Comments by "Halfdan Ingolfsson" (@Halli50) on "Scott Manley" channel.

  1. The first 2 decades of my aviation career was in unpressurized light twins, single pilot and in a nasty environment weather-wise (North-west part of Iceland), and the rest in an airline setting, larger multi-crew and pressurized turboprops - which was a breeze! My advice, for what it's worth: Getting your IFR rating is the easy part, MAINTAINING your IFR proficiency in coming years is where you have to be really careful. It is a skill that evaporates very quickly if not frequently exercised, something I found interesting to monitor regarding my own skill set after retiring. Still flying privately, I initially reverted to IFR on an infrequent basis, and it was alarming how quickly my proficiency deteriorated.
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  2. Ehrm... Reverse engineering a fictional engine?
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  3. We ALL started our zero-G fiddling early: A pack of cigarettes placed on the glare-shield, the trick consisting of regulating the vertical G with the elevator and the fore/aft movement by reducing power. In a barely-100kt Cessna this lasted a very few seconds - with everyone properly strapped in. Progressing to a 290kt 19-seater extended the zero-G experience beyond 10 seconds, but the basic mission remained the same: Good elevator control for vertical G and judicious reduction of power to control fore/aft movement. Opportunities were rare and, as a result, we usually mucked up a bit! This was always limited to non-IFR ferry flights with one or more professional colleagues in the back = idiotic behavior guaranteed! What I found to be the biggest worry: Bigger toys, bigger egos = nobody strapped in and you REALLY had to be careful when re-introducing positive G: Just a little bit for a second or so (allowing everybody to arrange themselves on the floor) before pulling harder in preparation for the next bit of zero-G fun. Messing this up can cause real physical harm.
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  4. Much as I am disgusted with Fascist Apartheid Musk, one has to admire his engineering teams that made the capture possible. We can all see where this is going, the only painful and ugly wart on the whole issue is Elon Musk, supporter of our equivalent of Adolf Hitler.
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  5. Is NASA going the Boeing way regarding quality? Silly question, they have been for a long time . . .
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  6. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot! Assuming this idiocy was caused by catatonic Russian inter-branch coordination (much like the current catatonic inter-branch coordination of US forces in battlefields), heads are bound to roll among top Russian brass.
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  7. SpaceX has a lot to learn about welding stainless steel. It is a lousy heat conductor and will warp like crazy if precautions are not taken.
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  8. @András Ács, The "world class engineers working there" definitely know about it, just look at the surface "quality" of the thing. They probably just don't care at this stage, I imagine they are concentrating on function over form at this stage. They will take proper precautions in due course, and the final product will definitely not look like it was tack-welded together by a 12-year old (as this example does).
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  9. @András Ács, I am not "attacking" anyone, just stating the fact that stainless steel is a bitch to weld if you want a good surface finish. I actually have no doubt that the geniuses at SpaceX are aware of this and have a ready fix, the "a lot to learn about welding stainless steel" quip was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek. I know I suck at jokes, but you appear to be just as lousy at "getting" a joke, not to mention an admittedly a bad one.
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  10. It's actually hilarious, how your 'Murican grandfathers managed to land and return numerous missions to the Moon with only minimal mishaps - and NO in-flight fatalities, even if their computational resources were inferior to a turn-of-the-century average wrist watch! Why is everyone mucking it up now, with all the immense technological advances of over half a century? True, there are new and untried aspects being tried, but they are only incremental. In this case, redundancy seems to have been ignored - only 1 (one) lidar ranging system available. Jury-rigging an on-board experimental system seems to have saved the day, after a fashion; quick-patch, untried and un-calibrated, it ended with excessive lateral speed knocking the lander over. While not an outright meteor-like crash, it was not "flawless" as the private organization said it was...
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  11. This describe a genuine house of cards. Cross your fingers and hope for nothing, absolutely nothing going wrong.
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  12. Like Scott Manley points out, this is the logical place to redesign and build a modern replacement of the Arecibo Telescope. The general infrastructure (mast foundations, cable anchors and gelogical features) are already there.
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  13. Boeing used to be the Gold Standard regarding safe aviation designs. Sadly, 21'st century Boeing cannot be trusted to do ANYTHING safely. The Boeing label means "Beware" these days.
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  14. Hindsight is 20/20. All the mistakes and things ignored laid bare. Even if the foam strike had caused an EVA to do a pre-re-entry-inspection to discover the heat-shield damage, there were no procedures in place to remedy the situation. The only difference is that the crew would have had reason to believe they might not survive the re-entry. No one knew how much heat-shield damage would be catastrophic, and going in blind was probably better. From the realization that something was wrong to the point of death (loss of consciousness) would have taken less time than a heart attack, a minute or even seconds. The crew would have died fiercely working through whatever emergency checklists that were available. In short, too busy to be afraid...
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