CAPSTONE Mission Operations Update: Initial Recovery Successful
Oct 7, 2022

https://advancedspace.com/capstone-...success-update/

Over the past couple of weeks, the CAPSTONE mission team has been working to resolve an anomaly that occurred early last month and resulted in the spacecraft losing full 3-axis attitude control and entering into a spin stabilized state. Through extensive analysis and evaluation supported by a dedicated team of individuals on the mission team and key partners, the most likely cause of the anomaly was identified as a valve related issue on one of the spacecraft’s eight (8) thrusters. The partially open valve resulted in thrust from the associated thruster whenever the propulsion system was pressurized.

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The history of the SLS fiasco documented in detail. Unfortunately, to make matters even worse, this thing was made in support of by far the worst science vs cost method of space exploration - manned spaceflight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41gKr5oE-P8

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Eyes on Asteroids

https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/asteroids/#/asteroids

Planetary Defense

https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense

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Navigation Camera Imagery of Ingenuity's Flight 33

https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/270...itys-flight-33/

A small piece of foreign object debris (FOD) is seen in footage from the navigation camera of NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter during its 33rd flight on Mars on Sept 24, 2022. The FOD is seen attached to one of the rotorcraft's landing legs, then drifting away.

More on that plus flight logs:

https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/#

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Apollo Comms Part 22 - How NASA Upgraded the Moon TV to Color

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msWnY2zKS9o

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Poster infographic:

Significant Incidents and Close Calls in Human Spaceflight

https://sma.nasa.gov/SignificantInc..._Poster2018.pdf

Report version:

https://sma.nasa.gov/SignificantInc...portVersion.pdf

It's a miracle that we lost "only" 14 crew members and two shuttles. That system was just an accident waiting to happen. The following article mentions some of the near misses, but then gives ZERO details or links to the NASA review. It's an example of an all too common total crap article by a lazy author that got me digging for all Space Shuttle incidents.:

NASA Revisits Space Shuttle Close Calls
July 02, 2005

https://www.space.com/1265-nasa-rev...lose-calls.html

PROBER TELLS OF 5 CLOSE CALLS PRECEDING SHUTTLE (Challenger) TRAGEDY
Apr 01, 1986

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news...0126-story.html

NASA AEROSPACE SAFETY ADVISORY PANEL ANNUAL REPORTS

https://oiir.hq.nasa.gov/asap/reports.html

Older reports (prior to 2004):

https://history.nasa.gov/asap/asap.html

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Soyuz 4 & 5 - Docking, Spacewalks and Nearly Burning Up In The Atmosphere

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od1i0V57iGs

A Watery Yarn: The Unlucky Voyage of Soyuz 23

http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/...oyuz-23-part-1/

A Watery Yarn: The Unlucky Voyage of Soyuz 23 (Part 2)

https://www.spacesafetymagazine.com...oyuz-23-part-2/

__________________
The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan

Yep... then-NASA Administrator Dan Goldin was all over "Faster, Better, Cheaper" like a fat kid on an ice cream... IIRC he coined the phrase. "FBC" ended up as a laughing stock though, after a series of ignominious failures. Basically at its core FBC was predicated on the idea of eliminating "unnecessary" reviews, testing, revision, and oversight. In short, cutting the development cycle and a lot of the "useless" meetings. Certainly a laudable goal, and probably a partially achievable one, as how many NASA project meetings involved various highly paid engineers and managers sitting around fancy meeting room tables sipping coffee and listening to various "Nu-speak" speeches about minutiae down to nonsense like inclusivity and sensitivity type garbage... BUT cutting corners on testing of actual flight hardware proved to be a very costly mistake indeed...

Mars Polar Orbiter is case in point... it crashed down on Mars during its landing attempt when, IIRC, the engines shut down while it was still traveling at a pretty good rate of speed, several hundred feet above the Martian surface. Ultimately the post-crash investigation led to the discovery that the various teams working on the spacecraft and programming were using different systems-- engineers doing hardware building and various mission planning working in imperial units, and trajectory and events programmers working in metric, and somewhere along the line the figures they were getting never got checked as to which units they were in, let alone converted to metric... so therefore the programmers basically entered the imperial units into their programs as if they were metric, which turned out happened to convince the computerized guidance system controlling the landing aboard the spacecraft to shut down the engines at the wrong time-- instead of bringing it to a near hover a few feet off the ground, it was still plunging Marsward at a good clip of speed and several hundred feet off the ground... IOW, SPLAT!

