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

  1. That dark blue space suit looks like it's off the set of The Expanse.
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  2. I can never get over the monstrous power of those engines seen from so close in those launchpad camera shots.
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  3. The story I had in mind was Rocketship Galileo, in which a professor and three teenage boys build a thorium-fueled nuclear thermal rocket out in the desert and fly it to the moon. Crazy, especially the part where they test the engine in a static fire while standing behind a simple shield to protect against radiation. Teenagers. Interesting story, though.
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  4.  @craigcorson3036  "There will never be a good enough reason to use nukes" Oh boy that sounds a bit fanatical. A nuke is not some evil totem, it's a machine that creates lots of heat, radiation, and blast effect. If you have an application that benefits from those things you may consider a nuke. It does nobody any good to be afraid of technology just because it can be used for evil purposes; it's not going to get uninvented and there is no going back to 1944, so the only choice is to be rational and keep moving forward.
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  5. It's actually pre-Boomer, it's the generation before Boomers, the ones who were teens or twenty-somethings during WWII.
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  6.  @enisra_bowman  Oh boy, want some pork with that salt?
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  7. Bananagate!
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  8. Over the years, Rocketdyne got all the glamour jobs with engines like the F1 Saturn V main engine and the RS-25 Space Shuttle Main Engine, and it always seemed Aerojet lost out on the big contracts. But Aerojet had done well for themselves building engines like the AJ-10 and most of the thrusters used for attitude control and as propulsion on satellites. I'm a bit old school, so it's a bit disappointing that they merged into one company. As far as them being owned by L3 Harris, unless I am mistaken, I think Rocketdyne has spent most of its history owned by other bigger companies, and if so this is just more of the same.
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  9. Unfortunately they are relying on Blue Origin for those engines. Hope they get there but BO does not inspire great confidence on my part.
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  10. The footage from the cameras mounted on the SRBs during launch, separation, and splashdown is some of the most epic spaceflight footage ever made. Even has sound with it, so you can hear the wind whistling and the structure howl and creak as it tumbles downward. When the camera turns so you can see the orbiter and external tank screaming away at full thrust into the dark sky, that is just freaking awesome.
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  11. If you gain or lose weight on a long mission, or if your spine stretches out a bit in zero G, I can see the precision fit stop being precision. And then there's the problem with the areas you can't put constant pressure on, like the area around your crotch and genitals, and the area around your neck where the helmet has to attach. It's still a cool idea if it can be made to work, but it's been in sci fi books since the 40s or 50s and we still don't see a viable model yet.
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  12.  @volgawolfhounds741  Bro, do you even quote?
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  13.  @lawrencemiller3829  That person should've had a few teeth knocked out.
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  14. Or they could just use a flashlight from a window.
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  15. We like to have fun here.
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  16.  @DUKE_of_RAMBLE Nuclear reactors in space are not banned by any treaty.
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  17. Most people who work for NASA don't work for NASA directly; they work for contractors. Like SpaceX.
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  18.  @ZboeC5  Because anti-capitalists think that places like the Soviet Union, Venezuela, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and North Korea are utopian wonderlands where everyone works honestly and there is no corruption and dozens of millions of people were not murdered by their own governments.
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  19. "As you may have heard..." Nope, I don't hear about stuff like this until I hear it from Scott Manley.
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  20.  @LCaddyStudios  All fighter planes have always been built by contractors in the US, Lockheed Martin being one of them.
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  21. I see what you did there. FBI will be visiting, soon.
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  22.  @hydro-flare  More like 7.8 km/s
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  23. Maybe it was the cloud of unburned propellant looking like a wet rain cloud to radar?
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  24. Just watching this video gives me a bit of vertigo. I don't know what it is about the Saturn V; even though we have stuff like Artemis and Starship today, the Saturn V in my mind is just so much more badass. It's also aesthetically beautiful, the perfect shape and look for a rocket ship, right down to the massive engines, fairings, and those fins.
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  25.  @221b-l3t  It also makes it so you never have to worry about anything ever again.
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  26. When the Soviet army was in Afghanistan in the 80s they had problems with their tanks, because the soldiers kept drinking the brake fluid.
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  27. I don't know if they still sell it, but you used to be able to get peanut butter and jelly in one squeeze bottle. It wasn't very good though.
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  28. Interesting thought about the Shuttle's aesthetics. The Soviet Buran shuttle orbiter was a very similar design, approximately the same size and shape, but it was not a direct copy system-wise. It turns out that to do what STS did, your orbiter has to look pretty much just like it did. Function over form, as has been stated. But if you look at the two spacecraft side by side up close, the Rockwell orbiter looks a bit different than the Buran orbiter. The nose is a bit different, the windshield frames, the tile pattern, all these things represent the differences in philosophy between American and Russian aerospace engineers. The Buran looks Russian, while the Rockwell orbiter looks like it came out of a US aircraft factory, like it has some Boeing or Lockheed DNA mixed into its aesthetics. Personally, I think the US orbiter is better-looking, but that's subjective.
