Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "" video.

  1. The story by Edward Murphy involved a jacket being worn by a volunteer undergoing g-force experiments on a rocket sled. Except every time they launched the poor guy on the sled, they kept getting back readings of zero. The jacket had accelerometers sewn into it--not just one, but a whole bunch of them, to measure forces at different points. Each one could have been put in the right way, or the wrong way--you’d think, by chance, that about half of them would work. But they had all been put in the wrong way round.
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  2. It’s a comment on the ridiculously convoluted arguments offered by conspiracy believers.
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  3. Amy “Vintage Space” Shira Teitel did an item on the comparison between hypergolic rockets and ones needing explicit ignition. For example, the Gemini craft took off on Atlas boosters, which were hypergolic. You can see from the footage of the launches how the exhaust flame is barely perceptible at all. This also has to do with why Gemini had ejector seats, while neither Mercury nor Apollo did. But I digress...
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  4. Hanlon’s Razor: “Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
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  5. Imperial units don’t actually exist as such any more. They are all defined in terms of equivalent SI units. E.g. 1 inch = exactly 0.0254m, 1 pound = exactly 0.45359237kg etc. I really wonder how NASA’s space program was able to work as well as it did. If you listen to the flight transcripts, you can hear them talking about “miles” at one point and “nautical miles” at another, and similarly speeds in “miles per hour” at one point and “knots” at another. Pick a consistent set of units and stick to it! Oh, and forget °F and °C, I think all temperatures should be measured in K. Zero should mean zero!
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  6. 10:50 apparently it was a rogue fleck of paint that was throwing off the laser interferometer. Oh, and the company was Perkin-Elmer. They also made minicomputers.
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  7. 4:26 Being a test flight, the payload was uninsurable. On the flip side, being a test flight, ESA charged nothing for launching it.
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  8. 10:57 Before COSTAR went up to fix Hubble’s poor eyesight, I remember going to a presentation by a visiting researcher who was part of the team working on applying deconvolution techniques to sharpen up the Hubble images. Basically, they modelled the effect the aberration was having, and worked out how to apply an inverse transformation on the blurred images. It took a lot of number crunching, and presumably rounding errors would also limit the effectiveness, but they were able to get some quite decent, usable results.
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  9. So, your number one choice is between one stunning moment of major idiocy, versus the product of a thousand separate acts of minor idiocy--between an acute cockup versus a chronic one, if you like. Worth pointing out a slight cancellation between two of the separate items on your list: if the Shuttle had not existed, it would not have been able to conduct those Hubble repair missions.
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  10. 12:00 People have been launching rockets for centuries, if not millennia. You’d think maybe he might have taken that into account.
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