Then there was the Stardust mission-- a spacecraft sent out to deploy three tennis-racket sized sample grids containing glass foam (same basic material as the shuttle tiles) designed to fly through a comet's tail and embed the fine particles into the aerogel, safely capturing the high speed particles from about smoke size up to coarse sand, in order for it to be returned to Earth in a pristine sealed reentry vehicle for study. After passing through the comet tail to collect the samples, the three tennis-racket looking collectors were to fold up and stack themselves automatically in the return capsule, which would be jettisoned at the proper time to ensure it made its way back to Earth. After a flight time of a few weeks/months on the return trip, the capsule was designed to reenter the atmosphere with a heat shield, slow down sufficiently to deploy a parachute, and then be captured in mid-air by a helicopter towing a lanyard high over the Nevada or Arizona desert. Most of it worked perfectly, the spacecraft secured its samples and traversed space back to Earth, reentered, and was descending, but much to the program people's horror the capsule careened down at high velocity into the desert below like a tumbling football of a badly thrown pass, never having deployed a parachute... It was retrieved from the crater and bits of the collection devices were recovered and samples recovered from that, but the 'pristine' environment of the samples of course was badly mauled beyond recognition. Post-failure analysis tracked the problem down to a g-force sensor that was installed upside down, basically-- on top of an electronics board instead of underneath it, pointing the wrong way, so that its improper orientation never allowed it to sense the fact that the g-forces had built and waned and therefore arm the parachute deployment system. A thorough design review and construction phase verification testing of the spacecraft would have EASILY revealed the error before flight, and allows it to be corrected easily by installing the sensor in the proper orientation, BUT such "unnecessary" expensive testing had been done away with under FBC...

Hubble is probably the most GLARING example of the fallacies of FBC... Hubble's main mirror had to be ground to then-unheard of precision, as even an irregularity in the grinding of the massive monolithic glass mirror of 1/100 the width of a human hair would make it useless (IIRC), and the mirror had been being ground for MONTHS at Perkin-Elmer, the contractor building it. When it was completed, it was to undergo a detailed and rigorous testing and examination phase to ENSURE that everything was correct, and then have the mirror installed in the spacecraft and inspected AGAIN. Well, that was a TON of "unnecessary testing" that FBC aimed to do away with, and did. Perkin-Elmer was instructed to do the first half of the testing, checking the basic finish and curvature of the mirror to ensure there were no flaws, but most of the subsequent highly detailed focus measurements (which were time consuming, extremely precise, and thus VERY expensive) were whittled down or overlooked, as was further inspection and testing AFTER the mirror was installed in the HST spacecraft on the ground.

Thus Hubble was launched on the shuttle, placed in space, brought to operational status, and soon it was discovered that it was hopelessly myopic, having a flaw in the main mirror and how it was ground that rendered everything "out of focus". SO to save about $100,000 or so in ground testing, NASA had to salvage its reputation by putting a huge team of engineers to work to figure out what was wrong and how to correct it, and then sending up ANOTHER shuttle mission with the repair parts to fix it by basically adding a 'corrective lens' in the light path of the telescope before the light entered the instruments, resulting in the distinctive three-block "missing corner" in all the full-scale Hubble images (this information is lost or blocked by the mechanism correcting Hubble's mirror flaw). SO they spent over a BILLION DOLLARS on another shuttle mission and highly engineered "fixes" to correct a problem that would have been caught with about $100,000 or so of ground testing, and been corrected before the telescope was even integrated...

That was basically the death knell of FBC... it ended up becoming a laughing stock within NASA-- "Faster, Better, Cheaper-- PICK TWO 'cause you can't have ALL THREE!" Rightfully so.

If you REALLY want a good read that will make your blood boil and leaving you shaking your head, check out "Hubble Wars" by Andrew Chaikin, and "ISS-Capades" by Donald A. Beattie. Another good book is "Dragonfly" about the Shuttle-Mir program and what a clusterfvck that was...

