DoctorEvo
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Posts posted by DoctorEvo
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If this is true then NASA is effectively dead 2013.
Not even close. To be fair, the majority of NASA\'s efforts are in Earth orbit, including ALL manned exploration thus far (well, Apollo was a grey area), and in the grand scheme of things, planetary exploration is but a fraction of what NASA is up to.
That said, it\'s not good news. A cut is a cut, and Obama has not been the friendliest to NASA\'s budget.
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Dr. Evo seems pretty justified mentioning that plane.
Frankly, I\'m sorry I ever did. It was only a SIDE NOTE, and only related tangentially to the 'stalling out' concept that people were discussing. Other than that, it isn\'t really related to the topic. Though, I suppose you\'d have a better chance surviving jumping out of a slow&low-flying AN-2 than most other aircraft... though you\'d STILL have a FAR better chance of surviving if you stayed in your seat.
To be clear, you said modern, and that thing is 1993. To be balanced, the SGS 2-32 (a 1962 glider) has a comparable, perhaps slightly slower stall speed, and a wing area of 16.72 m^2. Better, though still not outstanding by comparison.
The 2-32 is not a motor glider. All motorized derivatives of it stall at MUCH higher speeds (50-70 MPH) owing to the additional weight. As a general rule, an engine adds at least as much weight to a glider as a passenger does, and with it comes a shift in certain v-speeds (stall speeds, best glide speed, minimum sink, basically anything that occurs at a fixed AOA will happen at a different speed).
Saying modern probably damages your cause, tbh, as with modern gliders efficiency would be favoured against low-speed performance/safety margins.
Very true. The 2-33 is the slowest glider I\'ve ever flown. Newer aircraft are usually faster on both ends of the spectrum.
*These figures are for the DG-808C motor variant. The unpowered variant will have less drag and thus a marginally better glide ratio, far more so with the lower weight.
Weight does not affect glide ratio. It DOES, however, affect the SPEED at which you will achieve best glide.
Before you point it out, no, the weight reduction would not be enough to account for a difference in stall speed. While it does cut it from 340 kg to 270, the minimum speed quoted is in fact still 35 kts. It wouldn\'t be enough to bring it under 30 regardless.
That\'s peculiar. It SHOULD cause an 11% drop in stall speed. Then again, most airplanes only use one 'quoted' (rather, 'marked') stall speed, measured at gross weight, despite the fact that normal stall speed is often as much as 20% less than this.
Wing area does not determine stall characteristics.
It does, but not by itself. Wing loading is more scalable, though on top of that the AN-2 also has a very high Clmax going for it as well owing to its slats.
I\'m not going to even bother, this has turned into 'look at my one number, you\'re wrong! you\'re so wrong!' from what was an obviously 'ha, like any human could somehow push theirselves hard enough to accelerate to Mach .6... Without dying... In a half second' (Let alone the problems of windblast or anything going on here.)
You\'re STILL on about that? How do you not realize that NOBODY DISAGREES WITH YOU ON THIS?! You\'re literally trying to argue a point to which there is NO opposition. Nobody is trying to suggest that it\'s possible to make such a leap. Nobody is trying to argue that jumping out of an airplane is more survivable than staying in your seat. So can we stop bringing it up?
(And, once again, mach 0.6 is an unrealistic number for low-altitude flight. 200 knots/M0.3 is much more realistic for a jet, or M0.15 for a \'typical\' piston aircraft).
And no-one is bringing up the highest G impulse because -it doesn\'t matter as much as you think-. 100G for a hundred miliseconds means 100 m/s difference; enough of a change in speed that its effect is basically the same as 10G for a second. Your body can cushion out the same amount in both cases. For instance, it\'s equivalent to 10,000G for 1 millisecond: onoes over 10k geeeeez?!?!?! No, doesn\'t matter, because it was such a quick event.
