NASA’s new lander CRASHES AND BURNS NASA’s prototype landing craft of the future, Morpheus, has crashed and burned in its latest launch test. Morpheus is designed to become a general-purpose lander capable of setting down payloads wherever NASA wants them. The Moon, Mars and even asteroids are mentioned in its design brief. The craft has undergone several tests …
"oh look,a manky dead worn out planet,just like we knew a century ago,brilant"
Even ignoring the rest of your ignorant tripe, have you really not understood that NASA have actually found liquid water on Mars?
Seriously, look in to the research and engineering they fund some time, and check out their motto.
Models and prototypes blowing up is almost what they're *for*. The fact is that you don't design a perfect machine right from the drawing board. So you test it at every stage, sometimes on the bench, sometimes with models and you find the mistakes/challenges/questions in the design.Sometimes something won't work, sometimes it will suggest methods of improvement, sometimes it will go bang, Certainly it's better than un unmanned model blows up now than a manned mission to Mars in front of the world's press in ten years time.
I would say to any congressman planning use this development stage as an excuse to slash NASA funding to ask themselves how they'd feel if they got on an airliner and a rep from boeing said "We've never flown this design before, but we're pretty sure it'll work okay. Here is your parachute and asbestos underwear, just in case".
If it hasn't gone bang, it is insufficiently tested.
This is a truism in all engineering; you don't want to know if it works, you want to know how and under what conditions it breaks. If those conditions are too close to those under which it will be operating, you do something about it.
Anyone remember the TV series "21st century jet" which followed the Boeing 777 from design to first flight? the bit I remember most was the destructive testing of its wings. (Clamp plane to the floor, put hydraulic jacks under wing-tips, watch the strain guages, jack up until the wings break.. Best explosives-free explosion I can recall, and very reassuiring that they're about 10% stronger than the designers calculated).
Checking that it really could stop on brakes only during a worst-case aborted take-off was also fun (perhaps less so for the pilot). The brake disks were literally white hot when it stopped, but nothing caught fire.
.... I heard the Merlin engines (the Spitfires and P-51 fame) were tested this way. We all know how they turned out.
The only way to know where the limit is, is to break it, and fail when the limit is reached. If it didn't fail, the limit was not reached.
Up to this day, Airplane turbines can deliver 103% on takeoff. It means that keeping them at this power rate indefinitely will DESTROY them, and you better risk destroying them than making a 747-shaped crater on the ground.
"and what is this much vaunted manned visit meant to achieve long term then."
Perhaps to expand humanity onto another world so there's a home for us once we've totally shagged up this place.
You know, it's the Perseids shower tonight and the next few nights. Go stand outside and make a wish or two as a shooting star passes by. But take time to observe the immeasurable size of "space", the universe, that light fuzz that is our galaxy, a moderate size one in amongst many. To say space is HUGE would be quite the understatement. And us? Everything we know, have done, and will do in the immediate future has taken place on this lump of rock we call Earth. All the wars, all the love, all the everything. Has happened here. We, as a species, are not so intelligent as we'd like to think. We've been to our own satellite, and we've sent cameras to a few of our neighbouring planets, and we've just about made it to the depths of our own oceans but so much of that is unknown. So much of other nearby celestial bodies is unknown. And meanwhile we're reproducing like bacteria and burning our way through the resources we have because, you know, all this end-of-oil-and-climate-change-bullshit will surely be somebody else's problem, right?
There will be a day we might want to go to inhabit another planet. And hopefully long after I'm dead, there may even be a day when we don't have a choice anymore. Kinda can't go far without the groundwork being done. I, myself, cannot build a cathedral; we as a species cannot inhabit another planet. Not yet.
"are you thinking of going as a tourist?"
I'm something of a loner, can spend long periods of time by myself. So, yeah, if I'm asked, I'd be up for it. Not so much as a tourist (can't mail back a postcard from Mars), but certainly as an explorer. Hell yeah!
It seems, Heyrick, that friend Tleaf100 is a groundhugger. He would have us and our descendants marooned here on this little rock, vulnerable to any passing dinosaur killer, when we could occupy an entire solar system.
To be sure, the risks to the individual will be higher, but the risks to the species - and call me bigoted, but I'm rather fond of hom. sap. - are reduced.
Or perhaps he's just concerned about the money spent. Maybe he thinks NASA stuff bundles of fifty dollar notes in any convenient cubby of the launch vehicle and dispose of them off-planet, instead of spending each and every one of them here on Earth?
"CHOW™ contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colorings, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly, the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman."
"MEALS™ was CHOW™ with added sugar and fat. The theory was that if you ate enough MEALS™ you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition."
- The Inventions of Famine, quoted from Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Why bother? Don't forget the cost penalty of every extra gram that you send to another planet. If it tips past the point of no recovery on a mission, it's doomed anyway, engine on or engine off.
And don't say that they could have put a shutoff valve in for terrestrial testing and later removed it for space missions. It's possible that it might be working only because of the presence of an open valve instead of an unadorned pipe.
When Intel clones a working fab, they clone *everything*. No matter how much of a bodge it looks (and in the first place probably was), that comical tangle of plumbing may be an essential part of the reason it's working. It's far too expensive to do an experiment to find out that it wasn't ... or was.
