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

  1.  @Hevach  True, but I'm glad we didn't have to watch the Saturn V blow up over and over again before it finally worked, though the footage would be spectacular. We did go through that in the very early days of Explorer I and Corona and so on.
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  2.  @mrcuttime22  Oxygen and hydrogen are nontoxic, as long as they aren't on fire.
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  3. Brawndo's got what plants crave!
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  4. That is a great article, worth looking up. I read it back around 2007 I think. The STS flight software is known as the closest thing to perfect code that's ever been written. Whatever else was wrong with Shuttle, the software was on point.
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  5.  @Infinite_Maelstrom  The fins are one of the coolest aesthetics of the Saturn V and Saturn IB, useless or not they look cool.
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  6.  @samrobinson9110  Maybe. I should've tried to ignite it to see what kind of Isp PB&J gets you.
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  7. Spam in a can.
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  8.  @jhdsfalsjhdfjashdkhvjfldld8301  Explain. Please cite facts and numbers.
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  9. A square orbit around the moon, well I'll be! I have to say, I was one of the doubters/haters of Artemis but since the launch and seeing all this stuff lately I've gotten pretty excited about it. The odd orbital mechanics is super cool. And so, by the way, is seeing that NASA worm logo out in deep space looking back at Terra and Luna.
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  10. The purpose of navigation lights is so you can tell the relative heading of a ship or aircraft (or spacecraft) from a distance. Red is always port side, green is always starboard side. Ships have white lights on the masts, a low one forward and a high one aft, while aircraft typically have a red "beacon" and an flashing strobe "anticollision" light. It seems to me spacecraft have apparently only had them since LED tech made lights light enough to bother putting them in your mass budget, I may be wrong. If you see a spacecraft (or any vessel) in the distance, you may be able to make out its shape but not its orientation, so the lights aid the observer.
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  11. If I Did It
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  12. Would be cool if they had video and sound in the cabin when this happened.
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  13.  @filanfyretracker  As a sport diver who's never been deeper than 140 ft or so, the deep ocean definitely scares me more than vacuum.
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  14. Because Dragon had a rocket engine blow up, which would kill the crew. Starliner's anomaly was non-lethal, easy to correct by an alert crew, and easy to fix without redesigning hardware. The vehicle went off course, but it was recovered and undamaged.
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  15.  @DeathValleyDazed  I'm referring to what some people call "The Greatest Generation", yes. I do not call it that, for reasons which are off topic and personal.
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  16.  @jokerace8227  If you look at some of the orbital bail-out schemes proposed for rescuing astronauts back in the 60s many of them involved an inflatable heat shield of some sort, some of them strapped to an astronaut's back so he would reenter butt first and descend under a chute.
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  17.  @ariaspes3842  That's twice now you've pedaled that bogus 37% failure statistic. Stupid troll, if you're going to spread propaganda, you have to be at least a little bit truthful. If you respond to this comment, don't forget to post a citation for your fake numbers.
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  18.  @bobqzzi  The scene where the astronauts are talking to their families, believing they are probably not going to make it, was pretty stark and horrifying. Gene Hackman's did a great job of portraying an astronaut who was at the end of his rope mentally.
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  19.  @5Andysalive  And that rescue vehicle CSM 119 is the only "flyable" Apollo spacecraft in existence now, on display at KSC.
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  20. I had to put on my new reading glasses to read this post.
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  21. It's 2019, you think they'd have the technology to add stars to the fake moon landing videos by now, jeez! The Chinese guy just copied Stanley Kubrick's outdated moon-faking technique, no innovation! (this is a joke, don't melt down)
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  22. It's not that hard: India wants Pakistan (and China) to know that they can hold their space assets at risk. Objective achieved. Some people will whine about space debris for a few days or weeks and then they will get bored and forget about it, but India's adversaries will remember the threat. India is betting that most of the space debris will decay and never collide with anyone else's satellites, and the chances of that happening are still pretty low.
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  23. MDD was once a good company, too. And before that, Douglas and MD were once good companies. The DC-3 was introduced in the 1930s and is still in service today.
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  24.  @NeonVisual  Mynocks. Chewing on the power cables.
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  25. That scene in From the Earth to the Moon was awesome. They woke the guy up in the middle of the night and fed him coffee until he came up with a fix.
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  26. ​ @therealjamespickering Anyone involved in ship or air navigation is who TF uses nautical miles. Next stupid question?