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  29. Re ejecting the warp core: assuming the thing has significant amounts of antimatter still inside, you'd better hope you get reeeeaaaalllly far away from it before the containment fails and the fuel contacts the reactor walls. If you look up the famous cutaway poster of Enterprise from the first Motion Picture, it also shows a whole array of magnetic antimatter storage bottles at the base of the engineering hull, each of which should be able to glass over half a planet according to the original series. Come to think of it, operating antimatter-powered starships in LEO is a really dangerous thing to do. In ST III when they destroyed the Enterprise, by all rights it should've wiped out the face of the planet along with it.
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  30.  Adymn Sani  I heard that was a prank they would play, trying to strand you in the middle while you were sleeping and then watch you squirm when you wake up.
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  31.  @Boold198891  Objects like that have higher area to mass ratios than the station and will deorbit naturally due to drag, probably after a few months or so. In addition, when astronauts chuck stuff away they should be doing it opposite the direction of the ISS's velocity, so that the object will be in a slightly lower altitude from that moment on. BAck in the day when the Shuttle astronauts were replacing the solar panels on Hubble they tossed the old ones overboard the same way by hand.
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  32.  @karenrobertsdottir4101  I believe that as long as the quartz remains transparent to X-rays then it'll work. But what do I know.
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  33.  @mattweihl  Yes, Mike Mullane talks about this in his book.
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  34. It's absolutely slow motion. Look it up. It was shot with high speed film cameras for the purpose of allowing engineers to examine it frame by frame so see how the system was performing after the launch. Every launch is extensively filmed so that if something goes wrong they can figure out what broke and why, or if nothing goes wrong they may still learn something and improve future missions.
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  35.  @FLPhotoCatcher  Whenever I think of Starlink or any of these other dump-hundreds-of-satellites-into-orbit programs, my song is Space Junk by Devo.
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  36.  @kennethc2466  Do you get offended when someone makes fun of Blue Origin? Because this is a conversation about the New Shepard, has nothing to do with whatever you're talking about.
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  37. Electrolux vacuum cleaners are an example of really good industrial design, I love that 50s/60s machine look and the logo.
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  38. We'd be in LEO with an even older ISS, because when there is no competition, LEO is about as far as you can get funding for.
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  39. It's also a gamble. In the years it takes for the spacecraft to get into position for its mission there are plenty of opportunities for something to go wrong. I'm always happy when something like New Horizons or Cassini gets all the way to its target and nothing major goes wrong.
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  40. I imagine you would treat the sun's surface the same as you would a gas giant, since it is basically a gas giant that is burning itself.
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  41.  @HALLish-jl5mo  Correct. And the water/steam inside the engine is a working fluid.
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  42.  @lawrencedoliveiro9104  Yes, the props were fake, but in universe they were real tech of the early 21st Century.
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  43. My understanding is that newer boosters have a leveling system, while 1058 was older and did not. So this is somewhat less likely to happen to boosters going forward. Read that in an article over on Space News I think.
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  44. Where I grew up it was against the law for kids to buy rocket motors at the hobby shop without some kind of license or something. So as a result I never got to do model rocketry, even though I desperately wanted to, looking at all the cool kits. I guess some asshole somewhere was happy they "kept me safe" or something though.
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  45. The title of this video is all about landings and failures to launch. It's a real downer. I'll be here all week, folks. Try the veal.
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  46. There is a video, possibly by Mark Felton, which describes the German plan for submarine launched ballistic missiles. A U-boat would tow a sort of barge behind it which contained a V-2 missile. This barge would've been a missile silo turned on its side. When it was time to launch, the barge would ballast itself to pitch up 90 deg into launch position. Never got close to making it happen, of course. But people in the 1940s were thinking ahead of the tech at the time.
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  47.  @LCaddyStudios  The Apollo and Shuttle suits were also built by contractors.
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  48. Hindsight is 20/20. Nobody at North American, Grumman, or NASA ever thought there would be a need for interchangeable filters, any more than they thought the LM's descent engine would be used for mid-course correction burns. Faulting them after the fact is hardly fair, given the circumstances.
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  49.  @TheNasaDude  I dunno, but in that stupid movie they were driving a drilling rig rover thing around in super low g, so, Hollywood rules.
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  50.  @TimothyLipinski  The RTG carried on Apollo 13's LM was carried back into Earth's atmosphere after the crew abandoned it and is still at the bottom of the ocean today. RTGs and nuclear reactors used in space are engineered to be very safe in the event of a launch vehicle failure and aren't worth losing much sleep over. A bigger problem is if a reactor gets placed on a trajectory to reenter the atmosphere after it's been critical. The Soviet Kosmos 954 satellite failure resulted in a nuclear reactor breaking up and scattering over northern Canada in 1977. Much of the core was never recovered and is still out in the woods and lakes somewhere.
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