Dur, we no know what Roswell is, we no not now how mak antigavity, we're dumb and clueless. We need spend billions of tax payer dollars on dumb failures cuz, dur, dur, never heard of a crfasshed UFVO. Yeah. Sickening murderers and thieves in government. You're sick.
Seriously, read this blog. Wow. An excerpt:
51) Can you show, even by the scientific method, what difference it would make if everyone believed evolution?
Whacked out crazy christian fella needs to understand what "the scientific method" means. It's really easy (this is why you should have been taught it when you were 10) and consists of only a few steps.
It starts with a question. The scientist takes that question, and provides a possible outcome - we call this a "hypothesis", it's greek for "to suppose". Now we have a hypothesis, we can make a prediction about what this means. Having predicted something, we now derive a test. The test is formulated so that performing the test will tell us if our hypothesis is correct.
Finally, having derived and tested a hypothesis, we compare the results to our prediction and analyse them.
This entire process is the scientific method. It starts with a question, and a hypothesis that can be tested, testing that hypothesis and analysing the results of the test.
So, now, back to your blog: "what difference it would make if everyone believed evolution". My hypothesis is that the world would be a much more civil place. In order to test this, using the scientific method as you request, I now need you and all your 'christian' friends to start accepting the theory of evolution. Once this is done, I'll start analysing the results and get back to you.
> Theres a whole bunch of split gavity round here that needs cleaning up
Gravity, like so many other things, is soluble in ethanol.
This is why you can stand at strange angles after a skinful - the local gravity map is so distorted by the dissolved gravity in yuor bloodstream.
It's also why you tend to fall flat on your face - there's more gravity running around your system...
Vic.
Armadillo built the rocket. Yes, it's a clone of pixel. I believe that the nav system is by NASA and the controller electronics might be Armadillo standard stuff. It runs on liquid methane and liquid oxygen.
Nice explosion, that. Fortunately, Armadillo has become very good at building replacement rockets. <eg>
While I'm not denying the Apollo astronauts were very brave to take on such a lot of risk etc, it is worth mentioning that the LLTV was always going to be much more unstable than the real lunar lander, as it was operating in an environment with 6 times the force of gravity than the LEM was going to operate in, so having to bail out of it was unlikely to add any significan worry over the real thing...
what is this,the nasa fan club ?
or are we not allowed to criticise use of vast amounts of cash,possible talent and resources.
somebody tell me what is so mind boggling important that nasa does,and please dont spin the yarn that they innovate new ideas,kit,matieials etc,we could achieve all that trying to set world wide fart sniffing system for health monitoring.itwould be more use than going to dead planets etc.
you better hope it is dead though,cos the result of someone returning genetic bits back to earth is just plain scary.
oh fine,it may only turn our still quite nice home into lifeless rock,so thats ok,cos its nasa doing it and we must'nt ask iffy questions.
i had hoped better of el-reg,but no,same closed,cloned folk "thinking".
Luckily back when we lived in caves, there were people who didn't think that playing with fire was a complete waste of time, likely to get people burned or worse. Because otherwise, we'd still be living in caves.
For a more recent example of curiosity and its delayed value, consider the field effect transistor which today lies at the heart of virtually all micro-electronics. The underlying physics was studied in the 1930s, and the transistor predicted as a theoretical possibility decades before the technology existed to make one (let alone two billion of them on a single chip).
i did'nt say dont explore,i did'nt say dont wonder,i most def did not say dont think.
i still say that as a way of furthering mans knowledge about all sorts of things,nasa is a very bad way of doing it.
the day we give up being curious about universe we live in is the first day of the death of humanity.
if we had infinite resources,brains enough,and no other large problems that could kill us tomorrow or next week,then nasa being,slow,messy,wasteful etc,would'nt be important,but we do have finite resources/brains etc so it does become important that we use it all wisely.
if nasa can do their hobby solely on private cash,from honestly run business, then fine.
if not,expect a lot more questions from folk with clout in the real world.
I can't figure out why they were testing something that they claim can explode in the course of testing right next to a truck full of hydrogen tanks.
Methinks that if you'd asked them *before* they lit the fuse, they'd have said it was "perfectly safe. We don't blow shit up anymore."
I'm just happy that wacky hijinks didn't ensue with hydrogen for added kaboom.
Listen I heard there was this fantastic new fangled device called a CONTROL MOMENT GYRO. It can generate a force in free space and prevent exactly this kind of muck up from happening. Yet every time I get into a design review and suggest it, I get pounced on by everybody in the room "Are you nuts? It weighs too much! If you don't know how to make stability happen by properly controlling gimbal thrusters you shouldn't be flying!" they said.
Well I agreed on the last point at least.
... did it come down within fire-spitting distance of a stack of white static pressurised tanks? Presumably containing something relevant to the exercise, such as hydrogen, oxygen etc..?
If it were me I'd be leaving a little more margin for error.
Pint icon because they'll need one after that.
So we're in the phony failure phase of the era of peace after the end of the cold war. That's when one side pretends it's program is being run by the three stooges and can't even get a ham and cheese sandwich into orbit; then the other side, obviously playing cretin catch up ball, tests a 'device' that falls down and "crashes and burns" when it's training wheels are removed. Give me a break.
Meanwhile, both sides are working 24 hours a day welding thousands of armed nuclear devices into the false backs of shipping containers and inside double hulled ships, but I don't think we'll ever get a count of those.
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