Rocketdude

Lately I have been reading Nancy Conrad's book Rocketman, which I found quiet entertaining and hard to put down. It, in a vivid and easy to read style, tell the story of late Astronaut Pete Conrad, known for his prankster humour and his politicaly uncorrect way of speaking. Speaking of Apollo related thing, I noticed today two posts on A Tribute 2 Apollo that could be of some interest, and not only for all the Apollo buffs out there. Larry McGlynn have over the years amassed quiet the space artifacts collection, with many items purchased directly from some of the astronauts. The two posts in question (Part 1 & Part 2) are related to the star charts used during the Apollo missions, and features some scans of the flown charts. For having searched for such documents, few months ago, I can tell ya that these are hard to come by, as most of the start charts available online are for earthbound use (I finaly settled down for the free Mag-7 Star Atlas, which I still haven't used with Orbiter...).

Meanwhile, progress on that Orbiter's add-on of ours (Castorp and I) is rather slow ... well on the coding side at least 9_9 ... Recently we switched our focus to the 7K-OK, which was the first Soyuz variant to have flew in 1967. Here's a little screenshot of it in LEO:

The docking apparatus visible here is currently been redone by Castorp to be more accurate in term of size and overall shape, as well the design of the docking probe is to be changed. Once this get the same treatment that we gave the 7K-T, it should be fun to fly ... however these solar panels are going to be quiet the challenge to animate ...