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

  1. I think it sounds like a stunt that, if all goes well, will result in a bunch of overrated cheesy "art". If it doesn't go well, well....then it's a very bad day.
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  2. Interesting lander design, height to width ratio much higher than Apollo LM, and the lander has 6 legs instead of the Apollo's 4. I thought the whole legs thing had been settled by the Grumman engineers, and that 3 was too few and required long legs, while more than 4 was excess mass, and thus 4 was optimal. I could be mistaken.
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  3.  @rosswarren436  In those days you were lucky to get 7 months of life out of a satellite to be fair.
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  4.  @esquilax5563  Yes, they do, the axes of the rocket body or any other space vehicle are defined by the engineers who designed them made the drawings, and wrote the documentation.
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  5.  william bush  No, only compressed air for me so far. Nitrox was kind of a new thing in sport diving in the 90s when I got started but I never tried it. It's where you bump up the O2 percentage a bit from the natural 20% to something like 25% or something. Gives you more bottom time at medium depths, but in deeper dives you can get oxygen poisoning. Plus you need a different dive table or computer so I never bothered.
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  6.  william bush  But yah, nitrogen narcosis is another thing to look out for. People get drunk on nitrogen sometimes, get disoriented, and drown before they know what hit them. And the opposite in oxygen poisoning, which sounds odd but it's yet another thing that can hurt or kill you. These are reason why sport divers never go deeper than 130 or 140 ft. Once you go deep the risks add up really fast. Most sport dives are 75 ft or less depending on where you are.
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  7.  william bush  And also, there are sharks lol!
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  8. They've played around with spherical drones I think, look like the interrogator droid from the Death Star, but I think they are designed for use inside the cabin and were just an experiment.
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  9.  @davidb6576  And how does THAT make you feel?
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  10.  @rorykeegan1895  Sure thing, buddy.
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  11.  @Ccs4646  Atlas V has indeed had more launches. All successful. It is indeed less complex. Both points for my argument. I would rather fly on the rocket that doesn't blow up. And it's good that Crew Dragon's launch went well; had it needed to abort its engine might have blown up.
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  12.  @SWilford  Nah, they stole it from Karate Kid, when Mr. Miagi tries to catch a fly with chopsticks. Also, at one point Musk was calling it the Mechazilla arms.
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  13. 8:56 That looks like the symbol of the Klingon Empire
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  14. GPS IIR-1 launched on a Delta II in 1997. Just above the launch pad one of the SRMs failed and the vehicle exploded spectacularly, raining debris and burning propellant down all over Cape Canaveral AFS. There is video. Several parked cars were hit by chunks of burning solid rocket fuel. Imagine explaining that to the insurance company.
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  15. Indiana Jones and the Plutonium Rover
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  16. The American version is the Martin B-57 Canberra, for reference.
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  17. Have they re-flown a first stage yet?
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  18. I think that even if you do nothing, the air blowing from the ventilation system will eventually push you up against a wall.
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  19.  @averageeclairenjoyer3010  Yeah, the movie never explains how a Soviet spacecraft winds up in a position to be able to rendezvous with Ironman 1, or how NORAD didn't notice it. Not a knock against the film, really, just one of those nerd questions I always ask.
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  20.  @swissTom124  Apollo expeditions were limited in range by rules. You couldn't drive the rover more than some distance (was it 3 miles?) from the LM, so you could still walk back to the ship if the car broke down.
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  21. Right, What we need a dictator to make us do what needs to be done. I nominate me.
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  22. Getting excited for China's space accomplishments today is like being excited for Germany's aerospace accomplishments in the 1930s.
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  23. Fasteners are one thing, what shocked me the first time I stood next to a Mercury is how tiny the spacecraft is.
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  24.  @Nuke-MarsX  Lots of studies have been done regarding parachutes vs. powered landings, going back to the 60s, and it's generally agreed that a parachute and landing gear system big enough to land a large vehicle masses more than the engines and a bit of extra propellant used on the same vehicle. Add to that the fact that the engines used to recover SpaceX's boosters are also used during the launch, so they are not dead weight. Also, a parachute recovery system won't be recoverable by a Mechazilla-style system, and that system allows you to do away with heavy landing gear and hang the structure under tension, saving more mass.
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  25. "COVID crisis caused a crash" say that five times fast
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  26. Training wheels are off, people. You'll have to tell yourself from now on.
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  27.  @Archgeek0  Statistically, it's a very safe bet. The odds of a collision are still quite low, and if one does occur, so what? India could deny responsibility, or just apologize, maybe even pay out some compensation, but the odds of having to even worry about that are still quite low math-wise.