I\'m not sure that\'s completely cogent... I think 10,000G for 1 millisecond would be likened to being hit by a train moving at 200 MPH. Even for instantaneous events, some level of cushioning is preferable (crumple zones and whatnot).
Numbers numbers numbers, ignoring everything about how 'uh, I doubt you can even do that in the first place, but somehow if you did without horribly maiming yourself.'
Frankly, the only issue where that is even remotely relevant isn\'t being argued by anyone but you. Do you have an imaginary nemesis that keeps countering the claim that jumping from a plane with 200 m/s of delta-V isn\'t possible? Because none of us are, yet you keep bringing it up - as the very center of your argument, no less. The only parts we\'re correcting you on are the areas where you actually ARE wrong - the idea that 500ms accelerations are not effectively instantaneous, the idea that the AN-2 is somehow not a good (and safe) airplane for slow flight, the notion that airplanes usually fly at mach 0.6 close to the ground... all blatantly wrong. (Yet you still stand by them in the face of quantitative facts proving the opposite... ???)
But when it comes to the very answer to the question of this thread,
WE
ALL
AGREE
WITH
YOU.
How do you not understand this?
these ever important stall characteristics of a glider versus the AN-2 and how the glider will be extremely forgiving because they are designed for that flight regime.
But gliders AREN\'T designed for that flight regime! They AREN\'T designed with STOL in mind!! They\'re designed to GLIDE. Their relatively low stall speeds are merely an artifact of being built to achieve low minimum-sink rates.
The AN-2, on the other hand, was designed with STOL in mind (much like the Storch you mentioned earlier), employing tremendous wing area, leading-edge slats, large control surfaces, an upright windshield with excellent visibility... IT IS BUILT TO GO SLOW, and it DOES GO SLOW. Yet you keep irrationally claiming it is not good for this.
I get the feeling you just hate the AN-2 because it\'s ugly.
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I think my MacBook is coming up on four years old now.
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... Last time I checked, being able to make 40g half second jump has no restraints like a nice F1 car would.
I never suggested it did. Re-read my posts. I AGREE WITH YOU - MAKING A SURVIVABLE JUMP IS IMPOSSIBLE.
But surviving a 40g crash, presuming you were buckled in with the tray table up, etc. etc. is very likely.
Also would you like to ask all those people that die from all those sub-20g decelerations into things?
People don\'t die from sub-20g instantaneous accelerations. Col. Stapp proved that.
So I guess the only thing I would ask those people is, 'why didn\'t you wear your seatbelt?'
... Oh. Right, something about 100g for 100ms guys surviving being this whole... Random event thing. Right, lots of other people die from sudden stops too. I guess this whoe survival thing is relative right? 0.1% is way, way better than 0%.
Only your chances of surviving a 40g crash ARE MUCH BETTER THAN 50%.
In a F-1 car, with all the safety restraints it includes, even 100g crashes result in nearly 50% survival rates, though you will almost certainly be seriously injured.
I assume modern motor gliders are nonexistent in your world then, carry on in the AN-2 there then.
Tell you what, YOU go find a \'modern motor glider\' that stalls at less than 30 mph/26 knots and get back to us on that.
...Unless you\'re just a flight sim guy... Because easier to stall does relate to 'how' it will stall... Or how you will enter the Flanker Inverted Flatspin Death Spiralâ„¢. Righto, something about gliders having nice stalling characteristics instead of 'you\'re dead' when your nose decides to yaw into the ground.
The AN-2 was DESIGNED to have benign stall characteristics, using a ridiculously low wing loading and massive leading-edge slats. Hence the incredible ability to 'parachute' to the ground in deep stall as I mentioned in the first place.... :
(And I\'m not 'just a flight sim guy.')
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I see, so you use 'moderate' in the format of the more conservative 'V-1s are raining around us and things are just moderately fine!' I love the Orwellian remix!
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/tbi/tbi.htm
Yes, yes. I assume moderate injuries all over the body does not cumulatively add up to this 'massive total body injuries.' Nope, not at all! Keep on rolling my Comissiarat, soon we can change the very way people think with the power of Newspeak!
