Posts by Vulch

Re: Possessing an image likely to cause injury

It's the act of creating the image potentially causing injury I believe. Posession of the image counts as encouragement to make more.

Re: "(aka kaboom)"

Although now a later tweet says "Detailed review of rocket telemetry needed to tell if due to initial splashdown or subsequent tip over and body slam" so maybe not so much KaBoom! as Tim-berrrrr!

Car mechanics. They know *where* to hit a vehicle to make it work again, they just need a range of suitable hitting implements to suit the fault.

Re: Connectors....

If you have a look at the animation there's usually a cover over the connector panel. You need to have a lot of connections to the trunk (power from the solar cells, data connections, etc) as well as to the rocket telemetry on launch. Easier to go round the side of the heatshield than try and run the wires through it. If you look at a picture of the Apollo CSM (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apollo_CSM_lunar_orbit.jpg ) you'll see exactly the same setup with the cover over the cables and panel being the lump at the bottom of that picture.

Re: Insolation

No, insUlation. The solar panels are supposed to fold back over the body during the night to help keep the internals warm enough. The mechanical problem appears to have been that one of them didn't.

Re: It looks suspiciously like an AE-35 unit

Actually the computers do like having atmosphere, it's a real bugger keeping them cool without. The ones outside usually have to be hooked in to the ammonia cooling system which also needs regular EVA maintenance.

It's OK. They'll be using a version old enough to be unaffected...

Previous out of the ecliptic missions (eg Ulysses) have used Jupiter to do the perpendicular bit. You aim your craft to go over one of Jupiters poles instead of round its equator. Cassini has used Titan in the same way to swap between orbits in the ring-plane of Sautrn and inclined orbits.

Shades of the Cambridge guided busway. When it started there were five bus companies going to use it, but by the time it opened that had reduced to two via mergers and takeovers. Some of the documents had apparently been updated by search and replace as it was eventually announced that "Whippet, Stagecoach and Whippet" would be running services from day one...

Re: Must be a techie...

The original phrasing used though implied it was eight track carts, not reel to reel on which the number of tracks would have been invisible to a journo of Mr Robinsons calibre. He would (probably) however have recognised the more common eight track due to their widespread use in radio studios where, with the tape being an endless loop, they were favoured for not needing to be rewound after every use. And I first encountered them professionally 35 years ago...

Re: Pliers cause pain

The maintenance department at the ITV station I was employed by contemplated getting a calibrated mat so they could measure EHT voltage by how far their summer student jumped every time he got a shock...

Re: 2014 DX110

Usually means that after it was discovered and its orbit worked out, they've gone back to old photographs of the relevant area of sky and found a previously overlooked trace.

Re: $15M

It's enough to pay for a team of around a dozen people for 7 or 8 years to work out the detail of what will be needed and what instruments can be fitted in to various launch configurations. Once they've got the plans worked out it will start needing real money to build and launch the spacecraft.

Re: Mi aerodeslizador está lleno de anguilas

¿Hay un eco aquí?

Re: There is a chance of a major win ......

Ah, finally a reason why they took Play School off the air. Betting on which window it would be today...

Mind you, it got harder to get BBC Presentation to take the bets when they realised VT were putting cryptic notes on the paperwork during the tech review...

Spherical cows obviously.

Re: a bit on the steep side

It would pay basic salary for that many. You still need to find Employers NI, pension contributions, uniform allowance, space for desks, lockers, changing areas, vehicles and associated running costs, etc...

Re: Connect me!

"An upvote to the commentard who can work out the riddle of the last one"

Probably related to the occasion at an ITV station where I was employed when the emergency standby generator fired up and cut in around 3pm due to loss of external power, then promptly shut down due to excessive load taking the region off the air.

Later that afternoon a missive went round suggesting it would be detrimental to peoples career prospects if kettles were ever found plugged in to the technical mains again...

Re: Profit Margin?

There's a difference between "UK sales" and "Sales in the UK". The other 7 billion of your figure will mostly be Luxembourg sales.

Re: A lot of risk was taken for the Moon landings

The pilot of the lifting body that featured in the Six Million Dollar Man titles actually walked away from that crash, although he subsequently lost an eye due to an infection picked up in hospital.

The Apollo 11 landing had around fifty seconds of fuel remaining at touchdown, if it got down to 30 seconds then an abort was required as the remaining fuel was needed to get enough altitude for a safe stage separation and ascent engine start. They were 20 seconds to that point, not to dry tanks, and as has been mentioned already the stages did not share fuel or engines.

Re: This was a resurrection of a failed proposal...

Antares is unlikely to get man-rating in its current form as the second stage is a solid rocket. Solids running in parallel with a liquid first stage are allowed, especially if the designer is NASA, as a capsule LES can get the crew away in an abort but there's no sensible way to get off a malfunctioning solid second stage.

The first stage is not hugely different to the Ukrainian Zenit, hardly surprising as it is designed and partly built by the same company under contract.

Re: COTS is about commercial competition...

http://spaceflightnow.com/tracking/ is a handy list and generally stays current. That lists a Falcon launch for the 3rd, but no sign of a webcast on the SpaceX site yet...

Re: Meh

The actual legislation probably won't specify the connector, just requiring a standard one is used and leaving the choice to be determined by whatever the EU equivalent of a Ministerial Order is.

Re: Ominous.

That's OK then, the SLS and Orion *are* subsidies to corporations...

Re: How about a little perspective here?

"But right now both FH and SLS are paper rockets"

Actually the stages for the first Falcon Heavy are mostly assembled. The engine clusters ought to be test fired on the static stand in Texas early in the new year with an actual launch from Vandenberg lightly pencilled in for around April, though that will probably slip.

Re: 80,000km > 35,786km

Missed the edit window...

The fuel saving is mostly in the plane change manouevre, the higher that is done the less fuel it takes. A launch from Kourou will generally go straight to GEO altitude as it's almost on the Equator anyway. From Cape Canaveral they need to lose 28.5 degrees of inclination so it takes less fuel to go higher, change plane and drop back, and from Baikonour you need to change by about 56 degrees which makes the Lunar fly-by option tempting.

Re: Let SpaceX launch it!

It's just inside the capability of a Falcon 9 v1.1. Not sure where you're getting the 6,500kg figure from but the SpaceX site gives around 4,850 to GTO for a non-R and you generally get two thirds of that to Mars, and two thirds again for the F9R.

Re: Hmm

Sarah Jane mentioned it to the David Tennant incarnation when they met up in "School Reunion". Her last words at the end of "The Hand of Fear" had been something like "I bet it's not even Croydon".