The Astronomy Thread

Tuco said:

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Fucker said:

How was it superior? It made a single flight and performed no useful missions at all. Silly Russians. Complete Xerox copy of ours and they still couldn't get it to work. It was another blazing failure like the Tu-144...whuch itself was another Xerox copy they couldn't get to work.

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Its as i said, it had 100% autonomous flight capability from lift off to landing along with having a jet engine which gave it incredible flexibility which it demonstrated on its only landing. Not only that but the engines developed for its boosters are what ULA uses today on it's Titan rockets.

Obviously who knows what the long term success rate would have been with it but remember the Space Shuttle suffered 2 complete hull losses with all crew. Seeing as how the Shuttle was a shit design that shouldnt have ever have been built it wouldnt have been hard to be better than it. The whole reason it only flew once was because the USSR was in the middle of disintegrating when it was finalized. That sealed its fate regardless of how well it performed.

Oldbased said:

Not sure if the TPS was done in house or contract but appears the QC oversight had tons of concerns and issues and many tiles are being replaced. Damaged tiles, cracks too wide, not flush fitted, loose and so on. That's going to cost a week easy.
Also initially BN4 was to be lowered off the orbital launch tower( OLT ) to install fuel arm to the main tower but now will be sent back to production site for swap of various things and going to go ahead and upgrade some parts to BN5+ system. I can probably dig up more on this as it is vague but not intentionally, sources very not very specific and I think NSF had the same source as it parrots just that.

This video also came out today and is a good watch on all the thermal stuff specifically for SpaceX.

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I wonder how many of those tiles were basically trash tiles they threw on because they didn't want to waste new ones or something. I also wonder how much they were directed to yeet those bitches on ASAP and not try to triple check that they were properly fitted.

Fucker said:

100% of the astronauts who died at NASA was due failures of management, not engineering. There wouldn't have been any loses if management listened to the people who designed and built them. Shuttles were examples of pretty fine engineering and performed their missions admirably despite being kept in service for far longer than they were designed to.

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Mismanagement aside, the Shuttle is a god awful design that had fundamental safety flaws and was an incredibly efficient launch platform.

The design of the Shuttle precluded any form of an escape/abort mechanism aside from ejection thats wherent really designed to be used and would have had major ethical implications(there was only 2 or 4 ejection seats iirc so half the crew didnt have any) if you did use them. Basically once the Shuttle launched the crew was strapped in with zero abort options until the SRBs dropped and even then they where high risk. Challenger exploded long before the SRBs dropped. Contrast this with conventional crewed rockets which have small rockets designed to extract the crew cabin if it looks like the rocket is going to fail, a system thats proven to work as the Russians found out a few years ago.

Then you had the incredibly fragile thermal tiles. Due to the design of having the massive liquid fuel tank on the side of the Shuttle ice/insulation falling off was always a big danger and as we saw with Columbia it was only a matter of time until falling ice/insulation would cause fatal damage to the tiles.

Finally it was just insanely inefficient. The Shuttles required months of maintenance and inspection after every flight. The SRBs where basically reusable in name only as the logistics of recovering them made any cost savings moot. The key design requirement of being able to capture a object in polar orbit and bring it back down was never once used. That huge delta wing was 100% useless in space and just reduced payload capacity and ability to maneuver in space. It carried no fuel so it had zero ability to ever leave LEO.

Yes it was a marvel of engineering especially when you consider it was designed in the 1970s but it was still an awful design that severely setback our space program. It was built because it sounded like a sleek forward thinking program, and politicians love that kind of stuff. Reality is post Apollo NASA became 100% a jobs program and the Shuttle is the result of that.

Oldbased said:

No doubt they were under extreme pressure to get it covered enough for the fitting and photo op, especially given Elon said exactly when he was bringing select media in. I still laugh that he has been practically living on site at Starbase in his 50k house. Guy is a mini Tony Stark.
Back on to the TPS I think even Elon may be at fault, not only the pressure but the acceptance level. I think prior to BO's rubbing he didn't care if reentry suffered issues as much as a launch, separation and a orbit. Then BO started memeing it all and suddenly he is going for the gold. Not suggest they cut all the corners, just some goals last month were more important than others and now all goals are with the BO stuff and FAA dragging. He was coasting good after SN15s success but success only buys euphoria for so long until reality crawls back in.

"Just a few" observations from QC and marked tiles overnight. Not sure which color is which problem but I think it was broken, loose, gap
View attachment 366075

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Would be super interesting to see how well Starship can deorbit with a bunch of botched tiles