If you are properly restrained, such serious brain trauma will not occur.
Such trauma typically occurs from things such as, say, hitting your head on the dash or on the ground after a long fall. Furthermore, crash test dummies are equipped with 100 G (that\'s ONE HUNDRED, not fifty) accelerometers in their head that are usually used to determine ultimately whether the crash was fatal or not.
OK. I will let you fly the anti-plane, seeing that it inspires pain and gag reflexes in others including those who fly the Cessna 172. Also I\'m pretty sure powered gliders have a much, much lower stall airspeed than the Colt there... That and something about 'not sucking.'
But I DO fly the Cessna 172, among others.
And the Schweizer 2-33 (a slow, 1930s-designed glider) which I first learned to fly in stalled faster than the AN-2 does, so I\'m pretty sure your presumption that motor gliders (which are obviously heavier) can fly even slower is incorrect.
You comprehend that even if someone were to zero out midair at 2km up in their air, they are going to die from the fall, yes? Or even at 100m they\'re most likely not going to survive the fall.
That is ASSUMING (Since you act as if that 40g jump was possible) they jump out of the plane. Oh wait, you\'re still falling. Right, just got rid of that nasty horizontal component.
I\'m not at odds with you on this.
IF YOU JUMP, YOU WILL DIE.
I\'m not denying that.
My remark that 50 Gs is survivable was not meant to imply the human body is capable of JUMPING at 50 Gs.
500ms is not a short, 'instanteous,' period compared to, oh, say, 100ms. Half a second of sustained 40g will screw you up. A 100ms spike, not so much. That\'d be closer to something you\'d experience in an automobile accident at peak.
Half a second IS considered an instantaneous event, though. Most of John P. Stapp\'s rocket sled tests involved velocities exceeding 400 MPH. With some simple, elementary school math, you\'ll see that his INSTANTANEOUS tests - which ranged from 20 to over 45 Gs - were all half a second or longer.
NON-instantaneous accelerations are those which are long enough to incapacitate simply due to a lack of circulation. Thus, about 2-3 seconds is where things go from instantaneous to sustained.
Oh right, this... Peak thing. Apparently that is ignored too.
Well I already stated that the common threshold at which crashes, etc. are deemed fatal is at least twice the acceleration that we\'re discussing, so that\'s a fairly large margin already.
On top of that, properly-restrained racecar drivers have survived accelerations exceeding 100 Gs on many occasions, including at least one case of over 200 Gs.
Keep it civil folks!
Cheers!
Capt\'n Skunky
KSP Forum Moderator
I\'m trying to...
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^ The AN-2 is a horrible example of a plane and a horrible plane at that. Soo many people say that its the worst plane they have ever flown.
EDIT
Look what I found on wikipedia.
I hope you\'re joking. The AN-2 was produced in truly MASSIVE numbers. For an aircraft as numerous as it is, 365 hull-loss accidents is not bad at all. I just did a quick query of NTSB hull-loss accident reports for the Cessna 172, and I count over four hundred in JUST THE LAST TWENTY YEARS, with even more fatalities.
It may be ugly, but it\'s a fine-flying airplane, and the fact that it flies so darned slow means it\'s less likely to kill you than just about anything else out there.
I love your Sovietesque language there: 'Moderately Harmful.' I heard jumping off a building from the third story and aiming to land first is 'Moderately Harmful' as well. Also I heard being shot in the stomach can be 'Moderately Harmful' as well. Something about it being eventually followed by the termination of heartbeat and brain activity, my Commissariat. Double love how you immediately accuse me of 'wrongfulness' out of nowhere. Also I like how you redefine 500ms as 'instantaneous' when in relative reference here. I\'ll let you be the rocket sled rider hitting the nice firm barrier there my friend.
50 Gs for half a second is not likely to result in death. Severe contusions, certainly; broken bones, quite possibly; but unless you forgot to buckle up, death is improbable.
