mikegarrison
-
Posts
5,157 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Developer Articles
KSP2 Release Notes
Bug Reports
Posts posted by mikegarrison
-
-
Just now, Terwin said:
Would you like to point out a better site they could have used?
Remember:
* on the Gulf Coast as far south as possible
* little or no near-by housing/businesses
* available for sale with enough space
Note: that first point is by far the most important
I know why they chose to locate there, but the fact remains. They chose this. So stop whining about it, please.
-
I'm just awfully tired of people complaining that regulators are doing their jobs.
-
On 9/20/2023 at 10:48 PM, CatastrophicFailure said:
SpaceX chose to locate in the middle of a wildlife sanctuary.
Chose. To.
Maybe if they had done a better job of not setting the place on fire or covering it with debris then they would be given the benefits of more trust.
-
On 9/25/2023 at 6:15 PM, darthgently said:
Interesting angle. Who else is cranking out 3 second stages a week?
"Manufacturer extraordinaire"? I mean, Boeing builds 737s at a rate of more than one per day. And don't try to tell me a Falcon second stage is harder to build than a commercial airliner.
-
Agreed. "Combustion" is a chemical reaction.
-
47 minutes ago, tater said:
Operating vehicles has nonzero risk. That's why they have closures. If you are arguing in favor of just launching, I agree.
If this is true they might as well quit, and the rest of us can wait for China to do something interesting, because it will never happen here in that case. When the Apollo people did it, they could have done it however they liked, BTW. They would not have faced a decades long environmental review, and no one cared about turtle nests, nor hardly any other pollution (all the engineers were likely smoking into the bargain). If you want Apollo era testing, first get Apollo era regulations, and the same sorts of permissions someone from Apollo would have had... they complain up the chain, LBJ gets on the horn and swears at them, problem solved.
Full flight static testing is useless. Having it blow up in a test stand is unquestionably worse than having it do so 40km up.
Little of the full duration testing is useful. How do the engines behave at increasing g loads? Who knows? How is the engine TPS able to deal with expansion and turbulent areas we always see at the base of rockets in low pressure areas with increasing altitude? No idea.
The reality is they will check off the 63 boxes and fly.
I think we live in a better world when people care about turtle nests.
-
3 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:
Interesting, primary cause of failure was fires in the engine bay, N-1 style. From what I saw, the primary problem was suspected to be in the hydraulic system, by the public at least..
Not that I want to sound like I knew it all or whatever, but if you go back in this forum I think you'll find that I was concerned right from the start about packing so many engines together so closely. That's a known risk on airplanes, and is one of the reasons why engines on pods hanging off the wing or fuselage are so popular. When fighters have twin engines buried in the fuselage, they often have a massive piece of structure between them to try and isolate one engine from the result of failure of the other.
-
Trying to pressure the FAA into giving their approval for something is often a bad idea.
-
"All the regulatory requirements": Possibly a reference to the environmental impact? Maybe something else?
-
I'll mark this on my calendar. Thanks for the invite.
-
37 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:
Perhaps I was using the wrong word, but I defined “lofty” as “having proven to have been impossible to complete [on time]”.
That's survivor bias.
If you have 1000 people drawing lots, and one wins, you are exhibiting survivor bias if you go ask the winner how he got to be so good at drawing lots.
Likewise, if there are 1000 lofty goals, and 999 fail, that doesn't mean the one that succeeded wasn't lofty. It just means they were the survivor.
If you judge the initial challenges by whether they were ultimately met or not, you are going to end up claiming that all successful attempts were actually easy, and all failures were hard. But that's survivor bias.
-
1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:
My comment was about the global failure to develop effective nuclear power at anything approaching scale since the scares of 3Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Most recently it was the Fukushima mess, actually. The German announcement that they were ending all nuclear power production came in the wake of Fukushima.
-
1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:
There is a possibility of building a second tower and table as part of this, maybe?
I can't see the utility of two test tables feeding one tower if launch cadence is being leaned into. But one test stand with one tower ready to launch and the other looking up ready to catch?
Shrug - maybe?
Probably they should make some successful launches with the tower they have before they build a third one. (Don't they already have a second one built or being built in Florida?)
