STS51L Accident Questions

In article sFb_d.707104$8l.596168@pd7tw1no,
Dave Michelson writes:
Derek Lyons wrote:
Pat Flannery wrote:


Remember that story about the bats running into the F-117 because they
couldn't see it with their sonar? And the camera that used a acoustical
focusing system not being able to focus on it? Did they even have those
back then?


That sounds like a bull**** story, because sound doesn't behave like
radar.

To paraphrase a certain former submariner,

"ROTFLMAO. Stick to sub stories. There you have a clue."

Let's see now - Three Points:
Bats use their echolocation to detect food in the air,
at distances long enough to allow maneuvering to intercept the target.
Are you suggesting that an F-117 has a lower acoustical cross-section
than a Mosquito?

One of the reasons that an F-117's RCS is as low as it is is the
incorporation of RAM (Radar Absorbing Materials) in the outer skin of
the airframe. That stuff's only effective over a small band of
frequencies.

If that thing were so good at reflecting _all_ types of
wave-propagation phenomena, you wouldn't be able to _see_ the bloody
thing, _would_ you? After all, light & radio are only different
colors of Electromagnetic Radiation.

So, like, you might want to Reset & Run From 0 on your assessment of
Derek's assessment of Ben Rich's (quite misleading, if no downright
inaccurate) claims.

Jive Turkey, ain't never jammed a Radar in his life.

--
Pete Stickney

Without data, all you have in an opinion.

Jorge R. Frank wrote:

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



Like, say Futron? :-)



They aren't the guys to ask; they're in the aerospace consulting
business, so I doubt they are going to say "Yep, we looked at it... and
you know what? There is no real future for commercial space endeavors.
In fact, if we had it all to do over again, we probably wouldn't even be
in the aerospace consulting business. We'd probably be in the seafood
importing business- bringing in low priced Chinese seafood to supply a
franchise of 'Mr. Mao's Little Red Brook' seafood restaurants ('The
journey to a thousand delights begins with a single breaded shrimp!').
Our studies indicate that once the price of a seafood platter drops to
below three dollars, demand goes right through the roof... a pagoda
shaped roof at that!"
I was thinking along the lines of a study done by some hard-nosed
predatory capitalists- the kind of guys who would sell their own mothers
into white slavery, and then garnish here wages to repay "finder's fees"
for locating her customers.
Say Harvard or Yale, somebody like them.

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.



You're looking at the wrong end of the market, at least for this phase of
the game. A century ago, a first class ticket on a transatlantic liner was
over $4000, or over $50,000 in today's currency. Today, a deluxe stateroom
on a world cruise is over $40,000, and the penthouses command $190,000.


I suspect that my ancestors arrived from Ireland in a more economical
manner, possibly as ballast.
The super high spenders make up a small percentage of the total
passengers carried on the cruise ships... plus the cruise ships have fun
things to do on them, and carry several thousand people at a time. In a
space hotel you get the choice of two novel experiences:

1. Being weightless.
This would be fun after you got used to it, but that is going to take a
few days and barf bags; and as I pointed out a while back you not only
have the problem of vomit getting free in the hotel and hanging around
in the form of small droplets that someone can inhale, but also the
problem of the smell- due to the fact that you only have so much air on
board. In fact a lot of smells joining together- vomit, sweat,
flatulence, urine, and feces. This place could smell like the oarsmen's
deck of Spanish galley in no time flat. Crossing over the ocean in a
luxury liner is one thing, crossing the heavens in a prison ship is
quite another. Just ask Geordy LaForge's ancestor Kunta Kinte what
travel to a distant world was like in the old days.
Then there is weightless activity # 1- sex. Everybody is going to want
to try this as soon as they get over their spacesickness, and if they
can get past the fact that the weightlessness has caused their faces to
swell up like groupers from Mr. Mao's, they well take a crack at
it...with the probable result that the violent motion well cause the
spacesickness to return with a vengeance.
The thought of what happens next isn't sensual, or even sanitary.
So the solution may be artificial gravity; but who wants to go into
space and _not_ have weightless sex?
If you spin the hotel for artificial gravity, you have reduced the
exotic sex aspect to the level of making it with someone on a
Merry-Go-Round; unless your name is Michael Jackson, this probably isn't
a major fantasy.

2. Watching the Earth go by.
Which would also be fun, assuming that you are in the weightless, pukey
smelling space hotel.
But in the one with artificial gravity (which has to be around 400 feet
in diameter IIRC to prevent motion sickness as you walk around inside of
it) you end up with that scene out of 2001 with the Earth whirling
around outside the phone booth window. At best its going to be hard to
try to keep your binoculars focused on one point of the surface; at
worst you are going to get dizzy and sick just looking at it.
The solution? Simple- you use a television camera to photograph the
Earth, and project a despun image of it on display screens throughout
the hotel.
In fact, you can now transmit the despun image live to Earth, where
space tourist wannabe's can watch it on their TVs- while pretending to
be on the space hotel and eating food out of tubes. Not bathing for a
week or so would even add the proper ambiance in the similarity of the
aroma of the space hotel.



Everest climbing expeditions also range over $10,000 (once you include the
costs of the sherpas), and you have a one-in-eight chance of getting killed
in the process. There are no shortage of other examples of very high-price,
high-risk tourism. Yes, at least in the early days, this is going to be a
playground for the rich. But if it follows the same pattern as other
transportation markets, it will not remain so for long.



And the nice part about that is that the taxpayer's need not put penny
one toward this effort, as it will develop entirely on it's own if it is
a profitable endeavor.



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.



The problem with the Mathematica study was not rose-colored glasses. The
problem was that there was a profound disconnect between the flight rates
Mathematica said were necessary for economical spaceflight (which remain
true today) and what the as-designed space shuttle was capable of doing.



