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

  1. After seeing the meteor, they immediately attacked the nearest humans, just because that's what geese do.
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  2. Yet despite all this science tech at our fingertips, we have flerfers and other idiots. SMDH
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  3. Space Shuttle pilots spent redonkulous amounts of time in the simulator, practicing, among other things, manually flying into orbit and back. Also, KSP players do not fly anything into space; they only pretend to.
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  4. Midgets. Custom designed for space travel. We laugh at them now, (yes, you do, in secret, don't act like you don't) but they are the future of humanity, while you long-leggers are obsolete.
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  5.  @dbf1dware  And now your task is to become incredibly wealthy so you can visit it.
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  6.  @UncleWermus  Nah, the gym membership fee was too high.
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  7. Astronauts are just riding on an expensive simulator developed by Walt Disney and Howard Hughes. It's a very realistic ride, but you never actually leave Florida. Good thing, because just a few miles offshore is the Bermuda Triangle, a triangular hole in the flat earth into which you may fall.
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  8.  @davidmoore8741  What does Ukraine have to do with a 1950s launch vehicle family?
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  9. I think most Soviet rocket engineers admired the Saturn V, even if they didn't admit it. Heck, the N1 has fans around the world, and it never even worked right.
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  10. In Soviet Russia, polonium uses you up.
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  11. A friend of mine used to work on Titan II missiles years ago when he was in the Air Force. He told me a story about some guys that were working in a room with a solid rocket motor that was, IIRC, supposed to separate stages, when they screwed up and set it off. It fired for maybe a second and those guys were essentially erased from existence.
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  12. I believe the ownership chain of Atlas, starting in the 1950s, is Convair, Martin Marietta, Lockheed Martin, and then ULA. ULA was a shotgun wedding between Lockheed Martin and Boeing forced upon them by the government. The Delta family of rockets was Boeing legacy companies.
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  13. The real name for "Fat Earth Theory" is called "earth oblateness" in the textbooks.
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  14. Also funny if Donald Trump.
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  15.  @SnakebitSTI  Mike Mullane calls it "normalization of deviance", basically ignoring the requirements because you got away with it a few times and figure you always will. Ther was a requirement for no O-ring burn-through, yet despite multiple burn-through incidents they launched Challenger anyway. There was a requirement for no debris strikes on the orbiter, yet despite tons of previous debris strikes they decided Columbia was going to be just fine. Follow the rules from the get-go and you can cut down on the risk and danger.
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  16.  @One-ny1hp  Hey guys, found the flerfer!
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  17. The irony of a guy calling people stupid when he confuses the 80s with the 40s....
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  18. For sure there's no way you'd get me to ride on that damn thing, up or down. I mean, it's awesome and as an unmanned freighter it shows great potential, but it scares me way more than the Shuttle did. The belly-flop landing is terrifying to behold, I'd take my chances on STS over that anytime.
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  19.  @Chris_the_Muso  Maybe also because water is corrosive and will get into all the parts and CO2 will immediately evaporate and dissipate in the air?
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  20. I always thought that scene was funny, because it implied that the Imperials were deliberately looking to kill people and didn't really care about cargo or droids getting away, even though the whole reason they boarded the ship was to find the stolen Death Star plans. Also, if they had just rolled the star destroyer so its belly faced away from the planet the escape pods may have all failed to function properly and could've been captured intact in orbit.
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  21. Ask your doctor about Dysprosium. Do not take Dysprosium if you are pregnant, diabetic, or have a heart condition. Side effects of Dysprosium may include unconsciousness, sleepiness, dizziness, greasy or oily stools, death, or an irrational urge to listen to Nickelback.
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  22. Get more for your dollar: send probes to outer planets and/or the Kuiper Belt equipped with telescopes and instruments for this as a secondary mission. Basically, more New Horizons type missions, but a bit bigger and better outfitted. NH was a fairly cheap mission as such things go, spend a bit more on a multi-vehicle program you could multiply the science return methinks.
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  23. Proving that 80s tech still looks more futuristic than 2020s tech.
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  24. Somewhere out there is the list of alternate landing sites for the Shuttle; you could look that up. But basically the Shuttle can land anywhere with a big enough runway. The tricky part is keeping the locals safe around the nasty hypergolic propellants after you roll to a stop.
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  25. That footage of those guys assembling the solid rocket segments, where you can see the rubbery propellant grain, scares me at some deep level. That's one of those jobs that is simple but seems like it can turn crazy deadly in an instant. Damn, rockets, you scary.
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  26.  @pedrolmlkzk  Nope. Launch vehicles and weapons have very different requirements. Generally, launch vehicles can tolerate things weapons can't such as delicate handling of hardware and propellants, slow tanking and slow preparations for launch, trading speed for higher payload mass to orbit. A missile is basically a bullet sitting in the chamber of a gun (silo) which needs to be able to stay ready for years on end and able to launch at a moment's notice. Missiles trade efficient performance for speed and reliability, and must be easy to handle for maintenance people. The liquid fueled Atlas, America's first ICBM, was mediocre as a weapon but made for a great launch vehicle later. Atlas had to be stored empty until an alert, when it would be raised out of the silo or coffin, and it took 15 minutes to load it with fuel and ox, while the current ICBM, the solid fuel Minuteman family, is much better suited to the task.