-
1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:
With hindsight it’s pretty clear that not only was the US fully capable of putting a man on the Moon prior to 1970, but the Soviets also had no chance at beating them.
Politically lofty? Yes, as you said no one has had the will to go back for 50 years. I’ll concede it was very lofty to get Congress to continue to fund it especially when the Vietnam War was a big priority.
Technically lofty? It was cutting edge technology for sure, but as to whether that means it was somehow absurd for it to be built by 1970, I personally think no.
With hindsight, everything that anyone has already accomplished was obviously quite possible to accomplish.
-
40 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:
I was listing lofty goals. Kennedy’s challenge was not a lofty goal because it gave the US almost a decade of time to complete it.
Whereas the Soviet Moon project and Shuttle had five years or so.
Wow.
Apollo in less than a decade was "not a lofty goal"? When the US had not yet even put a person into orbit at that point? And no one else has landed a person on the moon in more than 60 years since? I mean, it gave rise to the use of the word "moonshot" as meaning an ultimate all-hands-on-deck stretch goal.
But whatever. I guess you have your opinion.
-
3 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:
Moon in 2024 and then 2025 was always a fantastic date.
Note in the history of space projects, we have two examples of attempts at such predictions:
A) Soviet government orders a crewed lunar landing to occur in 1968, with development starting in ~1964-1965 (loosely similar to the original Artemis timeline)
B) NASA begins planning for Space Shuttle missions in 1978 following the beginning of formal STS development in 1972 (earlier timelines had the Space Shuttle getting approved right after Apollo 11 but flying in 1975!)
Aren't you forgetting Kennedy's 1961 speech saying the US "should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth"?
-
8 minutes ago, tater said:
who is on the hook if somehow tech is "exported" from a facility? The company/facility? The individual (what if they leave the country with that info?)? Both?
Both.
But again, *many* companies handle this just fine. The fact that SpaceX has not only not handled it correctly but also has refused to fix the problem for at least three years after the DOJ first warned them about it suggests that the problem lies in SpaceX management, not the laws.
-
23 minutes ago, tater said:
There are multiple laws here, not "a" law. I quoted the anti-discrimination law, and it flatly states that US citizens are always allowed preference in hiring.
No, it did not say that. It said only if they are equally qualified.
-
1 hour ago, tater said:
I've seen a few people online—guys running space startups—suggesting that the rules are not well understood even by them.
The rules can be be quite complicated and tedious to follow, but SpaceX is not a "startup" and certainly has the legal resources to be expected to understand and comply with the rules. And as I said, the DOJ told them they were out of compliance three years ago. It's not like they just didn't know they were breaking the law.
-
If you just have a blanket ban on hiring people with refugee status, how can you claim the people you do hire are "equally qualified"?
Other companies handle this just fine. There is no reason SpaceX can't. The DOJ brought this to their attention more than three years ago and told them to fix their practices. They refused. So now it is moving to legal action.
-
10 minutes ago, tater said:
Wouldn't this create incentives for the employer to be extra careful? Seems like someone coming from not the US or EU would lack a paper trail to properly vet them. Even stuff as simple as criminal records.
They can be careful, yes, but not at the expense of discriminatory hiring practices. They are expected to be able to follow both sets of laws.
-
9 hours ago, tater said:
Do companies have any liability for violations?
Yes. EAR and ITAR laws carry heavy penalties for violations. Both fines and prison time are possible.
-
26 minutes ago, darthgently said:
It would be nicer if the DOJ wouldn't be sent after SpaceX for not hiring foreign refugees (which would conflict with ITAR), but yeah, SpaceX is critical. Depends on the mood of the moment at the other end of the leash(es) I suppose
Hiring permanent residents (including refugees) does not conflict with ITAR. You can be a "US Person" for ITAR and EAR legal purposes without being a US citizen. You just need to have permanent resident status.
-
11 minutes ago, RCgothic said:
Has there ever in history been a case of rocket thrust so great it breaks a foundation before now? No.
Pretty certain the answer must be yes, or otherwise why all the designs with flame trenches and water deluge? I would guess those designs came about due to experience.
SpaceX Discussion Thread
in Science & Spaceflight
Posted
I guarantee you there is more than water and CO2 involved. It's an industrial site.