Posted on 02/06/2018 1:11:17 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Apart from not yet knowing whether the core booster stuck its landing on the drone ship, the rest of the launch went perfectly!
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
I kind of thought the same thing...:)
I kind of thought the same thing...:)
We have lived in interesting times, have we not, Friend?
My dad started out working on propeller driven airplanes before there were jet engines, by the end of his career, he had parts on the Moon and Mars.
They’re going to recover it in the centuries to come and the awful truth will be revealed...
“THAT’S NOT A MANNEQUIN!!!”
8-0 :-[ ;-) :-D
I don’t care if they party afterwards. But I do expect launch control and mission control to be all business during the event. I like Coach Lou Holtz’ famous admonishment: “Act like you’ve been there before.”
Isn’t the tesla going to burn up in the sunlight?
Wifey commented she liked private enterprise doing this, rather than govt. tax dollars. I chose not to mention that Musk is highly subsidized with tax dollars. I know his Tesla is kept alive by our dollars....not sure about SPACEX....almost certainly.
I could make a creative reply, but I don't want to get a time out...
I wish the audio feed were inside the control rooms or recorded in such a way that the party-goers were a low, dull roar in the background. All that woopin’ and hollerin’ made it sound like the whole launch was a lucky fluke.
You.ve got my vote!
I do hope that there will be a downloadable HD video of the event from countdown to landings. I need to make at least a half dozen DVDs for my grandchildren, grand nephews and my very untechie unamerican liberal sister...
There might be video of it like that, you'll have to look around. But if there is video like that, it would probably seem underwhelming. There is a communication loop that all the stations have at the control center, and you can hear the communication on the loop in the video that I saw. But the actual dialog is very limited on that loop, and it is culturally frowned upon to say anything not necessary on the loop. So its just a short occasional comment amongst the shouting.
If you want to enjoy a really cool bit of ground control history, here is a video of the Apollo 12 launch. At Mission Control, there was a main communication loop connecting each person at a workstation, plus each person at a workstation was connected to another loop focusing on their area of expertise, which connected them to a team of people off in another room. In those rooms they had teams of engineers and racks of documents and engineering drawings that could help them solve any problem.
What happened at Apollo 12 is that right after the rocket cleared the tower, it was struck by lightning twice. All communication between astronauts and ground control was cut for a few seconds, all the workstation displays show nonsensical data, and the electric bus in the command module went down.
Nobody knew what to do, nobody knew if the rocket had exploded or was even in the air. The flight director was about to send the command to abort the launch and destroy the rocket. After a few seconds they were able to get data from the Saturn first stage, and realized that the rocket was still flying. Later they got in communication with the astronauts.
But back in one of the engineering rooms, a twenty eight year old engineer realized that he had seen this situation before a few years back, when a power surge overloaded a test PCE panel. The contractor he was working with flipped a switch on the panel to AUX, then reset the panel, and went on testing.
Instead of giving the command to blow up the rocket, the engineer relayed to his mission control loop to reset the PCE panel to AUX. He then relayed instructions to reboot the electrical bus, and the astronauts brought the command module back on line. They went into orbit, and then onto the moon successfully.
Here's the video. Watching it, because of the terse communications on the loops, you would never know just how bad the situation was. Even the network news anchors listening in didn't catch on fully to the drama.
Launch of Apollo 12 Saturn V and lightning strike on rocket, original NBC TV
“:^)
Thanks for the post.
Elon Musk has secured his name as the solar systems premier sh!tposter.
God bless em all.
I don't think many people my age or younger have the same sense of wonder that your generation has, being born after space exploration stopped being a dream and became history. Hell that was part of the plot of Apollo 13 that less people cared.
It will probably take a dude walking on Mars to recapture the imagination of the public, I hope I live to see it.
My own take is that there are a few enterprises that would be VERY difficult to get going without government help, at least in the beginning. For a few this might take the form of protective tariffs, for something like attempting to build inexpensive, reuseable launch systems, it takes government money and cooperation. Elon has proved he and his team possessed the right ideas, and “drive”, but this sort of endeavor takes more resources than even he had.
“Had”, however, is the point: In his press conference yesterday, Musk seemed quite proud that Falcon Heavy itself did not rely on gov’t money. For most anything short of the Mars Colonization project, it appears SpaceX is now self-sufficient, with the benefits of both lowered launch costs, and, SpaceX is driving the Russians right out of the commercial launch market. A lot of things could have gone wrong, but, SpaceX turned out to be a good investment of tax $$.
It would be very interesting to run an analysis of how much revenue SpaceX, its employees, and related vendors, etc., send to the gov’t in 2018.
One thing is disappointing to me, however. In his press conference yesterday, Musk said the battery running the audio (in a near vacuum?) system in the Tesla for “Starman” was only good for about 12 hours. Granted that 12 hours of just one song is plenty, but, still, given the possibilities and the battery bank a Tesla would normally have... I want that job (or at least the supervision of it!) if there is a next time, someday. :-)
Does anyone have a link to an image of that view, 2000 pixels wide, or larger? Talk about a great wallpaper!
Elon Musk is from South Africa
And I also noticed they were almost entirely if not exclusively white males. Why doesn’t Musk have more diversity in this program? I think some protests and investigations are in order
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