Sure will show you 'the magic behind the curtain' at NASA... Can't wait til someone writes a similar book about the inside story of JWST!!!

Later! OL J R

__________________
The X-87B Cruise Basselope-- THE Ultimate Weapon in the arsenal of Homeland Security and only $52 million per round!

Yeah, that's true for sure... Shuttle was just a product of politics and BAD COMPROMISES from the time it was started... and yes we're VERY lucky we only lost two vehicles and 14 astronauts... the thing was a flying death trap IMHO; John Young shot down any ideas the agency had about performing an RTLS abort on the first shuttle flight as a test of the ability of the RTLS abort to actually work... he said it was like "taking an extreme risk of death to avoid CERTAIN death". IOW he had NO confidence that the RTLS could be carried off successfully without losing the vehicle and/or crew. The ejection seats were of limited utility, and were removed after the fourth flight anyway, in order to make room for the 7 crew seats of "operational" shuttle flights... as there was NO way to provide ejection seats for more than four shuttle occupants.

Shuttle never suffered "accidents". It suffered DISASTERS. The operative difference being, an "accident" is unforeseen, the result of UNKNOWABLE events, of happenstance, or circumstances. BOTH shuttle disasters were WELL KNOWN AND UNDERSTOOD that they were risks of Loss of Vehicle (LOV) and/or Loss of Crew (LOC) level events, BUT NASA, having grown complacent about their ability to flawlessly engineer stuff (after never having had to use the abort towers on either Mercury or Apollo in mission flights, and never having had to use the ejection seats on Gemini or shuttle, had grown complacent about safety... after all, they'd pulled a crew out of the jaws of death, 2/3 of their way to the Moon for pity's sake, on Apollo 13, and got the happy ending, so "what was the big deal?" NASA got to feel comfortable "normalizing" potentially fatal flaws, substituting "no harm, no foul" for a viable safety approach and safety culture. IOW, they'd gotten away with it before and NOTHING BAD HAD HAPPENED, so they ASSUMED that NOTHING BAD *WOULD* HAPPEN!

IIRC it was the flight before Challenger, the one that now NASA Administrator Bill Nelson (or was it Jake Garn, a Senator) had flown on after NASA bumped Greg Jarvis off that flight to make room for the politicians they were so eager to please, in order to garner better funding and support for the shuttle program and NASA as a whole in Congress... NASA had been handing out the "payload specialist" seats like candy at Christmas-- it was the lowest rank of astronaut, with the least requirements, so basically just about anybody could qualify to fly those positions with minimal training and little actual defined mission purpose. SO NASA had been flying politicians and even handing out seats to contractors like Hughes, who had a drawing to see who would win their seat on a shuttle amongst their program engineers... with Greg Jarvis winning the ride. He was supposed to go on an earlier flight before Challenger, but was bumped to make room for the politician. IIRC they had launched at 53 degrees, cooler than previous experience, and when they recovered the SRB's for refurbishment made an astounding discovery-- the SRB had a hole burned through the casing in the joint area large enough to toss a basketball through. They had experienced O-ring seal failure before and found incinerated O-rings and varying levels of damage, and roughly correlated it to lower temperatures slowing the ring sealing at ignition, but never to THIS level. It was by PURE LUCK that the seal had actually held until late in the 2 minute burn of the SRB's, and that the hole that developed was pointing AWAY from the thin-skinned External Tank filled with volatile liquid hydrogen. The hole that developed didn't have enough time to grow to staggering proportions, which would overpower and topple the spacecraft stack as was seconds away from happening to Challenger before the tank let go and the whole thing ripped apart, (Challenger's SSME's were almost at "gimbal lock" or "hard over", fighting against the ever growing side-thrust of the ever-enlarging hole in the SRB as it grew before the whole thing failed-- had the tank not ripped apart when it did, a few seconds later the side blast of SRB exhaust out the hole and thrust differential between the two SRB's would have caused the entire vehicle stack to go out of control and tumble and break up in a million pieces anyway). Of course the rest is history... Greg Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe, the first "teacher in space", sitting in their payload specialist slots for NASA PR, died alongside five other career NASA astronauts when Challenger exploded. Thanks to the bravery of people like Roger Boisjoly among others, the story FINALLY came out about what actually had happened and WHY, how NASA ignored their own contractor's warnings and exerted pressure to overrule them or get them to "tell them what they wanted to hear" so they could launch and "keep up the schedule". NASA gambled, the crew paid with their lives.

