Bernie Roehl

For those who are interested in seeing some of my 3D graphics work, I've uploaded a project I did for Mount Knowledge.  You can find it here.  The demo uses sound, so be sure your speakers are on.  It uses the (excellent) Unity3D plugin.
 
The initial scene, the Loft, is used by permission of 3DNA (for whom I did a lot of work a few years ago).
 
Enjoy!
 

Here's a full update to my list of spacecraft

• Soyuz, designed by the Russian space agency and launched on their Soyuz launch vehicle
• Shenzhou, designed by China and launched on their Long March launch vehicle

I apparently like to make lists. :-)

Here's a list of spaceflight technologies that I would like to see developed in the next few years.

* Cryogenic propellant depots
* Automated rendezvous and docking
* VASIMR (and any other credible alternative)
* Large-scale solar power for SEP (either photovoltaic or solar-thermal)
* Stirling-cycle nuclear reactors for NEP
* Restartable cryogenic engines (e.g. RL-60)
* Methane/O2 engines
* Inflatable aerocapture shells
* Water recycling
* Radiation shielding
* Human-scale centrifuges, tested on ISS

There have been a lot of changes since I last blogged about human spaceflight.

President Obama has cancelled the Constellation program. The whole thing. Not ust Ares I, which everyone was expecting, but also the Ares V heavy-lift launch vehicle and the Orion spacecraft.

 Since I wrote my earlier posts about human space flight, some people pointed out that my list of current and possible future spacecraft was incomplete.  Here's an updated version:

• Soyuz, designed by the Russian space agency and launched on their Soyuz launch vehicle
• Shenzhou, designed by China and launched on their Long March launch vehicle

As I mentioned in a previous post, the Augustine Commission findings are very interesting.  Apparently in the near future, they'll be giving a priority ranking to their various recommendations.
To me, the guiding principle is that NASA should focus on what it does best -- manned space exploration.  Routine earth-orbital operations should be turned over to the private sector and to international partners.
 
If it were up to me (and it really ought to be!), here's what I would propose:
 

I've always been a huge fan of the space program.
 
Back when I was a kid, I followed each new space mission from launch to splashdown.  I could identify every spacecraft and launch vehicle, and quote their stats the way other kids could do with sports figures.  The combination of following the real-life space program and the various science-fiction shows of the time was pretty powerful, and left me with a firm belief in the importance of scientific research and manned space exploration.
 

I have a lot of books.  For years I've been planning to inventory them.  At one point I was going to sign out a barcode scanner from the university and write some software that would allow me to scan them, but I got busy with other things.

With barcode scanning now possible on the Android phones, I decided to sit down and do it.  Less than one hour later, I was done!  That's the beauty of Python.

There are some programmers who claim they can program in any language, from C to Forth to Haskell, and that a language is just a language.  I disagree.  Language shapes thought, and that's as true of programming languages as it is of Orwell's "newspeak".  If programming languages didn't matter, there wouldn't be so many of them.  They're all good at different things.