351–360 of 560 posts
Looks like they had a payload go with it. Sad. > "SpaceX confirm Amos-6 was aboard the Falcon 9 and was lost in the explosion." https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/77135388623807283...
What's sad about it? They have insurance, it's just hardware. Nobody died or was even injured, so it's merely an invoncenience.
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Mocking a six ton payload is actually fairly expensive, to get the cg, vibration etc. right. A lot more difficult than payload = mock(satellite); NASA did it for the Hubble but so the ground crew could practice operations and not drop the billion dollar space observatory, not to try and save some money if something blew up during testing.
Surely still much cheaper than a two hundred million dollar satellite?
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You're advocating the Broken Window Fallacy. http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fal...
I'm kind of skeptical about this alleged fallacy, where I have to admit that I'm not an economist. The usual formulations of it seem to be something crucial missing. I've heard that many producers of goods deliberately introduce failure points, e.g. in electronics by using cheap solder or capacitors with a limited lifetime. Buttons also fail way too easily. Or think of batteries that cannot be replaced. Do they all c…
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Nitpick: you're thinking of a ballistic missile. Cruise missiles are more like exploding fixed-wing drones. The V-1 flying bomb was a cruise missile, and the V-2 rocket was a ballistic missile.
If a fully loaded (cryogenic fuel + oxidizer) SpaceX rocket did a belly flop into downtown Orlando I suspect this distinction would be quite meaningless to the locals!
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It takes years to build a satellite, the bus, and every component is purposely built each component and the satellite itself goes through months of testing and even if they could build one within 6 months all of the contracts would expire by then which will require Spacecom to open the bids again. All of the contracts were based on AMOS-6 being operational by a given date, AMOS-6 has been "under construction" for pro…
Why does every satellite have to be custom made like this? Without knowing anything about it, it seems as though most communications satellites do pretty much the same thing?
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They do the tests to validate that this rocket won't turn into a cruise missile, headed for the nearest residential area. Not an impossible scenario. Lots of energy stored up in one of those rockets. Just like when we test software, they want to have everything as close to what they would expect on launch day as possible (2 days from now). All the stresses, the structure, etc. That means putting stage 2 and the paylo…
> They do the tests to validate that this rocket won't turn into a cruise missile, headed for the nearest residential area. In that case the rocket has a flight-termination system, though, which should activate as soon as it veers too far outside the planned/expected parameters of the flight.
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Imagine how stressful that job would be when astronauts are the payload!
There were no self-destruct systems on the shuttle orbiter, though there were on the solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank. They were used only once, on the Space Shuttle Challenger after the orbiter broke up, but the SRB's were still burning in an uncontrolled manner.
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This discussion reminds me of the failure of the first Ariane 5 launch. The flight-termination system was activate erroneously, and the payload was not insured. Ouch. http://www.esa.int/esapub/bulletin/bullet87/cavall87.htm https://around.com/ariane.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_%28spacecraft%29
That's not what happened - the rocket went out of control due to a software bug allowed by over-reliance on unit testing, and was quite properly deliberately destroyed. But yes, Cluster was run on the cheap, hence the use of the Ariane 5 test flight, and didn't have insurance.
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He was downvoted for only looking at first-order effects: People harmed during the fire. And ignoring second-order effects: People harmed because of the results of the fire. The second group of people is not less important than the first.
Why is it necessary to feel sad and to even consider all of that? That is my point. What bothers you bothers you and what doesn't is fine, less to think about. You can't go around being bothered by everything 'bad' that happens in the world to someone else. I don't think that is healthy in any way. By "bothered" I don't mean indicating in words that something is sad. I mean actual concern as if it impacts you or some…