Recent content by reject

Er. This is probably a stupid question, but the payload lift of the proposed vehicle isn't out of the range of the existing Ariane 5 stack which was designed with the intent of man rating. So what benefit (other than political) is there from lopping off its boosters and perching it on top of a SRB?

*sigh* What did I say in point (b) ?

Well the real upper stage could become an uncontrollable useless piece of metal if the J2 doesn't ignite. Which is a totally valid scenario to have to plan for. So I hope that either a - this sep did not go as planned and NASA will sort it out, or b - NASA anticipated this sort of sep and...

I asked in another thread (maybe it was earlier in this thread, I dunno) why NASA had built a 300 foot home pregnancy tester kit. I was obviously wrong. Looks like what they built actually would prevent that problem from arising. Well done boffins!

I think you are right. The fact that the stages rotate in opposing manner at the same time strongly implies interaction of some sort (conservation of angular momentum anybody? :) ). Perhaps the SRB skirt retros need to be beefed up but that is going to be a tricky proposition given that the...

Especially when trying for a stable inline sep.

Yes, and generally that ton of money is coming from the commercial sector, not the government one. And believe it or not people are able to get inspired to create things without being on some government gravy train. Incidentally, throwing money at NASA doesn't solve the problem either. It...

Okay, let me put it another way. Which is the easier sell: 1. We want your money to put dudes on the moon. Chances are you don't know them. Chances are even greater you won't be one of them. But you will feel good for a bit until the next economic results are published. It might inspire your...

Well I think that's the point that is being made here. Notions of saving the species and colonizing the stars sound great but the science and technology to achieve it do not yet exist. So what is the better investment right *now* to make that happen? X billion bucks put into putting footprints...

Agreed. History is littered with examples of ruling elites riding roughshod over the masses in the belief that they knew what was best for the "great unwashed". Such systems usually came to a very sticky end. It's easy to sneer at the population at large being too unimaginative or too dumb to...

Wow, am I reading the graphic on page 11 of the press kit correctly? Some casings first flew on STS-61A/B/C? That's almost 25 years ago!

Why did NASA build a 300 foot tall home pregnancy tester kit?

The Challenger disaster is the extreme end of SRB failures, compounded by poor risk management decisions made leading up to the launch. The report lists 31 occasions where SRB anomalies were discovered, 16 of them since Challenger. My take on it was that the CSO doesn't expect SRBs to be...

I realize that not everybody has powerpoint and cannot view the link I posted. What follows is my digest, for what it is worth, of the observations made by the Crew Safety Office in that presentation: I'm certainly no engineer. That's why I tend to listen to those that are on...

I apologize if this has been posted before, but somebody posted this link on a discussion on NSF: http://www.nasa.gov/ppt/382364main_46%20-%2020090802.6.CSO%20inline%20concerns.ppt#306,3,Objective (It is a MS Powerpoint) It is a 2005 report by the Crew Safety Office on using an inline SRB...