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  27.  @MonkeyJedi99  In the Red Mars trilogy the first Mars elevator gets taken down by revolutionaries, who cut the counterweight off beyond synchronous altitude, causing the elevator to wrap around the equator, violently destroying anything or anyone close to the impact track. Because it was made of carbon nanotubes or similar, it didn't rot away, was hard to cut up by tools, and so large parts of it lay on the surface for the rest of the story basically being a giant eyesore and nuisance for the people of Mars.
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  28.  @coopman0  ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE
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  29.  @nottrevorallen  Nobody with a heart who has ever witnessed a space shuttle launch would not think it was epic. Bitching about the shuttle is for space hipsters.
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  30.  @adamc1713  Dream Chaser can't carry 7 people and a school bus-sized payload to orbit and back. People say that capability, mandated by the USAF, was overkill, but it was there, and it was used, for things like Hubble, space station construction, LDEF recovery, and so on. So to me an STS 2.0 would not give up capability, but deliver the same capability with better safety and economy.
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  31. The smile is just his face pulled back from g forces, like in Spies Like Us.
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  32. Rocket explosions are one of the few real life explosions that actually do look like a Michael Bay film.
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  33.  @MX304  The X-20 was also designed with skid landing gear. Never got to fly, unfortunately.
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  34.  @dancoroian1  I'm a republican: someone who keeps going back for more beer.
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  35. Not to mention the Titan V, which was used by Zephram Cochrane to launch his prototype warp drive spacecraft.
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  36. My guess is that FAST, like a lot of communist projects in the past, was probably made bigger than Arecibo for propaganda purposes. The practical or scientific value of such things is secondary to the public perception of party strength. Anyone who thinks it makes Arecibo or any other active radio telescope obsolete is just falling for the propaganda or maybe trying to get in a dig at the US by trolling.
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  37. Whatever else was wrong with the Shuttle's design, its glide ratio was exactly what it needed to be and was never an issue on any flight. If you want to fly a U2 into orbit you're doing it wrong.
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  38. There is an old sci fi short story out there called "The Cold Equations" in which a space traveler is faced with a very grim decision due to the rocket equation. Worth a read.
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  39. "We're passing through the magnetic field, set your deflectors double front."
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  40. Skylab was a modded upper stage, and it was a pretty good station.
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  41. My guess is that the manhole cover bent and started fluttering like a flipped coin, really fast, and was destroyed by heat and acceleration without ever reaching the crazy hypothetical speeds described.
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  42.  @RobertLutece909  Sad for the composer, happy for me. I love Ligeti because of that film.
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  43. Back when I used to use the Orbiter Spaceflight Simulator there was an addon vehicle called the "Dragonfly" that was basically a tug for moving cargo and other modules around a space station. Whoever created it had built into it a detailed model of fuel cells, and I remember that operating the vehicle was complicated due to the complex sequence you had to go through the start up and manage the fuel cells.
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  44. 15:14 "Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (canceled)" cool name, too bad it didn't get built.
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  45.  @benranson8424  America started off as a bunch of ex-British rebels, after all.
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  46.  @absalomdraconis  A heat shield plus a parafoil means making it heavier and bulkier. The idea is to provide a way to survive with the smallest mass penalty. This is even more important on spacecraft than on aircraft.
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  47. That is why we worry that they and Pakistan will nuke each other into oblivion.
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  48. As I get older I find I just don't have the patience to argue with moon hoaxers or flerfers. A lifetime of studying science and engineering have given me the ability to sus out facts in most cases and the ability to do math and make observations which clearly confirm things like how a rocket works or the fact that the planet is round, orbits the sun, etc. I can't convey all of this to someone who has so completely bought into conspiracy theories such that they cannot admit their theory is wrong without suffering some form of embarrassment. You're not just fighting ignorance and bad science; you're fighting human nature and the human tendency to dig in one's heels and defend a position based on fear or ego or other emotions. Someone has to keep arguing the side of reason, of course, but it tires you out after a while and feels so futile at times.
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  49. It might be a DC-X / Grasshopper type test vehicle. Or it might be a big joke to distract us from what they're really building.
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  50. Even Atlas III was pushing it. Atlas II and IIAS were the last "real" Atlas rockets according to many, because they still had the two design features that make Atlas distinct: the balloon tank and the booster-sustainer engine configuration. According to one history book, Lockheed Martin debated whether to name the new rocket Atlas V or Titan V. I think its connection to Centaur and development lineage from Atlas III gives it the right to still call itself an Atlas, if just barely.
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