PakledHostage

Just to be clear, nobody is putting a car into Martian orbit. At least not now. SpaceX is launching Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster aboard Falcon Heavy, but it will only be placed in an elliptical orbit about the Sun, with Pe near Earth's "orbital distance" and Ap near Mars' "orbital distance". Nobody is being hired to launch this thing. It is already up there. It was launched last Sunday as a dummy payload on the first orbital rocket launched by Rocket Lab. Rocket Lab could have made up that dummy payload with a lump of concrete, a bag of used shoes, a stack of old DVDs, a heap of All Blacks jerseys, or whatever, but they chose to launch their "Humanity Star" disco ball and "Curie" engine powered kick stage (along with two small cubesats), instead. That's their prerogative.

I should add that my only regret is that I never tried again...

Tell me about it... I flew all the way across the continent to see the launch of STS-101 (and boy were my arms tired!), only to have it scrubbed at the T-9 hold due to high winds. But I'm off topic again...

It was a test payload launched aboard Rocket Labs' "Still Testing" launch the other day. And I agree. If it is OK to put up a car that'll stay up for eons, then it should also be equally OK to put up a disco ball who's orbit will decay on its own within 9 months.

Indeed. This is why we can't have nice things...

I still play Railroad Tycoon 2 on Steam occasionally. Maybe they also have 3?

Some wooden railway guys are quite serious about it. This guy has even developed a standard for interfacing table segments together so that museums and educational facilities can mix, match and share their segments.

I've driven my wife insane with all the money that I've spent on wooden trains for my kids, but they love it and it gives me something to do together with them. Maybe we'll get into more serious model railroads as they get older, but if I have my way we'll migrate towards model rocketry or RC aircraft.

Yup, you are right. Star Wars TLJ sucks, Vox sucks and I suck.... What more can I say? Moving on.

A bit of an old article (from December) but some might find it interesting: Vox - The “backlash” against Star Wars: The Last Jedi, explained

For me it says: "You will not be able to see the satellite within the next 2087 hours. Please check again later." 87 days? Really?

Wrong thread? Isn't this is Rocket Lab, not SpaceX?

Well for what it's worth, TLJ has been nominated for four Oscars.

I don't know... Wikipedia says here that they are launching Musk's 2009 Roadster, and it says here that that model only has one motor driving the wheels...

While we're being pedantic, the Tesla has (had?) a motor, not an engine.

I just hope that someone secretly left a teapot (suitably eveloped in bubble wrap, of course) in the glovebox...

As I said the other day, there is a fairly broad discussion about safety considerations in Chapter IX of the Rogers Commission Report. Edit: I should add that it is often said that the aviation regulations are written in blood. That is probably true of other safety regulations as well - regulations get written because somebody died. Sometimes the mistakes that lead to those regulations are head slappers, like the 1956 mid air collision of two airliners over the Grand Canyon that lead to the Federal Aviation Act in 1958. Other mistakes are more subtle, like pilots grabbing the wrong lever at the wrong time and causing a crash, leading to regulations like FAR 25.781 that mandates cockpit control knob shapes to standardize tactile cues to help avoid such errors. Anyway, the point is that we learn from our mistakes and try to do things better in the future. There is no point being sanctimonious. I can say with certainty that the people who designed the Space Shuttle weren't reckless yahoos; they were "rocket scientists". Hindsight has shown that they made mistakes, but they almost certainly did the best job that they could at the time, within the constraints that they were under. This generation's job is to learn from the mistakes of that earlier generation and try to do a better job next time, but even this generation will make mistakes.

Oh, sorry, you're right... I mis-read it. I guess the 1/2 for STS-51-L means that one of the segments had been reused twice while the other one had been re-used once?

The Rogers Commission Report touches on this in several places (obviously), but a couple of those are worth highlighting: On page 156 of the report, where they discuss their reliability program and how that was supposed to be monitoring trend data, they note that process problems were emerging with the SRBs as the shuttle program matured: And the table below, copied from page 65 of the report: Note that on STS 51-L, in addition to the significantly colder joint temperatures (the impact on the O-rings of which the report discusses in great detail elsewhere) both segments of the SRB, above and below the blow-by, were re-used segments. In other incidents, only one or none of the segments had been previously used.

I'm going to go with the findings of the Rogers Commission Report: From Chapter IV - "Cause of the Accident" (Page 40) And from Chapter V - "The Contributing Cause of the Accident " (Page 83) The report also contains lots more information about the considerations that went into the abort modes and crew escape systems in Chapter IX - "Other Safety Considerations", starting on Page 179, but I don't have time to summarize them all here. Feel free to read through that chapter yourself, though.

We got onto the topic because people (including yourself) were brushing over the faulty management decision to launch Challenger, despite the protests of the engineers (who's job it was to define the safe operating limits) that the launch would be unsafe.

But again, that makes my point. The mundane little 747 and many other transport category aircraft can't safely land above their maximum landing weight or you'll risk bending or breaking something, or worse. Those machines have operating limits that are the result of physics, materials science, etc; those operating limits aren't design flaws.

The Shuttle was also orders of magnitude higher performance than an airliner. My point was that higher performance equipment have slimmer margins, and that that isn't a design flaw - it is the reality of the limitations of physics, material science, etc. The Space Shuttle (like any rocket) was among the highest performance vehicles that have ever existed. Margins are going to be slim, and as we've seen, knowingly operating outside those limits is going to end badly. But again, that isn't a design flaw.

No.

We went over this yesterday: The Shuttle (and any rocket, for that matter) must operate on razor thin margins or it couldn't do what it needs to do. Operate it outside of those razor thin margins and you'll run into problems. This is progressively more true of any high performance machine. In a more mundane example, the parameters for every takeoff of every commercial airliner flight anywhere are pre-calculated by the airline's dispatchers and flight performance engineers and then provided to the pilots as part of their flight plan. The takeoff performance analysis factors in things like runway surface conditions, density altitude, wind speed, fuel and payload weight, etc. If the pilots deviate from the plan and operate the flight outside of the margins that they are provided, there's a good chance that things will end badly. That's not a design flaw on the part of transport category aircraft. That's the nature of the business when you are operating high performance equipment.