Comments by "Helium Road" (@RCAvhstape) on "Scott Manley" channel.

  1. Buzz Aldrin is the man. He had a plan worked out to navigate using handheld instruments taking sightings out the windows and doing the math himself. A true astronaut.
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  2. In Soviet Russia, space explore you!
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  3. "ZIP Code Contracting" lol that one's new to me, but yeah, this reeks of pork barrel politics designed to waste as much money as possible. The idea that we can't build affordable new suits in a short period of time 50 years after the last moon landing is pathetic.
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  4. The cool thing about the Starliner launch is that this will be the first manned Atlas launch since the days of Mercury and John Glenn 60 years ago. Another feather in the cap of the Atlas program before it finally sunsets.
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  5. Scott, I don't usually comment on this stuff, but these kind of technical explanation videos are my favorite, and this one in particular is outstanding. You answered a bunch of questions I always had about spacecraft design and a few I never even though to ask. I always assumed Apollo capsules were shiny to reflect solar heating during space travel; I never thought about radiant heating from plasma during reentry. Likewise, I never really thought to ask why the Space Shuttle had that black and white color pattern, but it makes perfect sense now. Please keep up the good work.
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  6. That shot of the engine bell wiggling back and forth between oval shape and round at 6:55 always amazed me; the pure power and fury of what was happening to that big piece of metal was astonishing. Watching live shuttle launches was a thrill that never got old. The engine startup was like a shot of adrenaline.
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  7. Somewhere Werner von Braun is smiling. This is a lot closer to his old Collier's Magazine vision of lunar exploration than Apollo turned out to be.
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  8. Capsule: I'm going back to the shop; not feeling up to flying today. Atlas booster: I have better things to do than wait around for you with the meter running. Hop in Lucy, I'll give ya a lift.
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  9. I forget which Apollo astronaut it was who said that if he ever went back to the Moon he'd like to bring a set of skis with him, because apparently the lunar regolith felt to the astronauts a lot like powdered snow on a ski slope as far as texture and consistency goes. So maybe that's a winter sport you can do on the moon without needing actual snow?
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  10. I want America to have as many launch vehicles, especially reusable ones, as possible. One thing I wonder about this one is the short landing gear. I feel as though Falcon 9's barge landings have taught us the benefit of a wider landing base on a pitching flight deck.
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  11. Whenever I see something about space in the news, I always wait until Scott's next video to get the story.
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  12. RE. launching through the eye of a hurricane: that was a key plot point in the awesome film Marooned, where an Apollo spacecraft was stranded in LEO, unable to deorbit itself, and NASA had to figure out how to mount a rescue mission. The film was scary enough that it influenced NASA's decision to have a spare Apollo-Saturn IB stacked up for rescue during Skylab missions.
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  13.  @albertawheat6832  Well, it benefits the smart humans at least. Sorry about that.
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  14. I like the little 3D man with his hands on his head in that disaster sim.
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  15. In the documentary film "In the Shadow of the Moon" Gene Cernan talked about how he was tempted to go to manual and be the only man to fly a Saturn V by hand. He figured it was the last Apollo mission, anyway, worse that could happen was that he'd get fired after getting back from the moon. But he decided to play it straight and let the machine do its job.
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  16. Meanwhile, at Firefly... Engineer 1: Anyone have any idea where to start? Engineer 2: Scott Manley's video just dropped, ask me again in 20 minutes.
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  17. There's always the "Skylab Maneuver": Step 1: Evacuate the station Step 2: Wait Step 3: Pay littering fine to Australia
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  18. I know this project sounds difficult to pull off, but this is Rockwell, they created the Turboencabulator. They could do anything.
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  19. The engineers who work on these things are conditioned to never give up as long as there's money in the budget lol. But honestly, they are trying to fix or at least salvage a broken machine that is many light seconds away, which they can't get their hands on or even get pictures of, based purely on various bits of telemetry data, and more often than not they succeed.
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  20. This thing had better work. ULA is all in since they shut down Atlas production, and the USA in general currently has only one working launch provider, SpaceX. Personally I think it would've been a good idea to hedge our bets and fund an engine swap for Atlas as well as Vulcan.
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  21. Some of the rescue pod systems were not designed to get you back to Earth, but just to keep you alive until a rescue can come get you. My favorite was the Space Shuttle's "Personal Rescue Enclosure", which was a beach ball-looking spherical thing that you curled up inside and could keep you alive in space for about an hour, just long enough for guys in space suits to toss you across from your stricken vessel to another shuttle orbiter. It was about as bare bones as you can get, low mass, low bulk, designed in the days before the LES suits when there were not enough space suits for a full crew of 7.
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  22. So this means Bruce Willis just needs a garden shovel to bury the nuke in the asteroid.
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  23. Awesome timing, Scott, I was just reading up on Nike (again). When I was growing up there was a nearby abandoned Nike missile site situated to defend Philadelphia. It was out in farm land and had a rusty chainlink fence around it. Kids used to sneak in there and poke around. Parts of it were dangerous due to flooding and so on, but it was good "X-Files" type stuff. You should do a video about Nike-X/Sprint and the HiBex programs, ABMs that have ridiculous accelerations of 100G or more and went from 0 to Mach 10 in like 5 seconds upon launch. Fascinating technology.
