Racescort666

I’ll have to go look for it but they had an article on why they topped the MLP with a pine tree. It was a Nordic tradition to appease the tree gods. Interesting practice to maintain that gets me in the feels.

I’m not normally one to throw shade in the forums but SpaceX has much better marketing than the other companies and that’s what’s making them seem so far ahead. Is SpaceX ahead on moon hardware? Yes but it’s probably not as far ahead as it appears. Having been on the inside of start ups with good marketing teams, the marketing team can definitely make the company seem far further along than they really are or doing things they aren’t.

We were all thinking it.

Out of likes. Totally agree.

It seems a little premature to comment on this but spot welding is on the order of 3 seconds per weld. Granted, spot welds don’t have to be as accurate as weld nuts and they require some fancy setups from an automation standpoint but at 3 seconds/weld, you’re at about 30 hours of fabrication for 1 robot. Weld nuts aren’t the only fastening method though, depending on the thickness, they could probably just thread the skin. Or, if they wanted to get really fancy, they could flow drill:

He really likes his steel... I mean I do too, it's literally one of the most important materials humanity has ever developed but I wasn't expecting him to dedicate about 5 solid minutes of his presentation talking about how great steel is. ETA: ok so I decided to look up the grade of steel he said they were using and this stuff is pretty great. Strength and ductility wise, it seems to be on par with A514 which is a common high strength low alloy steal used in automotive (because it's strong and cheap). Welding doesn't seem to affect the strength much besides the fact that it will be normalized as soon as they perform their first entry maneuver.

\m/ I only spot Steve Harris, Nicko McBrain and Dave Murray though. +1 because likes are still not working I guess.

Iron Maiden is the coolest metal band ever. ETA: my handle is partially inspired by an Iron Maiden song.

This is essentially the crux ULA has. It’s probably pure speculation to say that the Falcon 9 was designed from the beginning for recovery but Falcon 9’s flight profile is much more amenable to fly-back recovery. The Atlas V stages at almost 2X the velocity and has a much more lofted flight profile. ULA would likely have to develop an entirely new rocket to do the same thing as SpaceX and they’d probably converge on the same design. (They might be calling Vulcan a new rocket but it’s basically an Atlas derivative.) Off topic (kinda): I just want to say “whew” 17 pages of SpaceX thread finally caught up on. They blocked the KSP forum at work so now I can’t catch up on my lunch break.

I appreciate that ULA has a polling graphic as they poll readiness.

I used to try aerodynamic separation in KSP. Turns out, it's less parts and lighter to just use sepatrons but it was fun to experiment with.

+1 for vents to allow the fairing to be pressure compensated. It seems odd that there would be scoops forward as those would pressurize the air. They look like they're a soft material so may be they do something counter intuitive during launch. My buddy at NASA said they nitrogen purge the fairings of their payloads to prevent contamination but once the payload is in space, it doesn't really matter. Here's a nice high resolution picture showing them: The other thing I was surprised by that video were the sparks coming off the tip of the fairing. I guess that explains the metallic nose.

They have 3 more flights including the one in July*. The last phase 1 flight for SpaceX will be CRS-20 in March of 2020*. After that, it looks like they will continue the CRS-XX numbering scheme for future flights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Resupply_Services *dates subject to change. I have come to celebrate this...

I mean, it’s not that uncommon to have a model name and a model code. Eg. Alfa Romeo 4C has the model code: Type 960

Do you think that Elon holds a design review before these tweet storms “ok guys, what’s the status of raptor? I feel like logging back into twitter today.”

This is more or less the stealth arms race in a nutshell. You can’t make something truly invisible to radar, the idea is to get as close as practical so that the currently (and near future) fielded radars lose their usability. Radar technology catches up, then the next generation of aircraft are fielded and it’s a cycle.

I love the Ford L9000 that ULA uses to move their rockets around. That thing is nothing but style.

Hazarding a guess, they might call it "Coastal Steel" internally (using the old name happens all the time, see: Willis Tower/Sears Tower?) and the security there was told "don't talk to strangers". It seems like there's a bunch of secrecy but they really just haven't made any statements clarifying the whole mess.

There is a trick to inserting images from instagram. TBH, I kind of hate social media and I'm even a millennial.

I thought the docking port was ejected from the CSM side and still attached to the LEM? Regardless, the docking port was designed to have load going through it so it might still be a reasonable place to try and grab with "the klaw"* if the docking port had been jettisoned. *I know "the klaw" isn't real but some sort of grabbing or attaching mechanism.

I have some with a scorpion in it. I wouldn't be real keen to drink regolith from the moon though.

I would say that SpaceX has always been like that. They're (or were) a startup with the intent of disrupting an existing market, it's almost expected that they would be a little more relaxed. Most startups I've dealt with are like that. On the other hand, it's not like Boeing is entirely stuffy:

If the docking port became unviable, I would think the next best place to grab would be the engine. That’s probably got the most structure of any piece on the LEM.

I wasn’t sure where to put this random thought so here goes in this thread: do you suppose reusable space launch vehicles weren’t developed earlier because most early rocket development was focused on weapons? No reason to recover a booster because you’ll probably not need it again. I know that there were other proposals for hardware to be reused in a manned space program but the first effort resulting in something resembling reusability is Space Shuttle which was designed to be manned from the ground up. I just found this progression of events interesting.

That and the fact that atmospheric pressure isn't really that much. Not like what a submarine has to deal with where the equivalent pressure delta is only 10 meters below the surface. Pressure is non-trivial in spacecraft design but not so much that it will override most other design criteria.