent interpolation so I don't waste time comput...

Best Stuff Of The Decade Video - Games & Movies

I thought this might make a decent video but decided I didn't have the time to actually make it into a full production, so I'm sharing it here for those who are interested.

Sometimes things don't work out as planned

I'm trying to depict the location of every satellite relative to the space station, but I was stuck with the problem of wanting the Earth to look decent, so I used the only scriptable rendering environment I knew - POVRay - and used that to make 360 renders of the Earth from LEO.

Boy it was slow..... so I turned the planet from an isosphere with actual terrain into a bump map and things got a lot faster.

Now it only took a week to render one orbit, my poor laptop was locked in a c...

Taming Liquid Hydrogen

Another free NASA historical book I've been reading through, I wish I'd read it before making yesterdays video because there's a fun anecdote in there involving hitting a balloon tank with a sledgehammer. Also the reason why Pratt And Whitney got to develop the RL-10 engine despite having no rocket engine experience before.

Space Shuttle Main Engines Upgrades

One of the main references on my RS-25 reflight video is this NTRS presentation on the multiple generations of the Space Shuttle Main Engine design. The engines were upgraded over time and swapped between orbiters as missions required working engines. 

And of course now these veteran engines are going for one last spaceflight together.

I'm trying to figure out if there's a good way to visualize the engines being swapped between orbiters during the program.

Look at the size of that thing

Taking photos from  https://twitter.com/BocaChicaGal which we stitched together by  https://twitter.com/13ericralph31 with apoligies to Dark Helmet

Also a reminder we have a t-shirt campaign right now: https://www.bonfire.com/hullo-39/ 

If You Could See All The Satellites WIP

Using the satellite data code from the weekend I started working on the idea of showing what things would look like if you could see all the satellites in the sky overhead, this is the first stage proof of concept rendered into a 360 video on youtube. 

THis needs a lot of work, it's missing all the debris and classified satellites, the projection is missing decoration for the ground, I need background stars. and I also need to know what satellites are up there so I can mention thei...

Science Hack Day - Watch The Skies

This weekend I participated in the 10th San Francisco Science Hack Day http://sf.sciencehackday.org/. An event where people get together to design and build things, some are stupid toys, others are sceintific experiments and some even position themselves as future product prototypes.

I teamed up with https://twitter.com/the_quark and his daughter wi...

Video from ESA/ESTEC Before Editing

I've not had time to edit the footage I'm recording on my trip to ESTEC, but I figured these are a couple of bits which don't need any editing to be interesting. The center has a public museum which includes a typical collection of space hardware, but my favourite part was a Viking 2 engine from a 1st generation Ariane rocket which had been cut in half to let people see the interior plumbing of the engine.

The town of Noordwijk has Astronaut hand and footprints in the pavement along the...

Space Debris & Solar Activity

I found this image in a NASA publication about orbital debris and wanted to share it. It shows 2 sets of data on the same chart. One line shows the level of solar activity, as it changes over the 11 year sunspot cycle, the blue points show the orbits of debris from the 1985 ASAT demonstration where an F-15 destroyed the Solwind satellite using an anti satellite missile.

What you should notice is that the rate at which debris decays and deorbits is correlated to the amount of solar activ...

The Last Ever Single Stick Delta Rocket

Tomorrow morning the last of the single stick Delta IV's will launch, leaving the Delta IV Heavy as the only Delta design still flying. Last year we saw the final Delta II as well. The Delta IV has been more expensive to fly compared to the Atlas V, so it's only found use on military payloads, and a handful of civilian spacecraft which needed every bit of the Heavy's performance - like Parker Solar Probe.

Delta IV Heavy has launches planned out to 2023, but it will eventually stop flyin...

Kerbal Space Program 2 Is Coming

I owe a huge part of my youtube success to the popularity of this game, when it appeared I had a step up from other gamers because of my background in astronomy. When flying the rockets I made I'd talk about science, but now I talk about science and only occasionally use the games when it helps.

It's not being developed by the original team, truthfully, many members of the original team left Squad years ago, but there were a few who have worked on the game for the last 8 years. The orig...

New Tune By Test Shot Starfish - AKA 'SpaceX FM'

I'm a sucker for their music as background for working on all sorts of things, especially when they borrow liberally from space themes for their SpaceX soundtrack work.

If you've ever wondered about the name, it's a reference to the highest altitude nuclear weapons test - 'Starfish Prime' which kicked the earth's magnetic field creating a bubble in the magnetosphere, a large electromagnetic pulse and an extra radiation belt that was likely responsible for several satellite failures.

A Rocket Casts A Shadow On Its Own Exhaust Trail

This morning's AEHF-5 launch by the ULA was rather spectacular, there were some minor delays and the rocket lifted off about 40 minutes before sunrise. This lead to a highly visible trail which was visible from hundreds of miles away, but the on-board camera also recorded something I don't remember seeing in a launch. 