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  24. Scott you are my main source for space news. There are good websites and so on, but being subscribed to your channel means I will be alerted to most of the important and cool stuff.
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  25. My question is: Who was holding Story Musgrave's beer while this was happening?
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  26. How do Australians avoid falling off the planet without seatbelts?
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  27. Arthur C. Clarke wrote a good story called "A Meeting with Medusa" about a guy exploring the Jovian atmosphere in a nuclear-powered hot-hydrogen balloon, it's worth looking up.
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  28. I hope it works out fine. The US needs more working launch vehicles. Can't put all our eggs in the Falcon 9 basket, and Vulcan isn't cranking out yet.
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  29. Coming soon: Starship Nuclear with liquid core nuclear thermal rocket engine, like the old Liberty Ship concept. Bring it!
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  30. "Building a rocket in a field and then flying it would be a first" Even more fitting since that was how it was done in a few Heinlein stories. Although I assume this one isn't using a nuclear thermal rocket engine.
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  31. That photo of the lander descending under a chute with the giant crater behind it is one of the most epic photos in spaceflight history.
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  32. If the JAXA rover doesn't turn into a mech I will be disappointed.
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  33. And it's not like they really need to reinvent the wheel; just take a proven design from the Apollo or Shuttle era and build new ones, with upgrades to the materials and electronics. Why does this have to be so difficult?
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  34. After the Challenger accident, the LDEF (Long Duration Exposure Facility) was left in orbit for a much longer time than was planned. Eventually it was retrieved by another shuttle and a lot of good data was gathered from it. Since then we've had several chances to visit Hubble Space Telescope and see how it has held up as it aged, and of course Mir and the ISS have both yielded lots of data on long term mission hardware. But Snoopy would be special, since it has been in deep space for five decades, outside of the LEO gravity well and the Earth's magnetosphere.
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  35. Most of the positive comments about the design have already been said, so I'll just throw in my admiration of the black and silver color scheme of Rocket Lab's vehicles, I think it adds a classy touch with a high tech look. I also love how these newer designs are looking more and more like the classic 1950s style, the way God and Robert Heinlein intended.
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  36. I wonder if the book mentions the various types of nuclear rockets. Nuclear pulse propulsion, where you use nuclear bombs behind a pusher plate, would actually be fairly safe "fuels" to handle in the sense that the bomb devices would be hard to accidentally detonate. Nuclear thermal rockets like NERVA are a different story; once the reactor has gone critical the fuel becomes pretty lethal stuff to be around. My favorite has to be the nuclear salt water rocket, which uses an open cycle liquid fuel core. The liquid is basically water with uranium or plutonium salts dissolved in it, which are injected into a reaction chamber and mixed to become supercritical, heating the water to steam and blowing it out the nozzle as reaction mass, along with all the fission products. High Isp and high thrust, it's almost a torch drive but using it in atmosphere would be unconscionable, since it's basically a giant flying Chernobyl disaster.
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  37. That aero phase, with the fins controlling it like a skydiver, is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.
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  38. Makes it difficult for astronauts to judge their altitude. It's one reason the Apollo landings were all made with the sun behind the ship, so that the pilots could see the shadow of the LM in front of them and use it to judge height and ground speed.
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  39. SpaceX should take bids for ad space, Coke vs. Pepsi.
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  40. It was always a hail mary thing anyway, and after Challenger's loss they redid the math and concluded that had Columbia's crew ever used the seats they'd have been killed by the SRB plume anyway.
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  41. On the plus side, if the Americans aren't producing quality science then the Chinese have nothing to steal.
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  42. What's interesting is when you look at designs for space stations and such from the 1940s and 50s, they are depicted as having solar thermal turbine generators for power, basically a parabolic reflector focused on a boiler unit filled with liquid sodium or some other working fluid, that then heats water to turn a turbine and generator. Photoelectrics were not yet ready for prime time so designers and futurists were working with technology of the day. BTW, I have an old Minolta twin lens camera from the 50s that uses a selenium light-powered meter, no batteries required, and it still functions just fine.
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  43. So in the end Jupiter basically ate the probe and digested it.
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  44. The idea of riding the inside of that fairing reminds me of the old astronaut bail-out devices they were testing in the 60s, such as the Douglas Paracone and so on, where an astronaut who needs to abandon his spacecraft would strap this thing to his back. It would deploy a conical heat shield behind him so he would enter the atmosphere back first, with "eyeballs in" acceleration. He had a small solid rocket thruster in front of his chest which would be used to deorbit himself. If he timed it right, he should be able to at least hit a landmass. The conical heat shield was also an aerobrake and had a honeycomb crush zone in it to absorb impact with the ground. The poor astronaut would be falling face to the sky with no idea where he was about to land, assuming he survived reentry.
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  45. Are you sure you don't want to upgrade to Windows 11? Really sure? Really really sure?
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  46. Best train ride ever!
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  47. It's called "The Cold Equations"
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  48. It's a phenomenon known as Manley Scattering.
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  49.  @gean31  "Remember, Joe, if you screw this job up, the crew dies on national TV. No pressure. See at the pub later, yeah?"
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  50.  @docjanos  He also had a famous response to some NASA leaders who wanted to do an RTLS abort during a test flight just to see if it could be done, "We don't need to practice bleeding."
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