... Also I hope you realize that you\'d need like 730kW output for a half second just to pull that from Mach .6 to 0 jump there. Last time I checked human biology, I don\'t think people\'s legs could pull that sort of output.
I never implied such a jump was possible.
But just so we\'re totally clear,
NO, YOU WOULD NOT SURVIVE JUMPING OUT OF AN AIRPLANE JUST PRIOR TO CRASHING.
Such a notion is so utterly absurd, I felt it didn\'t even need to be said.
And another thing, planes don\'t fly at mach 0.6 close to the ground unless they\'re fighter jets with the afterburners lit. Realistically, you\'re looking at closer to mach 0.25 for a typical airliner at low altitude in landing configuration (which pilots will try to achieve prior to crashing if at all possible), or 0.35 for one in cruise configuration.
I hope you realize the Colt is a wooden biplane. You could treat that like a glider at that point.
I also hope you also realize it is a comically sad aircraft that in this context, might as well imply you were very much joking about bringing it up because its existence is very much ignored by aerospace engineers.
IT WAS A SIDE NOTE
HENCE THE WORDS 'As a side note'
SHEESH ???
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I don\'t know exactly what happen if you jump form the plane at that time, just before crashing. After leaving the plane, do you still have the same velocity or you start from 0?
You can\'t be serious.
You\'re talking about experiencing 40g for a half second, enjoy.
The fall doesn\'t kill you, it\'s the sudden stop...
You\'re wrong there. Instantaneous accelerations of over 100 Gs have been survived before, and in crash-testing fields a 50 G crash is commonly considered to be moderately harmful, but not fatal.
Or you can be real cool and try to stall the plane in such a manner where you impact the ground 'gently' enough so your fuel tanks don\'t rupture.
Or you could, y\'know, just land instead...
As a side note, the Antonov AN-2\'s emergency procedures includes a protocol emergency landing that involves placing the airplane in deep-stall and 'parachuting' to the ground. It would almost certainly wreck the airplane, but with that much wing area, I guess you\'d actually have a decent chance of surviving it.
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I\'d like to submit mine for consideration.
Yours is a solid candidate for most mesmerizing, I\'ll tell you that much.
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It\'s not an issue at all. You don\'t NEED your exhaust jet to be greater than your final velocity if your mass fraction is greater than 2.72. Of course, mine will be even greater - around 10 or so...
*edit*
Alright, I did a little research and crunched a few numbers as sort of a reality check. I decided that, based on available materials and the scale of other investments I\'d need to get my rocket off the ground, something a little better than fiberglass would be ideal. So, with a new fiber in mind, I found the material properties, and calculated a baseline pressure figure by assuming 1000 feet of 80-lb fiber wound around a 2-liter bottle (realistically, I\'d probably use a shorter length of heavier fiber, still achieving similar figures). Based on these figures I determined I could wind a 2000-PSI body weighing about 100g 50g/liter, for about $60/liter. By comparison to the current world altitude record holder, the carbon-wrapped X-10, this is VERY favorable (then again, it includes ONLY body weight and ignores the weight of the camera, altimeter, and recovery system the X-10 carried).
Yet still, pushing these numbers further, it appears reaching the sound barrier is going to be more challenging than I initially thought. I took this pressure value and cut it in half to roughly account for pressure loss during expansion (realistically the average would probably be less than that, but this is only a reality-check), and then used the Bernoulli equation to estimate a conservative average water jet velocity. This came out to about 117.4 m/s.