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  27. Well IIRC the original idea was to have it retrieved by a Shuttle orbiter and either serviced on the ground and re-launched or retired and put out to pasture in a museum. That idea's history now, so either HST gets grappled and deorbited or, if it loses attitude control and tumbles, it becomes impossible or unsafe to dock with, winds up dying in orbit and becoming space junk. My bet is it will die on orbit before anyone coughs up the money to grapple it. So, likely space junk.
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  28.  @AsbestosMuffins  In an extreme situation, an extra 100 lbs can be the difference between life and death, and the whole point of the story is that it's an emergency with no time to build a mission with the proper safety margin.
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  29. 1:05 well that's about what I've come to expect from DHL, the deliverymen who have never once actually found my house for some reason.
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  30. DART is helping Earth fly safe.
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  31.  @Sableagle  No, this was made by a bunch of 50-year-old white guys, many of them Navy vets.
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  32. On one of the early SpaceX Falcon 1 launches, this actually happened and many of us saw it on a live stream. On the Falcon 1 the interstage skirt is fixed to the first stage, and when the first stage separated the skirt banged into the upper stage rocket nozzle. In the video it is dark and then suddenly sunlight enters you see the nozzle scrape past the edge of the skirt and spring back into position before igniting. Though the burn started off well, the re-contact collision caused the upper stage to slew sideways and induced fuel slosh in the tanks, making the vehicle oscillate back and forth. The control system failed to damp it out, it got worse and worse, and finally the fuel sloshed too far and caused the engine to cutoff early, leading to a mission failure. I vividly remember watching that live and guessing what was happening before SpaceX cut the feed. Days later after analysis they confirmed what lots of us were thinking. I think this was the second launch, back in 2007.
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  33. Arthur C. Clarke's book 2010: Odyssey Two also saw some Chinese astronauts discovering life on Europa the hard way.
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  34. The Genesis Device!
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  35. 8:31 It never fails to amaze me that when the air is clear with no dust the Martian sky is so blue. Makes it look like you're in Utah.
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  36. My dad served aboard an aircraft carrier in the 60s. He saw an arresting cable snap and when it whipped around it took out the landing gear from under some A-4 jets, leaving them pancaked on their bellies on the flight deck. The landing signal officer who guides the jets in to land is in a pit off to one side of the deck and he ducked down below deck level, saving his own life.
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  37. "Helicopters do not 'fly', they beat the air into submission."
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  38. I believe some variant of the Titan III was also planned to be used for launching the X-20 Dyna Soar spaceplane before the X-20 was canceled. There are illustrations of it from the 60s. If anyone gets a chance to visit the USAF Museum in Dayton, Ohio, they have several rockets and ICBMs there, including a Titan IV shown towards the end of this video.
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  39. Same here, when he pulled out that one module I was waiting for it start singing Daisy.
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  40.  @paulcairns8718  Being cautious is one thing, but when there are people who've spent their entire careers on this program and may retire before it's even launched, one might say it's taking a bit too long. And that's before we bring up the money.
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  41.  @grg6574  Fewer engines also has many pros. Fewer moving parts to fail, and a higher thrust-to-weight ratio. And more engines didn't work out for the Soviet N1, for a variety of reasons beyond engine choice. This is a debate that's as old as spaceflight itself. But the OP's point is well-taken: big engines are cool to watch in action. What I'd give to witness a cluster of F-1B's shoving a giant rocket into the sky.
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  42. For the first stage when you are fighting gravity to get your giant tank of fuel off the ground, high thrust is more important than high Isp, for later stages the reverse is generally true. But yes, solid rockets are sometimes used on satellites to boost them into GTO due to simplicity and the fact that they are small and only need to burn once, briefly, to get the job done. At Goddard Spaceflight Center's visitor center there is a early-model Delta upper stage on display, a small solid rocket motor with no propellant loaded (obviously) and a mock satellite payload on it for context.
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  43. I imagine that would be a huge hazard in free fall, with it getting into the ventilation system and avionics, shorting things out, and being breathed in by the occupants.
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  44. For a big centrifuge, yes. For a smaller internal drum type like the one Frank Poole runs around, you need some Ligeti.
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  45. Yes, this is mission design. Before a mission is flown the planners have to work out things like this to ensure that in the case of contingencies there are fallback options. There's an old but great movie called "Marooned" about an Apollo CSM that gets stranded in orbit while returning from a space station because the service module's main engine fails to ignite. It's a great movie but it always bugged me that the fictional mission designers didn't budget enough propellant for the RCS jets to allow for the crew to use them for deorbit or to return to the space station and await rescue.
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  46. They could've landed at a downrange airfield if they lost a second engine after a certain point. I think part of the cockpit dialog was "Story, where are we going?" "I think we're going to Spain". After that they were told to ATO.
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  47.  @S1baar  Ezekiel Jones isn't wrong, but he didn't answer your question: the reason you never hold your breath is because if you have to swim to the surface in an emergency, the air in your lungs will expand as the outside pressure on your body decreases. This will cause your lungs to inflate and will damage the lung tissue. This is called lung expansion injury, and is a whole other thing that can painfully kill you besides the bends. SCUBA diving is lots of fun, but you really need to get good training.
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  48. The vast majority of those Hollywood people demonstrate no respect for my beliefs, so their strike means nothing to me.
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  49.  @scottmanley  It's like University of Pennsylvania (aka Penn) vs Pennsylvania State University (aka Penn State). People confuse this in conversation all the time, and the Penn Ivy Leaguers really hate it.
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  50.  @filanfyretracker  Also wheels on railroad locomotives have steel tires that get "sweated on" the way you described.
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