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NASA SLS/Orion/Payloads


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2 hours ago, sh1pman said:

Here's your proof that reuse doesn't work! Booster landings - cheap publicity stunt! ;)

Nah, proof that refurbishing after EVERY flight isn't practical or economical. Jury's still out on reuse, as SpaceX isn't terribly transparent with their finances...

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3 hours ago, SuperFastJellyfish said:
  Reveal hidden contents

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There’s a reason the Energiya-5 variant design that uses an actual RD-0120 first stage core (rather than another Soyuz-5/Irtysh) is known as the “fatty”.

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3 hours ago, Nightfury said:

Could they be preparing for the EM1 mission ? 

EM1 is indeed their abbreviation for EM1, clearly they must just be testing something, or it was a mistaken entry.

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2 hours ago, Xd the great said:

How much of that money goes to bureaucracy?

Depending on how you view the Silicon Valley crowd?

Some of it... or, actually, most of it goes to the Deep State. *dun-dun-DUN!*

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13 hours ago, tater said:

 

Talk about checking things out...

NASA: runs structural tests

SpaceX: slaps together a suborbital prototype from a bunch of sheet metal

Edited by DDE
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On 1/31/2019 at 12:20 PM, MaverickSawyer said:

Yeah, that definitely seems to be their mantra for manned spaceflight. An acquaintance of mine said they wanted a 1-in-10,000 chance of mission-critical part failures.

If you have 200 or so of those mission critical parts, you have roughly the safety of the shuttle (2 loss of crew in ~100 missions).  They really add up (there's a reason that engineers love the chance to use redundant parts).

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Man, that better not be the case. If that's true, then it might be the next President who gets to unfairly claim credit for a project started by the prior President, itself a near carbon copy of a project started by the President before that, attempting to use 1970's era hardware in a way best designed to funnel money to 1970's era contractors.

And that would be... bad?

Anyways, I seriously hope nobody dies as a consequence of the SLS, which is composed of so much pork that it could probably win Midwest hog-raising competitions without the judges any wiser.

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On 2/7/2019 at 3:58 AM, Starman4308 said:

Man, that better not be the case. If that's true, then it might be the next President who gets to unfairly claim credit for a project started by the prior President, itself a near carbon copy of a project started by the President before that, attempting to use 1970's era hardware in a way best designed to funnel money to 1970's era contractors.

And that would be... bad?

Anyways, I seriously hope nobody dies as a consequence of the SLS, which is composed of so much pork that it could probably win Midwest hog-raising competitions without the judges any wiser.

I dunno, NASA booking flights on the Federatsya/Yenisei stack while pretending Starship doesn’t exist would be... hilarious.

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NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) has released its annual report and makes for some interesting reading regarding the new heat shield design for Orion.
 

Quote

During this year, the ASAP continued to review several areas of concern in the Orion Program.  Overall, the ESD System was designed to methodically collect data and expand operational experience to build confidence in the integrated space system. Large scale integrated system tests, including the flight tests, were designed to ensure that important data and knowledge required to properly mitigate safety risk would be obtained before sending humans beyond LEO.

In carrying out this approach, Exploration Flight Test-1 returned data that resulted in a completely different approach to the design and manufacture of the capsule heat shield. This new system relies on blocks of heat resistant material, joined to a backing with the inter-block spaces filled with a gap-filling compound. The new system has a potential failure mode that involves the differential ablation rate between the block material and the gap filler which could lead to heat shield failure. Fully understanding this failure mode can only be achieved through full-scale flight test, because no ground facility can generate the extreme environmental conditions over a large enough area to fully validate the shield’s integrity. The acquisition of critical heat shield thermal performance data is required to ensure crew safety, and only flight test can obtain this data.

Despite this, ASAP has now learned that recent decisions about launch commit criteria could result in a situation where the EM-1 flight test could occur without the ability to obtain this data.  This could be caused by the lack of a properly functioning avionics box that collects and stores the data from the heat shield instrumentation. Without this critical data collection, one of the main objectives of the flight test could be compromised. If the avionics box fails, the back-up plan for heat shield verification is to visually examine the EM-1 heat shield for damage and/or potentially deploy an airborne asset during the re-entry phase to attempt to acquire infrared imagery of the Orion capsule as it returns to Earth. This approach is driven by the desire to avoid a launch delay in order to roll back the system to the Vehicle Assembling Building for avionics box replacement. While we understand the reticence to accept such a delay, neither option guarantees enough information will be gathered to provide the needed understanding of heat shield performance. The ASAP position is that NASA should aggressively research alternate means to collect the data onboard if the avionics box fails.

 

Edited by James Kerman
edited for formatting
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So... They're ignoring the lessons of Challenger and Columbia all over again. They're putting schedule above safety.

beathead.gif

How hard could it possibly be to put in a dual-redundant data capture system if it's that critical to the mission and they're that worried about it failing? Or plan for all the alternate modes of data acquisition anyways, since you can cross-reference them against each other to get a better idea of what is/did happen?

Better yet, put the avionics box in a spot that technicians can get to it and quickly swap it should it fail before launch. Now THERE's a novel idea. th_dry.gif

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