STS51L Accident Questions

Pat Flannery wrote:

Derek Lyons wrote:

Even on a glass smooth sea the Sea Shadow left a wake - and it was the
wake that was being detected on radar.

Well, that's not what I got out of Ben Rich's book.
The SWATH hull design and the submerged pontoon's shape were chosen as
much as for wake reduction as any other reason:
http://www.lowobservable.com/Ships.htm

Wake reduction doesn't mean wake elimination Pat. Keep in mind that
many of the radars used at sea are optimized to detect periscopes and
their wakes... A very different problem than that faced by aircraft.

The discovery that Sea Shadow left a detectable wake was a very
unpleasant surprise.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

Pat Flannery wrote:

Derek Lyons wrote:

Remember Ben Rich's description of the Lockheed stealth submarine using
faceted technology to defeat sonar? I'd love to see a drawing of that one.

Sounds like another bull**** story - see above.
(Not to mention the drag problems and self generated noise from a
facted submarine - water doesn't behave like air.)

He says the Navy was adverse to it in no uncertain way.

He also fails to explain why the Navy was against it... Other than
leaving the impression that the Navy didn't recognize True Genius
(I.E. his) when it saw it.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

Pat Flannery wrote:

Derek Lyons wrote:

Not only that, but Congress isn't real likely to fund an ongoing
series of manned missions to nowhere... Esp with Landsat etc proving
what we already knew with MOL: For a large fraction of things worth
doing in space - man isn't needed.


And can in fact screw things up by moving around while the spacecraft is
trying to image things The Soviets found out the same thing with their Almaz
reconnaissance stations. The only advantage you get is in having the crew
looking for targets of opportunity to photograph, and apparently that never
panned out.

OTOH, I've read reports that say the solar types were quite happy with
having people operate the ATM on Skylab. Vibration was a problem, but
the crew could and did redirect the sensors onto interesting targets
of oppurtunity.

This may have had much to do with a) lack of real time ground control
of the ATM and b) solar targets tend to be in view for longer time
frames than ground targets.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

On Sun, 13 Mar 2005 23:47:10 -0600, Pat Flannery
wrote:

That's pretty much how I view Apollo also.
Should I get the Comfy Acceleration Couch?

....Nah, the ejection seat will do.

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

On Sun, 13 Mar 2005 23:51:12 -0600, Pat Flannery wrote:

Someone else might have, Comrade. They could probably gotten there by
1972 or 3 if they put their minds to it.
More likely though, they would have just copied whatever we were doing.

Pat

Comrade! You have broken security by releasing
the Udder Top-Secret HtML code in plaintext!.

!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" html
head
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Snip details of clandestine Anti-Wombat
operations in Utah...

It is too late for you Comrade, the NKVD
Section 9 is on the way, but for the sake
of your replacement please turn off the
HTML on the machine you posted from.

Dos vidanya,

The Middling-High Command

--
Chuck Stewart
"Anime-style catgirls: Threat? Menace? Or just studying algebra?"

Pat Flannery wrote:

What's needed though is an impartial assessment of the possible
expansion of space usage by someone completely outside the field.

There's a generic problem: The credibility (and in hindsight,
accuracy) of market research inevitably falls off sharply as it moves
from asking current users/customers "How much more X would you do at a
lower price?" to asking non-u/c "At what lower price would you start
doing X?"

I usually rail against trying to measure other technologies against IT
and especially Moore's Law, but just this once... Ken Olsen of
DEC -- which had sandbagged mainframe vendors with mini-computers for
small companies and departments -- famously doubted in the 1970s that
anybody would have much use for a computer at home. That wasn't just a
quantitative miss (PCs would cost less than he could credit), but a
qualitative failure to imagine that PCs would come to offer games,
communications, music/video/photo libraries, matchmaking, Google, etc,
etc. Likewise, distribution of recorded music was way down on Edison's
list of uses for the phonograph.

I don't blame space entrepreneurs for seeking a security blanket in
market research, but a large dose of "build it and they will come"
optimism is not only necessary but inescapable.

-Monte

In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:

This:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedi...6197-br500.jpg
Is far more interesting than this:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/5...A_Progress.jpg

Not to an engineer, Pat . . . :-p

--
Herb Schaltegger, B.S., J.D., GPG Key ID: BBF6FC1C
"The loss of the American system of checks and balances is more of a security
danger than any terrorist risk." -- Bruce Schneier
http://dischordia.blogspot.com
http://www.angryherb.net

In article ,
(Derek Lyons) wrote:

(Not to mention the drag problems and self generated noise from a
facted submarine - water doesn't behave like air.)

Well, that depends on the Reynolds number you're interested in . . .
water does, in fact, behave a lot like air at low velocity (e.g., when
compressibility doesn't matter).

--
Herb Schaltegger, B.S., J.D., GPG Key ID: BBF6FC1C
"The loss of the American system of checks and balances is more of a security
danger than any terrorist risk." -- Bruce Schneier
http://dischordia.blogspot.com
http://www.angryherb.net

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...

What's needed though is an impartial assessment of the possible expansion
of space usage by someone completely outside the field. At $300 per pound,
that one week tourist flight comes in at $75,000 dollars, and now we're
talking 30 Carnival cruises to Europe.
Somebody who's into space advocacy is going to to look at the situation
through rose colored glasses, and you'll soon be back to something like
the Mathmatica study on the Shuttle as far as reality goes.

I think $75,000 will lift 250 pounds of inanimate payload (e.g. corned beef
sandwiches) into space eventually, but not a tourist. Especially if you want
said tourist to come back alive.

On 2005-03-14, Derek Lyons wrote:

OTOH, I've read reports that say the solar types were quite happy with
having people operate the ATM on Skylab. Vibration was a problem, but
the crew could and did redirect the sensors onto interesting targets
of oppurtunity.

This may have had much to do with a) lack of real time ground control
of the ATM and b) solar targets tend to be in view for longer time
frames than ground targets.

If memory serves, though, this is the sort of thing that can reasonably
well be designed for, now; a computer able to process the general
imagery in real-time and identify weirdnesses for the instrumentation to
look at - after all, solar prominences tend to be visibly remarkable. So
real-time ground control may not even be required...

--
-Andrew Gray