Same is true of Columbia. NASA knew for YEARS that foam strikes were a continual problem. Previous missions had come back with a number of adjacent tiles shattered and smashed from foam strikes, but they'd held together enough to keep the shuttle intact through reentry, or had been by happenstance in non-critical areas of the orbiter. One of the most severe instances, and the real "attention getter" moment (SHOULD have been, anyway) was when an orbiter was found after return to have had several tiles KNOCKED COMPLETELY OFF on the shuttle belly, and a HOLE burned through the belly of the orbiter which allowed hot plasma during reentry to get inside the spacecraft. Fortunately for that mission and crew, the hot gases had opened into a compartment/structure of the shuttle where no critical structures or systems were located... under the payload bay in a non-critical area. NASA *AGAIN* took a "no harm, no foul" attitude, welded in some new aluminum skin where the whole was, replaced the felt underlayment that the tiles attached to over it, and retiled the area, "all is well". Kept on gambling while they assigned some backroom team somewhere to "look into the problem" and kept flying, until Columbia lifted off and got its wing leading edge shattered by a foam strike, which blew a hole big enough for a man to put his head through in a critical area of the wing... which of course let in hot plasma that burned up data sensor wiring and control hydraulics and probably ended up fatally weakening the wing structures, causing the shuttle to go out of control, tumble, and break up in a million pieces.

Shuttle could either have a crew escape rocket system for the crew cabin, or carry a payload, NOT BOTH. IT simply wasn't feasible to add it to the design. The fragile nature of the tile heat shield meant it would ALWAYS be susceptible to foam strike damage, and there would always be a gigantic source of foam to shed, off the External Tank, just a few feet away from the fragile tiles. The foam was necessary to prevent ice and frost damage to the heat shield at liftoff, and had been modified numerous times over the years in how it was applied, what it was made of, etc. in order to minimize risks and problems that had been found, like liquid air forming in voids in the foam, etc. BUT the very presence and nature of the foam and proximity and nature of the fragile tile heat shield was something that could simply never be overcome, which is why the shuttle was FINALLY retired... the risk could never be eliminated or even truly addressed. Plus, by the mid-2000's, the shuttle was 40 year old technology... the state of the art for the mid-70's when it was designed, but outdated now to say the least. Yes, upgraded many times (and at great expense) but still facing a litany of problems with no easy solutions (cracks in the fuel distribution manifolds for the SSME's being only one of them, and virtually impossible to fix due to their nature), and to continue flying past 2010 the orbiter fleet was going to need BILLIONS in upgrades and updates, particularly to its avionics and computer systems. In the end, the cost simply wasn't worth it, and thankfully shuttle was retired without killing any more of its crews.

Later! OL J R

__________________
The X-87B Cruise Basselope-- THE Ultimate Weapon in the arsenal of Homeland Security and only $52 million per round!

Correct on the metric vs imperial mix-up, but wrong spacecraft. The Mars Climate Orbiter was the casualty because it relied on aerobraking at arrival to save propellant weight and enter the proper orbit, but the unit mix-up resulted in it entering much too low into the Mars atmosphere and burning up.

The shut-off of landing rockets too high was the Mars Polar Lander. IIRC, they think that was possibly from the landing sensor detecting the rapidly pulsed "digital" motor firings or the drop of the landing legs as surface contact. However, in a recent video by a knowledgeable and authoritative space geek on YouTube, they're supposedly back to thinking the lander never fully separated from the cruise stage which would then also explain the total failure of another mission on-board - the Deep Space 2 penetrator probes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_2

On the other hand, there is Mars Global Surveyor imagery of what may be the MPL crash site and possible parachute:

https://www.space.com/1153-mars-pol...crash-site.html

Anyway, my name is on the CD-ROM on it as it has been on every lander where that was offered including the Huygens Titan lander. That was very little known in the US, but I found out about it somehow:

https://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage...ull_image_2.jpg

BTW, ESA failed to turn on one of the two receivers in Cassini, so half of the images and data from that probe was lost. Also, after launch they discovered that doppler shift caused by the relative motion of Cassini and Huygens would cause loss of frequency lock and tracking by those receivers and the only fix was to alter the approach trajectory and orbit of Cassini which cost it a significant amount of additional propellant.

