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

  1.  @pov1  I don't believe that for one second. Landing an airplane on a paved and heavily instrumented runway is not the same as landing on an alien planet surface full of poorly mapped obstacles and sloping ground, with a comm lag of several seconds. Proof is in the pudding: the Apollo astronauts, all test pilots, managed to make 6 good landings in a row, while these modern robotic landers are having a hard time getting consistent results.
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  2. 6:53 I like that 80s graphic design, like an ad for a toy rocket. "Get the new Peacekeeper Nuclear Missile by Hasbro! You and your friends will have hours of enjoyment posturing, threatening, and even nuking each other!"
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  3.  @martythemartian99  pink hair theory
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  4. Shuttle haterz be like:
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  5.  @infernaldaedra  I'm sure it can be made to work, but no thanks. I'd rather fly in a Shuttle with a nice comfy smooth runway landing. That bellyflop means that no matter how smooth the mission has gone, the last few seconds will be terrifying. With Shuttle, the scariest parts have all passed by the time you are on final approach and the landing gear deploy.
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  6. It seems like a poor design choice to make those batteries hard to replace or recharge while the vehicle is on the pad, given that they are a showstopper.
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  7.  @michaelsommers2356  What was it Scott was saying about pedantry again?
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  8.  @michaelsommers2356  Well, SpaceX is calling their latest a starship, and it clearly is not capable of interstellar travel, but I don't get too upset. Beech made an airplane called the Starship back in the 80s too. Same deal. So I'm cool with biplane.
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  9. Only downside to that is that you need to have more propellant to start the landing maneuver at a higher altitude, especially if you're going to use an extra engine. I don't know what their delta-V budget is for a typical Starship mission, but I'm guessing it's tight. Falcon 9 does the hoverslam because it needs to use just enough propellant and can't carry smaller landing engines that would allow it to hover. Personally, even if this worked every time I don't think you'd get me to ride it without a solid bailout system.
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  10. 23 years in the making, billions of dollars, and the delta-V budget only gives us 6 to 10 years? Can't say I'm very impressed by this project. Hope the data is worth it.
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  11.  @toohardtowatch  Yes, lack of atmospheric haze is a big thing. Human stereo vision stops being good at angular range-finding beyond a certain distance, but we can still estimate the range to a distant building or mountain based on haze and humidity. We also have familiar objects to aid us, such as trees, animals, people, cars, light poles, etc. On the fractal surface of the moon, though, most of these advantages are not present. During the Apollo landings, the landings were all set up so that the sun was behind the LM and the crew would be able to see the shadow of the spacecraft on the surface during final approach, which gave the crews a familiar shape to help judge distance and height.
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  12.  @MonkeyJedi99  Right there with you. Thank God for the Expanse!
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  13. Careful what you wish for. Gamma ray burst, anyone?
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  14. Like Dr. Snuggles' rocketship.
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  15.  @z-beeblebrox  So hydrogen bombs and dinosaur-killer asteroid explosions can't get any louder than that?
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  16.  @kennethc2466  I'm not going anywhere, better just mute me, Rosco.
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  17.  @kennethc2466  You really hate this guy. Let's hear some more.
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  18.  @kennethc2466  This is great, keep it going!
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  19. They didn't bother to safeguard the hi rez Apollo 11 landing tapes, and that was pretty much the most historical thing NASA ever did, its whole reason for being. So, no surprise here.
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  20.  @aesbj9228  As in "almost 50 years since the last moon landing"?
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  21. It kind of looks like the graphics you see in the cockpit of the Nostromo in Alien during the landing scene.
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  22. "I've seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion..." Roy Batty knew what happened up there.
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  23.  @nikolatasev4948  Yep. The best programmers or engineers won't help you if you have poor configuration control, system engineering, and a rigorous and thorough testing regimen. If management whines about the cost, tell them you won't work on it because you don't want the guilt on your conscious when the damn thing kills its crew. Manned spaceflight is not the place to scrimp.
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  24. Some people make an entire career out of something we take for granted. Designing antennas, or the water suppression system on a launchpad, or a turn signal system for a car. Engineering is a busy field.
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  25. Shiny
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  26.  @filyn  The saying I heard about bumblebees is that, like helicopters, on paper they shouldn't be able to fly (if that's true, your paper is wrong, of course). Also bumblebees are cute and fuzzy, not ugly. (And I'll confess, some helicopters are good looking machines to me.)
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  27. I swear these youtubers all conspire to sync up the subject du jour. Amy's Vintage Space also talked recently about the jet boots experiment on Skylab.
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  28. So as we worry about a collision, SpaceX is launching another cloud of space junk into orbit.
