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Skylon

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1 hour ago, wumpus said:

I once had a coworker who did "work" "upriver" (as a contractor).  That was all we were supposed to know.  Then we were told to forget about the "up river" part (presumably it meant NRO instead of CIA, but with the amount of contractors all over VA I doubt anyone could say for sure).

I once knew a guy who did "material science". That's all he could say about it, but he did say it took six months to get cleared to work in his lab.

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14 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Some new (here) info on Wednesday’s FH test, as per NasaSpaceFlight:

Test window opens at 1300 EST, 1100PST, 0000 UTC. It’s planned to be a wet dress rehearsal, first time the monster has actually been fully fueled. If everything goes well with that, they may proceed directly to a static fire...

"And if the hold-downs aren't up to the job, we'll be moving right on through to a launch situation. Either way it's guaranteed to be exciting."  -- Elon Musk.

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8 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Oh god what a lovely quote.

Umm, I figure you all realised this anyway but in the interest of complete transparency, I should probably point out that the first sentence is fiction... :blush: 

I agree that the second sentence is a lovely quote though!

Edited by KSK
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8 hours ago, PakledHostage said:

I can't figure out how old this is but it was only posted to YouTube about a week ago and may be interesting for some of you:

 

I don't know if it interesting. It does seem to me that he sets his goals low . . . .
like wow if it gets off the launch pad without damaging it, that's a win (really). I would think that if there was significant risk of damaging the launch pad that they would not attempt to launch. 

Mach shock on the boosters

Lower static atmospheric pressure (accelerate slower between 250 and 280 m/s)
Increase Sears-Haack shape of the booster nose cone
Decrease rate of turn before max Q.

 

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8 minutes ago, KSK said:

Umm, I figure you all realised this anyway but in the interest of complete transparency, I should probably point out that the first sentence is fiction... :blush: 

I agree that the second sentence is a lovely quote though!

Oh, I understand that his first sentence was fiction.

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Apollo started spooling up the F-1s at ~T- 8-9 ("ignition sequence start!" POed me in the Apollo 13 movie when they did the countdown wrong). So the blast trench can take something approaching 20 seconds, probably. Sitting on the pad and doing a long, static test would be much harder on the pad than a real launch, where the LV leaves the pad such that the blast attenuates with every meter it climbs.

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1 hour ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Yeah, but... did Saturn  ever have a 12 second full-power static fire? (Obviously the shuttle did not)

They didn't do static tests of the Saturn V on the launch pad, but they did full-power tests of the Saturn V's S-IC first stage (five F-1 engines...7.5 million pounds of thrust) on the test stand. I see a video of a test firing that was over 40 seconds long.

...and I see a document that says they did a static test of S-IC number 2 for 126.3 seconds.

Edited by Brotoro
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1 hour ago, tater said:

Apollo started spooling up the F-1s at ~T- 8-9 ("ignition sequence start!" POed me in the Apollo 13 movie when they did the countdown wrong). So the blast trench can take something approaching 20 seconds, probably. Sitting on the pad and doing a long, static test would be much harder on the pad than a real launch, where the LV leaves the pad such that the blast attenuates with every meter it climbs.

Not going to tell a lie - that 'ignition sequence starts' call from the commentator always gives me goosebumps.

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