Clear Skies, Beano.

Alan Bean, the fourth man to set foot on the moon, has passed away.

Alan Bean, artist and astronaut. Image: © Smithsonian / NASM (as far as I know...)

Alan Lavern Bean was assigned to the Apollo Applications Project (AAP), when Apollo 12 original crewmember Clifton Williams died in a plane crash. 
Commander Pete Conrad immediately thought of Alan Bean as a replacement. Apollo 12 was the only crew who were actual friends that flew together.
Of course, Alan bean, Beano for his friends, was the one who knew what SCE to AUX meant, when Houston radioed that to the crew after a lightning strike took out the control panels in the Apollo, just after they left the launch pad. Their mission was out of the box, well-organised, professionally executed and filled to the brim with fun.
After Apollo 12, Bean resumed his work on AAP and commanded the second manned mission to Skylab in 1974. When he retired from NASA, Alan Bean became a prolicic painter. His main subject was of course his mission to the moon and Apollo in general. His paintings were realistic and had a nice grain to them. He added small chips of their Apollo spacecraft heat shield in  his work and used his tools he used on the moon to give his paitings more structure. In some ways, Bean also can be compared to Manet, when he made an elaborate study of the colour of the moon, the same way Manet did with the Cathedral of Reims. He painted situations that never happened, like the plan he and Pete conrad had to make a photo of the two of them together with a timer he had smuggled with him in his suit ( he couldn't find it when they planned the photo so it was never made) and also the full crew of Apollo 12 together in front of the LM.
Now that Alan Bean has died, the crew might be back together again, somewhere out of this world.

Clear skies, Alan Bean and the crew of Apollo 12.

image: © Alan Bean / source: ArsTechnica

Zio's Hawker Tempest

At the moment I am working on Blue Origin’s New Shepard, a model made by French designer Edy. It goes a little slower than I anticipated, while I am using glossy photo paper which makes it tricky to glue. In need for a quick result, I decided to break out another little Zio plane. And I chose one of his Tempests.

The Hawker Tempest is one of a family of planes all conceived in the early days of the Second World War. While the famous Hurricane was fighting in the Battle Of Britain, Hawker already worked on a more modern successor. The Tornado was the first one they tried, but it was abandoned. Then, the Typhoon came along which was better but had some disappointing characteristics at the start. The Tempest was a direct derivative of the Typhoon and in the hands of a good pilot it became a formidable fighter. The Typhoon also saw service, by the way.

The Tempest was equipped with a large Napier Sabre engine, which needed lots of cooling. For that purpose, a big radiator was placed under the nose, giving the plane an unusually large ‘chin’. But it also gave the plane its characteristic looks. There also was a version produced with a radial engine wich looks really sleek and much more like the very beautiful Hawker Sea Fury which actually was the plane the Tempest eventually evolved into.

This here is the end result, the build report is below, after the jump.

Missions: a missed opportunity

This is a little rant about a TV series I saw the 1st episode of yesterday on BBC4.

Let’s start with saying I love science fiction. It can’t be weird enough. I love Lafferty, Asimov, Bradbury, Niven, Laumer, (okay, it’s all old stuff.) I also love realistic SF a lot. I think films like “Moon” and “Ex Machina” are excellent examples of good realistic SF. So I was excited to be able to see the start of a new SF series on BBC4, the French series called “Missions”.
It tells the story of a Mars expedition going wrong and weird. In a preview people spoke of elements of “Lost” and “Alien”. Okay, sounds interesting, let’s go for it. Below you can read the rest of my review.
 

The Eagle Transporter Ulysse 01 on Mars © OCS City