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  29. You don't just have a problem with LM, you have a bunch of left wing opinions and LM making weapons is just one of them. For my part, I'm glad LM makes weapons. I'm also glad they build launch vehicles. And I don't buy into any of that other political crap you're peddling here. Class warfare, "what the American people want", blah blah blah, save that for your Antifa rallies with your pink pussy hats. As long as LM's planes are bombing terrorists I'm cool with it.
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  30.  @neithere  Stop shilling.
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  31. Skylab used an Apollo-style artificial atmosphere, while ISS uses a space shuttle type atmosphere, so you couldn't just berth it to the ISS unless you had a special airlock module between them. Such a module was actually built to allow the Shuttle to operate with Skylab but never got used since the shuttle got delayed until after Skylab's orbit decayed. A great missed opportunity; had it worked out there would've been Skylab-STS missions through the 1980s and lots of data gathered on long term human spaceflight 15-20 years before ISS.
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  32.  @justrecentlyi5444  The Apollo spacecraft family, including Skylab, used a low pressure pure oxygen system. The space shuttle used a normal air system at much higher pressure, almost sea level, similar to what you breath in a jetliner. So if you wanted to transfer from the shuttle's cabin into Skylab, you'd have had to go into an airlock where you'd slowly lower the pressure and breath pure oxygen to keep you from getting the bends when you enter Skylab.
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  33. Well, if the Singularity hits, you might live to get an immortal robot body, only to die anyway when it gets vaporized in a multi-gigaton asteroid impact.
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  34. Get your coat and see yourself out.
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  35.  @owensmith7530  Let that be a lesson: when a veteran cosmonaut tells you something, you should probably pay attention.
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  36.  @christopherpardell4418  Please, never ever accept a job as a public official in NASA or any other space agency.
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  37. "Follow me!" - Marshall Applewhite, 1997
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  38.  @daszieher  American Civil War in a nutshell. The Union had strategy but tactically was pretty deficient. The Confederacy had great battlefield commander who won lots of battles early on but their strategy was lacking. The result was a long meatgrinding war that ended in a Union victory and a horrendous casualty figure.
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  39. Rich Corinthian leather?
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  40. Yes, it's the poster child for how government will build something cool in the slowest and costliest way possible. Even more so than the Space Shuttle.
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  41. You can always wear your favorite snoopy cap replica you bought at the NASA gift shop, I'm sure. Will help your hair out of your face while you're in the suit, anyway.
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  42. Taylor was mentioned in George Dyson's book Project Orion (George is the son of Freeman). Taylor worked on the nuclear pulse-propulsion program and was interviewed on the subject, search for it on youtube. He also famously used a parabolic reflector to light his cigarette with a nuclear bomb.
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  43. Oscar Goldman is who you want to talk to about this.
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  44.  @PlanetEarth3141  Well, in the 70s, they'd throw in an arm and two legs along with the eye. Inflation, though.
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  45. A laser bluetooth mouse should work fine if you make the mousepad with a sheet of metal underneath the cloth and put magnets in the mouse so it doesn't float away. Magnets fix everything!
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  46. My understanding was that the Project Pluto engine worked quite well when it was tested in a static test, and that it was air-cooled, no liquid coolant of any kind. I also believe that the reason the project was canceled was because it was expensive, prone to safety issues (as we see here), and because it was too provocative. US policy makers figured that if they went ahead with it then the Soviets would be sure to start building and stockpiling the damn things as well. It was also an insanely scary weapon, basically being able to hit multiple targets, and optionally, the reactor could be "salted" so that it spewed out deadly fallout onto the areas it flew over, pretty much the ultimate "I hate the world" weapon. I really am shocked the Russians would build something so stupid, 30 years after the Cold War ended.
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  47. You forgot to tell him to fly safe.
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  48. The Saturn IB isn't "cute", it's cool-looking, and it was a workhorse for NASA. Could've been a workhorse for a lot longer had Congress funded it into the Shuttle era. I love the fins, too, not so much the Saturn I block 2 but the ones on the Saturn IB are so cool looking. Those small fins are part of what makes the Saturn family of rockets so good looking.
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  49.  @mikepatrick1904  Only the ones in that particular squadron, which was training USAF pilots for spaceflight. The F-104 in Yeager's accident was one of these specially modified Starfighters which had a rocket motor installed in the tail above the jet nozzle and gas thrusters in the nose. The pilot would use the rocket to zoom climb to stupid high edge-of-space type altitudes, where his jet engine would flame out and his control surfaces were useless, and use the thrusters to control the jet's altitude like he was flying a spacecraft for a few minutes, until he fell back to lower altitude where he would restart the jet and fly home.
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  50. The 727 is one of my favorite ever jetliners, glad to see one still in service, and with a cool paint job to boot.
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