I then plugged it into Tsiolkovsky\'s trusty rocket equation to determine what kind of mass fraction I\'d need to get a minimum amount of delta-V (Realistically, I think I\'ll need AT LEAST 400 m/s to account for drag, but that remains to-be-determined). Using 500 m/s I got an impossible 70:1 mass fraction, so I of course jumped to the absolute (unrealistic) minimum - 343 m/s, or exactly mach 1. Here I found that 18.5:1 would be necessary. Given that water rockets are typically filled less than half full for optimal balance between compressed air and mass fraction, this is much higher than the ~8:1 ratio the current concept would realistically achieve. With said ratio and the previous water jet figure, my rocket would theoretically achieve 244 m/s of delta-V - impressive, but not nearly fast enough. Re-figuring the exhaust velocity for the full 2000 PSI and the (again, unrealistic) low-ball delta-V figure of 343 m/s, I finally achieved an ~8:1 ratio, but unless I use liquid methane to pressurize my rocket, I\'m not going to be able to maintain that kind of constant pressure throughout my boost phase.
Furthermore, I ran some numbers for drag and determined that, using a Cd of ~2 at mach 1 (note to self - reference this value against spitzer bullet ballistic coefficients as a reality check) and a sea-level air density, I determined approximately 250 lbs of thrust would be required to penetrate the sound barrier (ideally, you\'d want at least double that to minimize losses) with a 4-inch-wide rocket (i.e. 2-liter bottles). At 1000 PSI, this shouldn\'t be terribly difficult to achieve with larger nozzles, though using a taller, thinner rocket would still be prudent (a rocket with half the diameter, for instance, would suffer only about 1/4 the drag).
I\'m in no way about to write off the idea as impossible at this point; I don\'t really have any stronger materials to turn to, but there\'s still lots of optimization to be done - finding the ideal compromise between empty weight (mass fraction) and pressure (specific impulse), performing a more realistic estimate of gas expansion... and of course, considering the option of using multiple stages.
*edit2*
I found a simple error in my initial container-weight calculations (I forgot to divide the weight of my two-liter wound bottle by two to find grams-per-liter), which puts my mass fraction at a much more promising ~16:1. I\'m still not QUITE there, but it\'s darned close, and I\'m now very confident that a bit of optimization will tip the scales.
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PS going to the moon from the ISS isn\'t a very good idea, it requires a HUGE plane change burn. You might be able to do an off plane transfer, but your window would be very small
I did it once in Orbiter. The Russians did it a dozens of times. It\'s possible, and while less than ideal, it\'s not particularly prohibitive, since there are naturally periods of low-velocity flight in a lunar transfer during which the plane-change may be more-efficiently done.
The way to set it up in Orbiter when you wish to go from an arbitrary LEO to the Moon is to (mentally) project a line through the ascending and descending nodes out to the Moon\'s orbit, plan on intercepting the Moon at one of these points, time-accelerate until the Moon is the appropriate distance from reaching this point, then perform your TLI at the opposite node.
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800 feet? PFFFT. Welcome to ten years ago.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080117120905/http://www.geocities.com/wrgarage/millen.htm
On a side note, I\'m thinking of trying to build the world\'s first supersonic water rocket. I still need to run some numbers to see if fiberglass has the material properties I need or not.
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Okay, I\'m Australian and not American. So some of the nuances will be lost on me no doubt. But to me it seemed like the very opposite of fearmongering.
In case you\'re wondering, if you watch the entire video, Senator Paul is NOT saying 'elect me or there will be Chinese bases in Texas'. His point is rather more clever than that. He\'s putting you in the place of, say, a citizen of Iraq; and he\'s asking you what you\'d do. He\'s showing you that the 'insurgents' may well be doing just what you\'d do if you were in their shoes, and demonstrating how offensive current American foreign policy appears to people from overseas.
Wait... so you\'re saying... we ARE the China in this analogy?!
(But seriously, thanks for clearing that up. I feel like the people who missed it didn\'t listen to the entire message.)
maybe im nit picking here, but when they did the shadow outline of the foreign troops, note not ONE of the guns looked like an AK (standard Gun of the chinese and russian militaries) but looked instead like the barrel of an M-16.
The Chinese shoot the QBZ-95 now.
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At first, I misunderstood your picture and thought you were suggesting harvesting Earth\'s rotational kinetic energy via tension in a space-elevator-esque tether (which, in theory, WOULD work, but would not be worth the expense from an engineering standpoint).
