81–90 of 104 posts
I can't easily link to it because it's still live streaming but at 4:10 in they seem to be debugging a local internet/HTML error on their iPads. Next level debugging in production.
Related, I wonder if there's going to be a postmortem on this mission on the UI, because from the brief scenes when its shown updating or being clicked on, it looks to have a responsiveness on the order of half a second .
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Or 19:48 for those of us in the UK. NASA/SpaceX really should start using UTC for their timestamps.
I feel like it's not at all weird to say that something is arriving somewhere in that somewhere's local time zone.
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There are four parachutes. It's designed to support at least a single-chute failure, I don't know about multiple chute outages. As for propulsive landing - the latest I can see[1] is that while the craft is technically capable of propulsive landing, it's not approved by NASA, even for emergencies. So it's likely that these options are not even available for the crew, and they wouldn't have trained on how to use it/ac…
Not even for emergencies? Does that mean that it is officially not there, but in the unlikely unlikely event it can be used, or that it really isn't there anymore and the capsule would just drop dead on the ground?
Clearly not. NASA was already not keen about the superdraco system. The explosion that destroyed the Dragon 2 capsule that was slated for the In-flight Abort test killed any chance of it being used for human-rated flights.
> Does that mean that it is officially not there
This is life-critical hardware/software. You don't go putting functionality in there that isn't approved by NASA, and most importantly the crew who're going to fly it.
Finding out that there's undocumented features and easter-eggs, even if they might in some very remote scenario help save life is certain to be outweighed by the risk that having it in there might somehow contribute to someone's death.
Could it be used for propulsive landing? Perhaps, but they'll first have to prove to NASA that it's safe - just like they proved to NASA that reused launch vehicles were safe, and reused Dragon 1 capsules were safe.
SpaceX seems to have given up on the idea of it anyway. They deleted landing legs from the capsule, and propulsive landing at sea as an emergency backup for the failure of all four parachutes (and you'd need to include a way to detect the failure, cut the chutes and then use the superdraco thrusters) seems a shitload of work which is probably going to only increase risk.
For propulsive landing of humans/cargo, it seems Spaceship their focus.
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Including features that are never used is bad design even if they don't compromise every other aspect of the design. What mainly doomed the shuttle was the DoD requirement that the shuttle be able to pluck a satellite from a polar orbit in one orbit, making it necessary to include the massive wings so that it wouldn't be forced to land in the Pacific as the world rotated underneath it.
If they’d used those features it wouldn’t be public knowledge
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Unfriendly satellite can blow up or cause fire inside of shuttle, so it's bad idea to capture enemy satellites. It's like sending billion-worth mine capturer behind enemy lines, which can be destroyed with AK.
Don't see why you're downvoted for posting this. Certainly, satellites designed before the Space Shuttle would have to be very paranoidly designed to include a self-destruct mechanism, but it only takes a couple kilograms of explosives to strongly disincentivize kidnapping it. If I was a military satellite designer, heaven forbid, I'd definitely include that in a world that included the possibility of stealing satell…
Perseverance also launched a few days ago: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/ Hopefully the landing is just as smooth as Curiosity's. It would be really cool to see actual, high quality footage of it, but at least there's the simulated renderings. Extremely impressive.
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The Shuttle was built to bring down soviet spy satellites and spacecraft, so in that regard, it was the best design made.
Including features that are never used is bad design even if they don't compromise every other aspect of the design. What mainly doomed the shuttle was the DoD requirement that the shuttle be able to pluck a satellite from a polar orbit in one orbit, making it necessary to include the massive wings so that it wouldn't be forced to land in the Pacific as the world rotated underneath it.
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There are four parachutes. It's designed to support at least a single-chute failure, I don't know about multiple chute outages. As for propulsive landing - the latest I can see[1] is that while the craft is technically capable of propulsive landing, it's not approved by NASA, even for emergencies. So it's likely that these options are not even available for the crew, and they wouldn't have trained on how to use it/ac…
Not even for emergencies? Does that mean that it is officially not there, but in the unlikely unlikely event it can be used, or that it really isn't there anymore and the capsule would just drop dead on the ground?
Official response from SpaceX: Superdraco thrusters are completely inhibited once the launch is sucessful.
So, no, not even as a backup.
Also, one other thing I remembered - the draco and superdraco thrusters require different pressurisation levels for their fuel systems. Before launch, the system is put into a high pressure mode, to enable launch escape. After they make orbit, the system is depressurised back to enable the draco thrusters to operate.
So they'd need to have time to re-pressurise the system, too.