PakledHostage

Lots of Yabuts live in this swamp...

Watching it come down, I can't help but think "Is this really the state of the art, 62 years after Friendship 7?" We really need to move beyond capsules.

The livestream just started.

Maybe hypergolics, as evolved in the Bombardier Beetle, but on a larger scale? Rocket propulsion more than jet propulsion?

I assumed (incorrectly) in my earlier comments that these were thrust links in the pylon, which are part of the linkage system that connects the pylon to the wing, but they're not. They are the ones between the engine and pylon. Mea culpa.

It is odd, but there could be other explanations that don't require a mistake by their engineering department. It could be something like a maintenance procedure that loaded the links in a bad way while installing the engine or inspecting something else, as was the case in the Amarican Airlines Flight 191 crash. In that case, American Airlines mechanics used a non-approved procedure to lower the pylon for an inspection and caused a crack in the pylon's aft bulkhead in the process. The crack went unnoticed and the aircraft was sent back out flying with disastrous results. Douglas and the DC10 took a decades long publicity hit from that accident, but as usual, there was more to the story than what reached the 6 o'clock news.

The pylons on Boeing aircraft are a nightmare. They have been since well before the merger with McDonnel Douglas that gets all the blame for the company's current woes. Look at the list of structural airworthiness directives on just about any of their types and you'll see that a disproportionate number of them are ATA 54 (pylons). They use a variation on the same design for all their types, and it has the same problems on all of them. But having said that, I will also say again that it's easy for laypeople to jump all over Boeing in response to any little story they read in the media. It's harder to process those stories in proper context. Every type has maintenance issues. Service bulletins and airworthiness directives get issued for all of them. Sometimes those airworthiness directives even require that work be done prior to further flight. Almost all the time, those maintenence directives go unnoticed by the general public. But in the case of Boeing these days, people treat any little wrinkle as a major moral failure by the company. In this case, the problem is happening on a type that's still in flight testing and that hasn't yet entered service. That's when you're supposed to find problems. They found the problem, they're going to fix it.

He was being a bit flippant when he said that. It was more a comment on the incromulent nature of capsules, rather than about any aliens that might land here in one.

I agree. Capsules are so 1960's... Like Neil deGrasse Tyson once said: If an alien were to land on Earth in a capsule he'd be like "meh..." It's just not cool. Dreamchaser landing on a runway is a significant step in the right direction. Starship too. Capsules? Lame.

What do people here think of Ender's Game? The obvious "cheat" is the ansible, but I recall really enjoying the first book (and the movie they made of it). As one who remembers the '80s, I recall when it came out. In the usual '80s fashion, grown-ups around me were tut-tutting it's distopian themes, as though us kids playing Atari would thereby turn us into warriors. But even Reagan got on board at one point and suggested in a speech that kids who played a lot of video games would grow up to be excellent fighter pilots.

Trouble with landing on Australia's north coast is that you need to overfly Australia to get there, because it will be coming from the south. Pacific Islands would be safer in that regard, but maybe they're not ready to count on a de-orbit burn to accurately bring it down, just yet? Didn't they originally talk about bringing it down NE of Barking Sands on Kauai, but scrubbed that plan because it would require Starship to first be orbital and the de-orbit it?

Of a man named Brady?

I would love to see what someone could do with a hydrogen alpha filter on a telescope, for one of these transits. I just used a 600 mm lens (on a camera with a 1.6 crop factor sensor size, for an effective focal length of 960 mm), and a regular solar filter.

Here's a composite one I did a few years ago of the ISS transiting the Sun: I should add that I used transit-finder.com to predict the transit, and a GPS for the timing of the exposure. (Typical transits last on the order of 1 second.)

Is that someone's photo of the ISS through a telescope?

A crummy commercial? [I went out to face the world again. Wiser.]

A long time ago (but not in a galaxy far away), there was a massive forum glitch that took down the whole KSP forum for about 3 weeks. In the process of restoring it, about 6 months of forum history (as well as everyone's rep count) was lost. But I remember seeing that image of the napkin sketch too... Maybe that post got lost in that great forum purge? (I recently went looking for the Chelyabinsk meteor impact thread, but couldn't find it; I think it too was a victim.)

That sounds about as wishful as my hoping in 1986 that Santa Claus would bring me a G.I. Joe aircraft carrier for Christmas... didn't happen then and ain't gonna happen now.

Maybe this forum will be like Milton Waddums in Office Space and, by some glitch, it'll be forgotten about and thereby remain online?...

That may be how the kilometer was originally defined, but the ratio you give is no longer correct. A nautical mile is now defined as a derived SI unit equalling exactly 1852 metres. The circumference of a perfect sphere where 1 minute of arc is 1 NM would therefore be 40003.2 km.

Arguably, the biggest advances are learning how to live and stay healthy in zero G. A trip to Mars is a 3+ year long mission, round trip. That's longer than anyone's stay aboard the ISS. Simply saying "Hold my beer" and going for it probably isn't the best way to ensure a successful extended mission like that. When it finally happens, the ISS program will have contributed to the success of the first manned mission to Mars.

Since we're being silly, why not a scaled up version of the M.O.O.S.E?

Bringing a piece down in order to study the effects of a couple decades of exposure to the space environment (e.g. thermal cycles, micro-meteorites, etc) isn't a bad idea. If we want to go to Mars, we're going to have to be able to build spacecraft that are resilient to that environment for years without external assistance. That is yet to be done. (This idea has precedent. The older 737 classics were given a hard service life limit after studies of the lap joints revealed irreparable microscopic damage. The studies were done on sections of airframe cut out of aircraft that had been in service for decades.)

"Working Together" was the catchphrase and design program philosophy associated with the 777 development in the early '90s. The first 777 aircraft was christened that as a result. Allan Mulallay is credited with coming up with the philosophy in his role as the Boeing 777 program's director of engineering (and later the program's lead as vice-president and general manager). The "Working Together" program resulted in Boeing working closely with airlines and regulators when they developed the 777.