But now that I understand what it actually IS... No, of course it wouldn\'t work. :
Actually it\'ll still 'work'. It was so obvious that it\'d become tidally locked that I initially assumed that was the intent. You\'d then have the sidereally-fixed gyros rotating relative to the satellite once per orbit. Net result, you\'re using your satellite as a flywheel, slowly deorbiting it for a trickle of energy. Insane in the inner solar system, it could make sense for a planetary orbiter farther from the sun, though the need for heavy gyros and heavy counterweights makes me skeptical even of that.
Well, if it were possible to 'sidereally-fix' a gyro (which it isn\'t, all a gyro does is add angular momentum), I suppose that could work. But, as you mentioned, the energy yield would be pathetic unless you used absurdly large weights, and it would only be coming from the specific orbital energy of your satellite (which you had to pay for in the first place), so this idea is, needless to say, kinda pointless.
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I sorta feel like the Brits will return to deck parking with the Queen Elizabeth class now that it\'s slated for CATOBAR. The biggest advantage of CATOBAR is that it consumes only a small amount of deck space for launching, and leaves considerable space for simultaneous landing or parking. The STOVL carriers often rely on using the whole deck for takeoff when loaded, so they actually frequently NEED the entire deck to launch without catapults. CATOBAR opens up a whole lot of real estate for all kinds of configurations and operations, permitting massively more frequent launch and recovery rates, and thus a higher mission-availability for aircraft operating from a single carrier. I highly doubt the Royal Navy will pass that operational capability up.
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The issue with recovering a C-130 on a carrier was the fact that the ENTIRE deck had to be cleared to do so. Given how intense and complicated the logistics of moving even small, CATOBAR-capable aircraft around a carrier, this was easily enough to rule it out as an option for what they intended to do with it.
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Pollution JATO is awesome.
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I\'ve already stated that blowout ports alone couldn\'t have saved Challenger or her crew. I\'m not sure if ASRMs could have.
But yes, that mentality was harmful to the program. And the mentality they later adopted, consisting of 'we can\'t LET anything go wrong,' was harmful as well. Things WILL go wrong, and you have to be prepared to handle it when it happens.
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Tell me, do you have any REAL statistics showing that launch failures are any more frequent than they used to be amongst Russian launches? I figure if you\'re going to use this issue as a political mouthpiece, you AT LEAST ought to back it up with some relevant data.
I keenly await your response.
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And though plenty of people will try to argue that the Shuttle borders on insanity for lacking an escape mechanism, they fail to take note that in both accidents such a system would have proven useless given the situation anyway.
Gonna have to disagree with you there - ejection seats or escape capsules could\'ve saved the crew of Challenger. Not Challenger herself, but the crew could quite possibly have been saved. Keep in mind that they were still alive (and at least two of them conscious) after the disintegration, and the crew compartment was structurally intact.
IMO, it is the lack of this one feature that is the greatest threat safety-wise of the Shuttle. NOT the SRBs, NOT the reusable TPS (though light ablative heat shields on some ejection capsules - a la Paracone or MOOSE - might be worth considering), NOT the cavalier attitude of the program managers during pre-launch decisions. Expecting nothing to ever go wrong in the realm of spaceflight is absurd - the key is to maintain as much damage control as is reasonable for when things DO go wrong, and to learn as much as you can from these mishaps so they can be prevented in the future.
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According to Wikipedia, a fault detected in the engine diagnostics triggered an engine shutdown and abort. No specifics on WHAT the fault was.
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Interesting thought. That\'d give you the best of both worlds, since you could also use the rail trolley for situations where the arm wouldn\'t be convenient anyway!
Really, the way I see it, the arm itself is for situations where getting there WITHOUT it is inconvenient. I think just crawling around by hand is probably actually the fastest way to get around for spacewalkers right now, but there aren\'t always handrails or handles to grab onto - which is where the RMS usually comes in. A handrail running up the arm would let you clip on and shuffle your way up to the elbow in practically no time.