But you still need the payloads, and although reduce costs up the number
of them (possibly markedly) I don't know if you get up to 200 to 500
flights per year anytime soon. which is probably somewhere near the
break-even point as far as operating costs go.

Pat

On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 14:41:55 -0600, Pat Flannery
wrote:

Just ask Geordy LaForge's ancestor Kunta Kinte what
travel to a distant world was like in the old days.

....Which reminds me of one of my earliest photo editing gags. A still
shot of Kinte caged and awaiting slave processing. A VISOR has been
pasted over his eyes, and the caption reads "Data, I think this
holodeck simulation of yours has gone a bit too far..."

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

Len wrote:

There were--and are--workable solutions. They just
haven't been tried. Instead, official funding has
gone into unnecessarily complex technical approaches.
Two-stage--or even some assisted single-stage--
space transports with existing rocket technolgy, plus
clever system design, will work. This approach was
almost tried in 1972, before being drowned out by the
Space Shuttle. It was almost tried again two decades
later in a black program before being preempted by NASP.


The Air Force had their minishuttle on the 747 carrier concept, but I
guess they didn't think it was worth it without the ability to carry big
reconnaissance satellites.
I'd still like to find out more about this thing though, particularly
the engine layout and type; It looks like a stepping stone X-vehicle
heading toward something like the Starclipper:
http://uk.geocities.com/osaka2015/fdl5.JPG
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/...fdl_launch.jpg
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/...fdl_flight.jpg
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/...e/fdl_land.jpg

The other half of my 1962 position was to rely
on Saturn 1 and rendezvous in LEO to get to the
moon. Like the Manhattan project, I would not
have put all the eggs in one basket. Rather, I
would have gone for one or more competitive
aproaches--competition is probably always cheaper
than concentrating resources without competition. My
competitive suggestion was to go for a (reusable) two-stage
space transport (reusable being a redundant word, IMO).
I think the LEO rendezvous approach could have
been done just as quickly and cheaply as developing
a whole new direct flight vehicle such as Saturn V.



Is the idea to attach a RLV upper component to a lunar apacecraft using
a direct landing on the lunar surface and return to Earth then? Or does
the the RLV just carry the crew to the orbital assembly site of the
lunar spacecraft? A returning aerodynamic RLV could use the Dyna-Soar
skip technique to lower the reentry heating of return at lunar velocities.

Pat

Peter Stickney wrote:

Let's see now - Three Points:
Bats use their echolocation to detect food in the air,
at distances long enough to allow maneuvering to intercept the target.
Are you suggesting that an F-117 has a lower acoustical cross-section
than a Mosquito?



I saw a bat fly into a chain link fence once. I'm still trying to figure
that one out.
If it can't echolocate a chain link fence, there's a opening in the
ecosystem for a giant web spinning bat eating spider.

Pat

Derek Lyons wrote:

In this instance - I am. I've studied sonar, and operated both active
and passive sonars.



The real problem with the faceted idea is that the modieded laminer flow
body of rotation design of our subs would already be pretty good at
deflecting active sonar waves (particularly with the anechocic tiles
installed), except for the sail and the sternplanes. You get one of
those facets lined up at 90 degrees to the emmiting sonar, and you're
going to have a problem.
Then there's problem number two; is the faceting biased toward thwarting
surface combataints, or other submarines near your depth? And
hyrdrodynamicly, this thing is going to be a disater area at anything
more than low speeds- at high speeds you might even get cavitation
bubbles at the junctions of the facets with all the loss of stealth that
that implies.
Still, it would be fun to see what they came up with.
BTW, here's what you need for your desk:
http://www.worldaircorps.com/tmpages/c5820r3w.htm

Pat

In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:

(Snipped stuff which translates as: "Can I get Derek to send himself
to Fort Leavenworth?")

;-)

--
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

On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 15:33:59 -0600, Pat Flannery
wrote:

I saw a bat fly into a chain link fence once. I'm still trying to figure
that one out.

....Chain link I can understand, It's seeing them hit screen wire that
confuses me.

If it can't echolocate a chain link fence, there's a opening in the
ecosystem for a giant web spinning bat eating spider.

....Gary Larson, is that you?

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

In article ,
OM om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org
wrote:

If it can't echolocate a chain link fence, there's a opening in the
ecosystem for a giant web spinning bat eating spider.

...Gary Larson, is that you?

OM

My wife says the banana spiders used to do that when she lived in
Okinawa. :-o

--
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

OM wrote:

"D Schneider" wrote:

A four-man winged shuttle, little cargo capacity (Pat, see the next
paragraph); get this going quickly, and use the "operational savings" to
design Mk 2 with more capacity. Would this have been a Dynasoar
knockoff, or would it look more like STS?

Use the same moldlines for a cargo shroud (a la Shuttle C) to get DOD
*hardware* up quickly, then merge a cargo bay into the Mk 2, perhaps by
making the Mission/Paylod Specialists ride in a Spacehab type "people
container" airlocked to the flight deck.

...IIRC, this was proposed, but nixed by the Air Farce on the grounds
that most of the payloads were required to be returned, especially the
high-security ones. A smaller "Shuttlette" would have allowed for the
results to come back, but the Air Farce wanted the equipment as well.

Dang. But given the Vandenberg Abort Once Around ideas, was the equipment
coming down the same equipment that went up in this scenario ;-)

And yes, I understand Derek's point that you build what you are funded
for. But I'm sure there are people -- and probably were some at NASA at
some point -- who knew how to get the camel's nose into the tent before
the purse string holders knew the rest of the camel would follow. These
guys probably ended in in SDIO :-(

/dps

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