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  28. In addition to redesigning hardware I hope they took a good look at their best practices for ground testing and handling, seems like there were several points where they should've taken a step back and said, "Nope, doesn't look or sound right, do not approve this tank for flight."
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  29.  @dalethelander3781  Yes I'm well aware of that.
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  30.  @GrimJerr  Check out the movie Oblivion.
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  31. Gotta love the off the wall ideas that might've worked. My favorite is the Chrysler SERV, a wildly different alternate design for the Space Shuttle that ditched the side-stacked orbiter idea for an SSTO VTOL vehicle with an aerospike style engine system that would take off and land back on the same pad. For manned missions it would have a small winged glider as an upper stage, which would have abort rockets to escape the launch vehicle in an emergency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_SERV
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  32.  @shawnmiller4781  Well sure, I know what that is, but it's not in the museum.
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  33. Would be ironic if the damage was caused by debris from a Russian ASAT test.
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  34. I had commented on that short video that I always thought the crackle was from rough-burning solid rocket propellant and that I was surprised that the all-liquid rockets do it, too. Very cool that you made this video so soon after that.
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  35.  @atlas8827  There's no proof of that. In fact, it could be argued that private spaceflight was held back by government run agencies like NASA. Congress basically allowed NASA to monopolize the launch market in the 80s to try and make the Space Shuttle "profitable", or at least less lossy. One wonders if a bunch of universities decided to pool their considerable funds and contract a builder for a space telescope as well as a launch provider how it would turn out and compare to Hubble, which has been an undeniable success, albeit an expensive one. Can't do worse than the current JWST money pit cockup.
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  36. "We won't need wheels where we're going..."
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  37. I think it's published by Apogee Books.
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  38.  @machy8515  Found it. Lunar Exploration Scrapbook. Go to Apogee Books website and look it up. Also, check out the vast pile of cool books they publish on space stuff. I have a bunch of them and some of them are crude and poorly printed but the ones on the Saturn V and the DynaSoar are great, so is the one on the Atlas rocket family, called "Atlas: The Ultimate Weapon".
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  39. I believe it's called the "Oberth Effect" (there is a wiki page) and I think it's used quite often.
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  40. Yup
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  41. Okay, idea for a new test: build a sloped tunnel, put a nuke at the far end, and stuff a bunch of these steel spheres in on top. World's most badass shotgun.
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  42. "The Americans must be executing their scientists at a faster rate than we are, we must increase scientist executions in order to build better rockets!"
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  43. I'm pretty sure someone did a Gemini Lunar mission addon for Orbiter; over the years they've done most of the alternate history stuff. Someone did LUNEX a long time ago.
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  44.  @theatom7264  I don't know about that, both VentureStar and Star Raker had pretty tough engineering problems to solve. I would like to see if anyone could solve VentureStar's propellant tank issues, given advances in material science. And that linear air spike engine was pretty nifty if you can make it work right.
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  45. It's become the fad to rip on Boeing, but as an American I want to see them succeed in the end. More successful space companies, competing with each other, is a good thing in the end. They need to stop coddling them, though, and ween them off that defense/NASA money they've become so addicted to since the end of WWII. Same goes for the other legacy aerospace companies, the Lockheeds and Raytheons and so on, many of which have storied histories to be proud of.
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  46. Missile manufactured by Weyland Yutani Corporation.
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  47. Many jet fighters lack APUs to start their own engines and thus require ground support equipment to start up, usually the device is called a start cart, and the procedure is called "fluffing the jet". Think about that. They had to fluff the Saturn V.
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  48. My favorite thing about these air launched systems is that keep very cool retired aircraft in service. I hope the Stargazer finds work and stays airworthy, as well as the F-104 system.
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  49.  @adamc1713  True that. There were lots of ideas for upgrading STS over the years that never got the funding to go ahead. Liquid flyback boosters to replace the SRBs, for example. Stuff like that would be a no-brainer for an STS 2.0, where all the lessons of 30 years of operating STS could be applied.
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  50. 1:07 That quote from Richard Feynman is crazy, especially if you read the rest of it. IIRC, he wanted to watch the bomb go off without using those welding goggle type glasses, and he reasoned that it was the UV light that burns out your eyes, not the visible light, so he got into a pickup truck, reasoning that the windshield glass would block most of the UV while allowing a clear view of the event, and watched it through the windshield. That is what they call "trusting science", and I certainly do not trust it as much as Feynman did!
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