StrandedonEarth

I guess they’ll stop pushing the FAA to let them certify themselves. But but but what about the shareholders?!? /s

Whoa, wait, how did this not get noticed, on this of all forums?

A tirre at work had "Who are you" written on it, so I had to add "Who who, who who" and it hasn't left my head since....

Check your ground on the battery. A loose ground wire can cause wonkiness. I had an Aerostar and the screw connecting the ground wire to the frame came loose. Not off, just loose, and the charging gauge needle was bouncing back and forth. Tightened the screw and the needle became steady as a rock.

Not a movie, but a mini-series...

Yup, in fact, I was on that forum up to about noon today, and when I refreshed the page after work at 230, I just got the white screen. But it was working for a good run there, Dec29…

The Navajo are probably happy about that. Perhaps the Moon spirits were offended…

Or safety wire. Lazy git probably center-punched the threads and called it good. But isn’t someone supposed to independently verify it’s done correctly? Oh right, probably got laid off as redundant…

... or be subject to a Vogon poetry reading...

The large 4-segment STS and 5-segment SLS SRBs have had full-duration static fires (can’t make them shorter), but in a horizontal, not vertical position; one at a time (not in pairs), and not mounted to a core stage, firing or not. (I probably read your post wrong; the wording of the first sentence is a touch ambiguous on second reading. )

They got gremlin remains on there too?

Hmm, good point, that's the main reason Rocketlab is pursuing re-use

Congrats to ULA for a successful debut of Vulcan! Now, how long until S.M.A.R.T. (better than nothing) reuse becomes a thing? And how long after that will they decide S.M.A.R.T. is as economical as STS SRB re-use (as in, not really)?

Radiative cooling. It might not be a lot, but apparently it was enough. And there is still air there, very little, but it's there As I understand it, the Karman Line is where the velocity required to maintain enough aerodynamic lift for level flight exceeds orbital velocity, and can vary somewhat as the atmosphere expands and contracts, as Starlink found out....SpaceX just lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm. There could be worse to come. | MIT Technology Review

Ah, but did it? Did anyone ever verify bolts were torqued and nothing was missing before closing the panel and signing off on it? We just don't know, but we do know they've been fighting with QC issues. Between the newest 737s and Starliner, Boeing appears to be going down like a Max with an MCAS malfunction and clueless pilots... "Too big to fail" vs "the bigger they are, the harder they fall..."

Well, it was a new plane. Do we know if they found anything yet? They should have some idea of went wrong with the installation by now. So they pull the panels off the other aircraft and verify that everything is in place that should be there, and make sure there are no signs of fatigue, movement, or wear. Then they give it a slap and call it good, like they apparently did at the factory without the verification that it was installed properly…

Was it an Alaska Airlines flight?

Unclear on the concept...

Since many of the keybinds from KSP1 are used in KSP2, I would like more of the KSP1 keybinds to be added to KSP2. Along with other features that have been mentioned, using [tab] to switch focus between CBs and ships was very handy; I miss that. And I'll echo the call for a navball docking alignment indicator; it was so easy to use yet unobtrusive. And I only figured out how to pause the game by accident.

Literal shower thought: my wife flipped a towel over the shower door and broke the plastic cover on the light there. So now I'm thinking about replacing the light...

Did I pass the test? lol

SpaceX is unusually public with their testing. Does anyone know how many RS-25s failed acceptance testing? RS-68s? RL-10s, F-1s, J-2s? BE-4s certainly had a troubled development; how many of those make it through acceptance testing these days? How many Merlins get scrapped without flying? The reason high-tech precision machinery is so expensive is that not all units produced pass testing, just like with silicon chips. "Perfect" is the enemy of good enough, something I fight with myself about as I can be a bit of a perfectionist. Mucking around to make something (more) perfect can end up ruining the piece. Granted, with something like a rocket engine, often only perfect is good enough, but to maintain high production rates you can't try to make everything perfect every time. Mistakes happen, things are missed. That's why there is Quality Control/Assurance, audits and inspections, and finally acceptance testing. If it's not perfect enough, it gets fixed or scrapped. Some get scrapped before testing, some are scrapped after testing, and some are passed for use. That's the nature of manufacturing, vs the hand-made, may-as-well-be-custom-made ways of early rocketry, when still not everything made it to the test stand. I will add that I work in manufacturing, although the tolerances involved are not anywhere near the precision required of aerospace. For that matter, I doubt anything is ever truly perfect. There are tolerances, and if a product is within tolerance, it's all good. But if you take a close look, there will still be minute, tolerable imperfections. NASA is (was?) known for taking tolerances to seven decimal places, but if you take a perfectly (within tolerance) round shaft and go down another decimal place or two, there will still be peaks and valleys: no longer perfectly round. From the Moon, the Earth looks perfectly round, but I can look out my window at mountains that say otherwise. How many Raptor tests are for acceptance testing, versus testing new materials/configurations/ideas, to see if it'll work for future versions? Nobody outside SpaceX knows. This is why they test, so they can find flaws and then test the fixes for the flaws. Every failure is a lesson. The only real cause for concern is when the same mistakes keep happening. Do the Raptors keep failing for the same reasons on identical hardware? That's a human problem, and it is one definition of insanity: doing the same things over and over while expecting different results. If there is one thing not happening at Boca Chica, it's doing the same things over and over (unless it already works, like making rings and barrel sections, and even those methods may still be getting iterated); every build has changes that are thought to improve the vehicle. Once everything is functioning the way it should, and only then, the design gets frozen, like F9B5. But hey, if you want to build a test stand for full-up, full-mission-duration, full power, full 33-engine Superheavy testing out of your own pocket, I don't think SpaceX will object. Good luck getting permission to build it anywhere in this hemisphere, though.

11:18pm Sunday night, Pacific time. Deep in the slumber zone for me…

LH2 has a higher specific heat than methane, so it’s more effective at cooling the heat shield. I’d cite my source, but it’s tricky on mobile; I just asked Siri and by the graphs it appears H2 is better

Enquiring minds wanna know!