After the rocket got high enough to be illuminated by the sun the exhaust was illuminated, because the rocket was at high altitude the exhaust expands rapidly formin...

Learning New Things About The F-15 Launched ASAT Missile

I've been doing some research for a story about the only case of a pilot 'shooting down' a satellite and in the process found that I'd misunderstood the launch trajectory for years. The missile had to be launched from a climbing f-15 in close proximity to the satellite's expected track, since the missile can't get to orbital velocity I'd imagined that this was launched from underneath the orbit, and probably facing towards the incoming satellite.

But I wanted to be sure, and I knew that...

Ariane & SpaceX Launches Today

For those who like watching live, Ariane is about to launch and is livestreaming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ8HecMG2qs

SpaceX is planning to launch the AMOS-17 communications satellite, this will be a free launch to make up for that unfortunate RUD on the pad with AMOS-6. The booster is not going to be recovered and looks quite naked without legs or fins. The weather is only 40% go at this time...

Amazing Fairing

SpaceX just released this stunning video from the recovered fairing during its controlled reentry. Looking back into the ionized air from the reentry, probably the fastest reentry of a fairing to date.

The colors are likely not truly representative, the purple color is typical of the engineering cameras used by SpaceX which don’t have near IR filtered out.

I’m sure there’s some editing going on given the duration, I would not be surprised if the parachute deployment system ...

A Big Day On Space TV

Earlier in the day NASA performed a spectacular live test of the Launch Escape System for the Orion Capsule intended to fly on SLS - I missed it live due to being on a train, but it looked like a success. Yes, it was intentional that they were going to drop the capsule into the ocean without parachutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNEcNj2uLYs

A bit further south than Florida there's going to be...

Deep space update from deep inside Europe

With asteroid day events taking all my time I haven’t had any video making opportunities - so here’s a quick update while on the road.

Answering Questions

I thought some of you might be interested in my answers to these 4 questions, I recorded these for a currently unnamed TV production but without that context I can share them now:

My Earliest Space Video From Over 20 Years Ago

I created this video using POVRay in the 1990's showing a spacecraft being sent to divert a comet using a nuclear blast. I didn't use a modeller, I hand coded all the scene files, all the animations, and even wrote an asteroid generation system that started with a cube and subdivided it into polygons. 

It has several obvious mistakes (like keeping the fairing around for no reason other than wanting it to look cool), and lots of wasted time panning around the object, but bits of thi...

Omegaaaaad - OmegA Rocket First Stage Fails During Test

Northrop Grumman just livestreamed a full duration burn test for the first stage of their OmegA rocket, and seconds before the end of the test the nozzle disintegrated.

This SRB is very similar to the ones used to launch the Space Shuttle and planned for the SLS, however it's modernized compared to both using new materials for the casing and other upgrades. 

Had this failed in flight the rocket would likely have experienced rotational forces due to the ragged nozzle likely re...

Asteroid (33434) Scottmanley = 1999 FU = 1989 GA6

It's official, I now have a minor planet named after me - asteroid 33434 was renamed 'Scottmanley'.

It's a small main belt asteroid, 2.74 AU out with an eccentricity of 0.064 and period of 5.02 years. It was discovered in 1999 by Alain Maury, but later analysis found the object was previously seen in 1989 and all the way back to 1954. So the orbit is pretty well constrained at this point due to the long observational arc. Based on its absolute magnitude of 13.5 it's probably less than 1...

Mariner I Research - Some 'Light' Reading

The 'Why Rockets Fail' series has been something I wanted to do for years, but I always wanted to start with Mariner I - it was supposed to be the first space probe sent to another planet, but instead ended up in the ocean after a guidance failure. And the root cause of the guidance failure was a programming error in the computer.

Arthur C. Clarke wrote several years later that Mariner 1 was "wrecked by the most expensive hyphen in history".

However simple this may sound, it's nev...

Blue Origin - Blue Moon ‘Hot take'

I’ll have a full video up for everyone tomorrow, but I had 5 minutes so I recorded this for those who are interested.

https://youtu.be/x2zwhFQfxUk

Kerbal Space Program Doesn't Teach....

I like doing these deep dives on rocket science related subjects, they take a lot of work to put together and cross reference all the sources. I have a few options for the next one, most with lots of supporting research already in the bag.

Which of these would people like to see? 

Or do you have other details that you think would make for a good story?

Hullo!

So, yes it's official, after many requests to start a patreon I have this! 

There'll a bunch of extra updates for supporters, and I hope that if you take the plunge and support me that you'll feel it was worth it. I don't really have the spare time to make extra videos similar to those on youtube, but I will have a few 'off the cuff' stories worth sharing as well as some old content sitting around just begging to be re-shared. The Discord server I use is available for everyone here...