Kerwood Floyd

Boy it sure is a shame those Raptor engines are so darned unreliable (j/k)

Has anyone else heard anything about this? https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/company-news/2024/08/21/bezos-blue-origin-suffers-fiery-setback-building-new-rocket/

I don't think so. I suspect my father was exaggerating. The post goes on to say that the plane in the picture was with the 9th Bombardment Group, whereas my father's plane was with the 3rd Photo Recon squadron, which I believe was directly attached to XXI Bomber Command and not to any Bombardment Group. My father's crew was a "floater" crew not associated with any particular plane, so I doubt he even would have remembered which plane he thought it was. Thanks for finding that, though.

In a combat zone in those days cold beer could be hard to come by. My late father told a story about selling cold beer to Marines on Iwo Jima. He had cold beer to sell because it was cooled while flying at altitude in an (unheated, of course) B-29 flying out of Tinian. [He claimed (a claim I've never been able to corroborate) that the plane he was top gunner in was the first Allied plane to land on Iwo Jima safely enough to take off again under its own power.]

Thanks. Yeah, that was my best guess, but I don't like guessing

Sorry. Can you expand SSSU for me?

I seem to remember reading somewhere that the vibrations from a centrifuge on ISS would mess up all of the experiments that are relying on the micro-gravity environment. Apparently you can have one or the other.

This sounds like the physicists' version of "Do bears [poop] in the woods?"

The silhouette is reminiscent of a Rebel X-wing fighter

Cool. I had a couple of problems with the book, but they would be easily fixed in a film

My son, my grandson, and I drove about 5 hours to Lake Wappapello State Park, in southeast Missouri. I would do it again in a heartbeat. Probably the most amazing thing I will ever see. It was dang near perfect. Great visibility. We saw the prominence on the lower limb. We saw Venus and Jupiter. And there was hardly any traffic on the way home. Totally different from our 2017 experience.

OK, I'm convinced. Thanks, all. Returning to lurk mode

I don't think anyone has actually answered my question, though. Did the FAA not considered the failure to land the booster (however unnecessary and experimental that was) to be a mishap that required investigation? In other words (to quote Tom Lehrer pretending to quote Werner von Braun) "Once the rocket's up who cares where it comes down?"

It seems to me there's a lot of flamey-boomy in this video: I don't see how this doesn't count as "blowing up rockets"

I wasn't paying much attention back when SpaceX were developing Falcon 9. My impression is that they blew up a lot of rockets. My question is: did they have to do a mishap investigation and wait for a new FAA launch license after each of those tests?

I read Minmus Taster's post as sarcasm. YMMV

Yeah, to me, this is the big question. I really want to know, for both vehicles, but especially for SH, whether they were destroyed by FTS, or suffered some catastrophic failure before FTS had a chance to activate.

Is my memory playing tricks on me? I remember in the immediate aftermath of IFT-1 seeing a lot of speculation that flying debris might have been the culprit.

Wow, Very interesting reading. Unless the leaks that led to the fires were caused by flying pad debris, it sounds like the disintegration of the pad had little to do with the in-flight engine failures.

It could also (imo, probably does) mean that they concluded it was GSE related, not engine related. If they did work that they think will fix the GSE problems, we wouldn't necessarily know about it. Which is the point @tater was making when asking the question (again, imo).

A lot depends on what you mean by "the 'major' Asian languages". English is more closely related to Hindi than either is to Mandarin. If you have in mind what I would call "East Asian languages", it seems that the Chinese languages, Korean, and Japanese are no more related to each other than they are to any of the Indo-European languages.

It seems you are forgetting what the U in RUD stands for. That RD is very much not U. (j/k)

nevermind

I think I must be missing something. Much of the discussion up-thread about the FTS seems to be speculating that the charges were undersized. It seems to me that the charges, once they were activated, worked just fine The problem is that the charges didn't go off until ~40s after the command was sent. Or am I misinformed?

I am far from a smart guy (I get the feeling you're smarter than I am) but . . . I think the secret is that temperature and heat are not exactly the same thing. I remember once reading a similar discussion wherein a smart guy pointed out that, while the average temperature of North Atlantic water is not much above freezing, it still contains a tremendous amount of heat energy. In a similar way, I think those interstellar clouds of gas contain very little heat energy while having a high temperature.