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Comment by sitkack | Hacker News Reader

Logging the max acceleration in x,y,z would have been better than throwing a bear out of plane. Knowing a bear survives is ridiculous and they knew it. Ethics are orthogonal, cadavers would have ben a better choice.

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What can you compare that acceleration data to? Put a human on a shaker table and measure his brain damage? At some point you have to damage humans or animals to find out their limits.

You would now have numerical values to compare rather the MILSPEC 'dead_bear' units. Nowhere did I make an ethical argument against animal trials or say that we should do experimentation on humans. But launching bears out of an ejection seat was even stupid then.

Logging what with what, in 1962?

He meant actually put a piece of wood log inside the capsule and observe the marks on it after it returned to earth.

A pencil on a spring is enough to measure maximum acceleration, I'm sure by 62 they had something at least as sophisticated.

Imagine if they have the advanced capability of moving the paper under the pencil, they might get acceleration over time.

In 1962 they would have had multi-channel magentic tape (analog) recording. The first flight data recorders date to the early 1940s.

Fitting it in ejection seat might be another challenge but I'm sure they would have developed something before moving to live subjects.

Might these proto-engineers also harnessed radio waves to transport signals across the aether for a form of telemetry?

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