Yeah, that was a real f-up which should have been caught. Talk about a single point of failure item... Incorrectly installed sensors caused a more spectacular failure with one of my favorite looking launch vehicles, the Proton. The sensors were supposedly keyed to prevent incorrect orientation, but were forced into place:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqW0LEcTAYg

Actually, their use of the test chamber they absolutely needed to test it in a space environment wasn't allowed. It was the same chamber where the NRO optical spysats (basically Hubbles with very fast optics pointed downward) are tested. At least that was their excuse that I read somewhere. The NRO donated a few surplus mirrors to NASA:

2012 National Reconnaissance Office space telescope donation to NASA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_...onation_to_NASA

I'd love to read all of those, but can't find "ISS-capades." I found these:

Dragonfly: NASA And The Crisis Aboard Mir

https://www.amazon.com/Dragonfly-NA...r/dp/0887307833

The Hubble Wars: Astrophysics Meets Astropolitics in the Two-Billion-Dollar Struggle over the Hubble Space Telescope

https://www.amazon.com/Hubble-Wars-...r/dp/0674412559

__________________
The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan

S-II and CSM development and manufacture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTBHkR_tmKo

NASA Tests Ways to Crash Land on Mars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkejVTkAnXc

NASA has big ‘guns’ to study micrometeorite & space debris impacts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXkfilo8cVU

JPL’s Venus Aerobot Prototype Aces Test Flights Over Nevada

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug6B2hnNk3I

Volume 2: Appendix F - Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle
by Richard P. Feynman

https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm

Solid Fuel Rockets (SRB)

An estimate of the reliability of solid rockets was made by the range safety officer, by studying the experience of all previous rocket flights. Out of a total of nearly 2,900 flights, 121 failed (1 in 25). This includes, however, what may be called, early errors, rockets flown for the first few times in which design errors are discovered and fixed. A more reasonable figure for the mature rockets might be 1 in 50. With special care in the selection of parts and in inspection, a figure of below 1 in 100 might be achieved but 1 in 1,000 is probably not attainable with today's technology. (Since there are two rockets on the Shuttle, these rocket failure rates must be doubled to get Shuttle failure rates from Solid Rocket Booster failure.)


NASA Estimate of (SRB) Rocket Risk Disputed
MARCH 5, 1986

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la...5406-story.html

WASHINGTON — Weeks before the disastrous launch of the space shuttle Challenger, a panel of federal safety experts had concluded that the craft’s solid rocket boosters had a higher chance of failing than NASA engineers claimed, two House subcommittees were told Tuesday.

The Interagency Nuclear Safety Review Panel, a federal board that estimates the hazards of space missions carrying radioactive payloads, pegged the likelihood of a booster failure at 1 in 1,000, rather than the 1 in 100,000 figure used by NASA officials as the minimum level for safe spaceflight.

SpaceX's Raptors

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq7y2lXvRvg

__________________
The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan

All about the SLS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdB_RyQafCs

First Methane-Fueled Rocket to Fly?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsGdi5IadNY

__________________
The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan

Disaster - NASA's SLS Launch Tower...
6 Nov 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRyd-MLYRNs

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From an email with no source given:

NASA says SLS rocket boosters good for a bit longer. On Thursday NASA officials held a teleconference with space reporters, and discussed the planned rollout of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft early on Friday morning. The space agency remains on track for an Artemis I launch attempt on Nov. 14, shortly after midnight, said Jim Free, who leads exploration systems development for NASA. This will be the third attempt to launch the SLS rocket on its debut flight. Free said the launch team is confident, but acknowledged there are "unknown unknowns" that may crop up during the countdown.

December deadline? ... One of the big questions about the rocket concerns the lifetime of its massive solid rocket boosters, which have now been stacked for nearly two years. NASA's Cliff Lanham, who oversees ground systems, said NASA's initial analysis found that the rocket boosters provided by Northrop Grumman had a lifetime of one years. However, a subsequent analysis of their health cleared one through Dec. 9 2022, the other through Dec. 14. NASA could probably extend their life further with additional analysis, Jim Free adds. But this will be a source of concern if the Artemis I mission has to be delayed again.

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How One Camera Changed Apollo Era NASA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kovAmQ0jz4

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Very cool, with audio reflecting data variations.

Huygens descent and landing on Titan. Time lapse with telemetry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbmcoL3OqPk

20 January 2005
Huygens: the missing data

https://www.nature.com/articles/news050117-12

Most of the probe's data were duplicated on each channel, like two different radio stations broadcasting the same programme. "The information is so important you carry it twice, it's a redundant system," explains David Southwood, director of science for the European Space Agency (ESA), which built and operated the probe.

That redundancy saved the mission from failure. Cassini had two different receivers to collect the data from Huygens, and one of them did not work.

Why didn't the receiver work? The Channel A receiver was simply not turned on during the mission. "There's no mystery why it didn't turn on," says one scientist on the imaging team, who was upset by the loss. "The command was never sent to switch it on."

"That's an ESA responsibility," admits Southwood. Any instructions that need to be sent to the Cassini spacecraft are compiled as a series of software commands by mission scientists, and these are transmitted to the craft from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. All commands relating to the Huygens probe were programmed by ESA.

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Elon Musk's Starship Thermal Protection System design

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGQ_0m7TLZo

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And Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter images it.

NASA’s InSight Mars Lander Seismometer Detects Stunning Meteoroid Impact on Red Planet
OCTOBER 28, 2022

https://scitechdaily.com/nasas-insi...-on-red-planet/

https://scitechdaily.com/images/Mar...ted-777x554.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T24yNNi8ZmA

NASA's InSight and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Team Up to Make Science Discovery (Media Briefing)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9C4yyqu3yI

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NASA Engineers Are Building an Ingenious Heat Shield That Inflates in Space

Made from ceramic fiber, the inflatable decelerator can be packed into a tight space and inflated for atmospheric reentry.

https://gizmodo.com/nasa-heat-shiel...ftid-1849704352

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzrDBwWoOFY

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How to Bring Mars Sample Tubes Safely to Earth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rehxGbYuwIU

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Relativity Space Just Revealed Its 4th Generation Stargate Metal (rocket) Printer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyA5YyAovzY

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Why Voyager 1 Is Permanently Blind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCkM6XEsrRo

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Fascinating, detailed analysis of multiple, major pogo issues, causes, and remedies, with both the Titan II and Saturn V, only one of which I've previously known about (Saturn V Apollo 6). The Shuttle's RS25 engine was designed from the start to avoid any pogo issues since more computing simulation power allowed that which also led to a significant increase in the cost and complexity of the engine.

Pogo - Rockets Behaving Badly Part 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn9hAnaoDfE

__________________
The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan

So a solid motor does not have a long "shelf life?"


Bill

__________________
It is well past time to Drill, Baby, Drill!

If your June, July, August and September was like this, you might just hate summer too...

Please unload your question before you ask it unless you have a concealed harry permit.

: countdown begin cr dup . 1- ?dup 0= until cr ." Launch!" cr ;

Give a man a rocket and he will fly for a day; teach him to build and he will spend the rest of his days sanding...

That's why I was disappointed that that email didn't provide any references.

Minutemen sit in the ground for quite a while before launch although, unlike with the SLS, they are, I believe, in a climate controlled environment which, if true, wouldn't experience large temperature cycles from ambient temperature changes or from adjacent cryogenic liquids like the SLS SRBs do.

Also, although the Minuteman is a nuclear armed system which makes it pretty important, it's not manned. So, they may have even higher safety standards for SRBs used on manned systems.

I roughly estimated at the link a 7.9% failure rate for Minuteman training launches and that wouldn't do for manned stuff:

https://www.rocketryforum.com/threa...-launch.147338/

__________________
The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan

They can't find a pencil or dowel long enough to reach the top, much less a big enough sheet of sandpaper to wrap around it and rough up the cores.

__________________
I love sanding.