Comments by "Stephen Villano" (@spvillano) on "Scott Manley"
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I'd have gone with clean room environment and vacuum chamber assembly to avoid gas pockets. But then, I'd also not have used expired carbon fiber or a viewport that was rated for 2/3 of the intended depth.
Worse, no xray inspections, ultrasound, etc after each mission. Just acoustic monitoring for popping, which if that happened, it was already beginning to fail and one won't make it to a safe depth.
Way too many corners cut, turned a cube into a sphere and the ocean dutifully refined the size of that sphere.
What should have been done is proper environmental control for assembly, proper selection of components and then, use the damned thing as an ROV for a hundred missions minimum, cut it apart to examine everything and build a new one based upon lessons learned from the first one. On the third, then consider carrying passengers.
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Well, all of the TPS tiles have been silica based. The earliest, so delicate that one could, with a badly sprained hand, crush them easily by accident and were about as waterproof as the Titanic currently isn't. Later versions improved greatly on strength, which even now remains not much to write home about and waterproofing - which has improved tremendously.
Discussing the things, as Scott mentioned, ITAR can be a royal pain in the gonads, with prosecution being quite aggressive and the regulations being so nebulous in some areas as to literally leave it open enough that one could cite someone for an ITAR violation for discussing the chemical formula for pure water.
And given my military background initially involved intimate involvement in nuclear weapons, suffice it to say, we had a keen idea on ITAR regulations. That dated back to when even PGP encryption was considered a weapon.*
*Entertainingly, an allied foreign nation had ordained that encryption, especially VPN's were unlawful within their nation as they considered the technologies weapons. Citizens and residents were rather stuffed, but banks explained patiently that there were three chances that they'd engage in unencrypted financial transactions, slim chance, fat chance and no chance and that they'd cease doing business within said country.
Policies swiftly changed for some odd reason.
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Those ribs would also impart additional linear strength to the tank, which at the time were problematic when depressurized. A few early missiles would collapse from their own mass if depressurized.
I do wonder though, how much hydrogen was retained in the foam, as hydrogen is infamous for infiltrating pretty much anything. Still, better inside than outside to slam into the stack as it's speeding through the atmosphere!
Rockets are easy. Make a bomb, have it explode slowly in one direction, add steering components, there you go. Making one that doesn't explode in all directions, that part's hard. ;)
Space is easy, surviving in space, tricky. There's a reason it takes an hour to open a hatch and the checklist is heinous, for good reason!
Getting back alive, trickiest of all. The Russians do it by making a spacegoing tank - I can't think of any US spacecraft that could enter the atmosphere inverted, but the Russians survived multiple times of service module failed separation resulting in inverted entry.
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Oh, but we've got high speed data now. And a half second and change lag round trip...
Used geosynch birds in the military at times, typical lag ranged from 550 ms - 650 ms round trip.
Maybe they'd prefer a cooler locale than earth orbit, say, Mars, where lag ranges from 4.3 minutes to 24 minutes. Ignore that sunny thing getting in the way on occasion or when the planet's facing the wrong way, Harry Potter's magical cue stick will fix that.
Hey, I'm feeling nice, usually I call it Harry's marital aid, in somewhat less family friendly terms.
There are around a thousand things I can think would go well in space, a data center for earth is decidedly not one of them - not even in LEO, where it'd need to be boosted back up fairly frequently or that data center would get decidedly toasty briefly, then go offline in chunks.
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Well, there are videos of after of both prompt criticality accident victims, thankfully, they'll remain classified indefinitely.
What that level of radiation did to those men was beyond what a horror film could ever show.
I do seem to recall a 6 ton design yield test, can't recall the test name and I doubt there'd be a video released on that silly design.
Still, were I asked to fire a Davey Crockett device, "Sir, did you just say that you want me to toss a whatlear whathead close to hand grenade distance?! Sir, I really need you to urinate into this specimen container for analysis, because you have to be fucking high".
We jokingly called them what they were, nuclear hand grenades.
The test, obscene. Fired the damned thing, had men run right into ground zero's fallout.
Actually met some of those veterans, studied for life through the VA.
Ignored for life - those downwind of above ground nuclear testing. Properly named Downwinders, there's a Wikipedia article on them.
I was born a week after Czar Bomba detonated. I still have a higher background gamma count than my children and grandchildren.
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Where something similar might work is, if we suddenly went into "Mars or bust" mode, dozens to hundreds of probes, a constellation of comms birds in orbit, one data center on the surface, where one has the thin atmosphere and even the lithosphere to help reject heat would make more sense.
For this, heat rejection, ridiculous size that'll be an instant Kessler syndrome, absurd lag, don't get me started on restocking reaction mass as it's exhausted, just for the top few problems that come to mind says, "a great big nope". Add in Murphy's Law with space weather, yeah, Murphy says, as soon as you deploy the panels, Sol will have a tiff and now half of your panels got crispy.
But, great scam.
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@jasonwalker9471 not quite, cosleeping, crib padding, infant positioning, not using a damnable pillow, as all are risk factors. They've recently detected genetic markers that suggest respiratory drive is lower and can potentially fail if the infant falls too deeply asleep as well.
Tons of research, little so far to show beyond the suggestion of one set of genetic markers maybe.
Way back in the mid-80's, our youngest was diagnosed with SIDS, we were loaned a world of monitoring equipment to monitor her breathing, laughably, our cat alerted us several minutes before the alarms would go off. We'd be standing there checking, the alarm would finally go off, the cat already having warned us by meowing and pacing. Would that we could figure out what alerted the cat!
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Hydrogen bombs used and still use lithium deuteride, which fissions down to tritium, which is fused with the already present and extremely angry deuterium. First attempt was infamous, as one common isotope of lithium was thought to not be of use in a fusion reaction, but to their astonishment, was quite useful. That test, Castle Bravo, where the crew inside of the shot cab, where the bomb is detonated from were trapped from detonation time until early evening, when the hottest fallout isotopes had decayed to a safe enough level to be able to run, while wearing sheets to limit contamination to the helicopter for evacuation.
The sheets were left on the ground as they boarded the bird.
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