(not so) Secret love ...

Ok ... yeah, this isn't really secret ... at least not if you have been following this blog ... I'm not only in love with Soyuz spacecraft ... I also like a lot the Space Shuttle (... and Buran too). Thus, lately I have been enjoying a lot the many posts done by nasaspaceflight.com's forum participant Jacques. This very nice fellow (like most people on this forum) have posted many pictures of STS from his collection, and I have been saving them to my hard drive feverishly (here's some links to the threads: OV-102, STS-2, OV-99). It is great that he is sharing them with us, especially as most (if not all) of them are very rare pictures.

Another good source of Shuttle pictures is the web site of the Kennedy Space Center, which sports some quiet nice (and hi-res) pictures of the Shuttle processing (STS-116 these days) .

When I'm not obsessing about collecting pictures of spacecrafts, I'm usually geeking away on our Soyuz addon for Orbiter. I took a break from working on the collision detection in order to implement some simple (and crude) Control Moment Gyroscope so that when activated, the torque generated by the translation thrusters could be neutralized ... making docking and flying around something (like a Salyut space station) much more easier (the real hardware had such a gyro package used among other things for stabilization).

I'd like to make a correction to my previous post, where I was saying that the current ISS crew was not taking much pictures. While this statement still hold true, they did post rather quickly (in fact a few minutes after I wrote the post) pictures of the Progress vehicle closing in for docking: