Comments on: Sequestration’s effects on commercial crew, and planning for FY14

By: JimNobles

JimNobles — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 19:51:22 +0000

DCSCA said, “This whole asteroid thing was place holding- pencilling in out year planning with a rock hunt for the green eye shade crowd and aerospace plannersâ€“ itâ€™s â€˜gapâ€™ make work. Paper shuffling. Meanwhile SLS/MPCV presses on.”

If the asteroid mission gets canceled what reason does SLS/MPCV then have to exist?

By: common sense

common sense — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:38:44 +0000

You are correct, mostly.

The failure though is not with the chutes.

By: JimNobles

JimNobles — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:18:28 +0000

I don’t mean to be a buttinski here but it might be helpful to consider how Elon Musk thinks. He’s gonna try this recovery and reuse thing just using software and what little extra mass in fuel that he can get by with. He’d try to do it using only the software if he could.

Unless things turn out to be impossible doing it that way I’d say items like chutes, ballutes, drag-ribbons, and etc. are non-starters. He just doesn’t seem to think that way.

At least not since chutes were such a failure with F1. Although I think for those launches they were mainly interested in getting the hardware back for engineering forensic purposes.

By: Robert G. Oler

Robert G. Oler — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 17:27:38 +0000

Fortunately the DOD is one agency that refuses to foot the bill for Muskâ€™s education.>>

yes, they are all tapped out spending 1.5 billion a year to subsidize ULA’s operation….which I guess you are all for.

Thank you for the post, I have figured out why you dont like SpaceX…RGO

By: Frank Glover

Frank Glover — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 10:48:10 +0000

Hmm. Who bothers with zipping an already compressed mp3 file? The result was only about 450k smaller…

By: Neil Shipley

Neil Shipley — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 03:50:04 +0000

Thanks, much appreciated.

By: Rand Simberg

Rand Simberg — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 03:26:08 +0000

Not the aerodynamicists I know actually doing hypersonics.

Whoop de doo.

Supersonic, hypersonic, it’s all the same atmosphere. The equation is not only not density dependent, it’s not velocity dependent. It’s entirely dependent on temperature.

By: amightywind

amightywind — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:41:07 +0000

You should use gzip or one of the other free (as in freedom) alternatives to WinZip.

By: amightywind

amightywind — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:39:14 +0000

In the past 20 years two trends guided the evolution of ULA: the development of billion dollar, one of a kind, Battlestar Galactica payloads, and the DOD and NRO’s extreme reluctance to lose at launch said payloads. The cost of high end radar, ELINT, and infrared payload and their variable and demanding flight profiles put reliability at a premium. (I used to see a lot of interesting things behind the curtains at Hughes Space and Com!) Boeing and Lockmart have achieved this admirably in the Titan, Atlas, and Delta programs. Modern satellites with highly miniaturized electronics are no longer as unexpendable allowing the DOD to focus more on cost. It remains to be seen if the DOD has the stomach for a cheap ride like SpaceX. Fortunately the DOD is one agency that refuses to foot the bill for Musk’s education. SpaceX enters the DOD market at its own risk. I have no problem with that.

By: common sense

common sense — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 23:22:27 +0000

“Itâ€™s close enough, for this purpose.”

No it’s not. We are talking a Mach 10 reentry.

“That is the equation that aerodynamicists use to compute Mach number.”

Not the aerodynamicists I know actually doing hypersonics.

“To first order, it is a function of temperature, and of temperature alone.”

Yeah well.