What\'s the problem causing so frequent russian spacecraft crashes last few years? It\'s the same issue that was with the last launch of Challenger: when the decision to abort-recheck-replace is made not by competent engineers (who know that this is really dangerous problem) but by some guys that care only about their money ('if we postpone the flight we will lose so much money! ... and in case of crash we will still be making new rocket and I will have 1 more chance to put half of the money in my pocket' - That\'s the way business is set in Russia nowadays :\'(, especially if it gets money from the state budget). And if it multiplies with the workers\' attitude 'Not so good part? Who will notice it? Anyway for these money I wont spend my time remaking it. I\'ll have more problems if i won\'t make planned number of products' the chance of something getting wrong if it\'s not triple checked is too big.
That\'s what happens if you remove the compenent that stabilised the soviet system & replace it with free market/democracy without bringing all the components that stabilise this system.
And WHEN was the last time a cosmonaut died on a mission?
OH RIGHT... :
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A thought I just had that might be of value, particularly in a 'legless' pod: For those situations where you need to travel a significant distance before you can latch onto an RMS (be it because the arm has to 'walk' over and it\'d take a lot of time to drop you off for each step, or because the RMS doesn\'t have any grapples in the convenient area, having some sort of wheeled socket that one can latch onto a transfer rail and run along under electric motors to travel, similar to the 'trolley' that Canadarm 2 can use to travel along the ISS\'s truss when needed, but smaller.
What about just installing a rail on the RMS leading up to the elbow, where you can just tether yourself to and go along for the ride instead of having to be repeatedly picked up and dropped off?
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Scifi bias? Sure, it\'s a site for people who want to write scifi. And, uhm, they don\'t claim adding armor is a good idea, they state pretty specifically that it\'s a terrible and useless one.
Where? Absolutely everywhere I\'ve looked, they speak as if noisy, manned, heavily-armored, nuclear-propelled warships are the inevitable future of space warfare.
There may well be some points where it\'s not as accurate as it could be but I wouldn\'t go as far as writing the whole site off.
The biggest problem is their tone - as if EVERY SINGLE THING THEY SAY IS UNDENIABLE FACT - and the fact that there appears to be no peer-review process regulating things. The end result is you have a website where fact is hard to distinguish from (alarmingly common) errors/disinformation unless you already know what to look for. At least wikipedia has a little [citation needed] tag near the bits that should be taken with a grain of salt...
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Excuse me?
You wanna go there? Fine.
It\'s immediately apparent that those guys read WAAAAY too much sci-fi. They are EXTREMELY biased, and their website is rife with technical inaccuracies and misinformation.
For instance, in that section on radiators and thermal management, their presumption that their own little pet-technology (nuclear-thermal rockets) are COMPLETELY immune to thermal management issues owing to the openness of their cycle, and their (probably willful) failure to acknowledge the relevance and usefulness of open-cycle cooling schemes for anything else, is just clearly indicative of the way they go about explaining things.
And I\'m sorry, but I just can\'t take seriously anyone who thinks adding ARMOR to a spacecraft is a good idea.
Rumor has it new budget cuts NASA's planetary exploration program entirely
in The Lounge
Posted
Funding for manned spaceflight is still there. COTS and CCDev are still on. We\'re still paying to keep the ISS manned and running. SLS development is written into the budget.
Furthermore, planetary missions usually take YEARS. New Horizons and Juno are both more than another Presidential term away from their destinations. The Mars Science Rover is on the pad as we speak, and is designed to last for another three years. If NASA\'s recent efforts in the post-Constellation-cancellation period are any indication, temporary funding cuts are not enough to stop them from making plans and preparing for the deed when the time is right. By the time the next spaceflight-friendly President signs more funding to them again, I\'m sure they\'ll have a handful of planetary missions ready to go just as soon as the checks can be signed.