Amazing stuff.
Some screencaps of Musk sitting inside the thing:
http://i.imgur.com/U2wkPV6.png, http://i.imgur.com/KHM0Phn.png
21st century spacecraft indeed.
Some screencaps of Musk sitting inside the thing:
http://i.imgur.com/U2wkPV6.png, http://i.imgur.com/KHM0Phn.png
21st century spacecraft indeed.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bo0_-6iCMAAmCL8.jpg:orig
Very retro chic with some 2001 vibes. Some interesting speculation on the touch screens and vibration damping over on reddit too:
http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/26tb6o/dragon_v2_con...
"I read an article on the SLS/Orion. They had a problem with vibrations making screens unreadable. It would have cost millions of dollars to dampen the pod vibrations so the pilots could read their instruments. Then a scientist realized that if you changed the monitor refresh rate to match the vibrations, the screens looked perfectly clear. The million dollar fix was abandoned for a 10 cent accelerometer that adjusted the refresh rate automatically. I see no reason why spacex couldn't use this solution to make the screens useful in the rigor of flight."
(I don't mean to accuse NASA bureaucrats of corruption. What I think happens is that NASA and partners come up with a design and take it to Congress for funding. Congress asks for more design choices. Curiously, the design that uses certain contractors receives funding, and the other ones don't.)
Thiokol won the contract for the space shuttle SRBs because James Fletcher was the head of NASA. Fletcher had previously been president of the University of Utah. He thus had connections with Thiokol, and also with Senator Jake Garn (R-Utah).
There were four bids for the SRBs. NASA engineers selected the Aerojet bid, which came in at the lowest price. Fletcher overruled his own engineers and picked Thiokol.
Because Thiokol was located in landlocked Utah, their SRBs would have to be delivered in pieces and reassembled at the Cape, using O-rings to seal the joints. The failure of the O-rings in cold weather then killed the 7 astronauts on Challenger.
To add insult to injury, Aerojet had been planning to manufacture the SRBs in Florida, in one piece, shipping them to the Cape by barge. Hence, no assembly, no O-rings, and no dead astronauts.
To add further insult to injury, James Fletcher was reappointed NASA Administrator after the Challenger explosion!
Jake Garn became one of only two Congressmen to fly into space.
At least some sort of revenge was had upon him....
Looks like he flew before the Challenger explosion. I wonder if he ever realized how close to death he came on his own flight, and his own role in it.
Astronauts on Soyuz and Shenzhou do not have any problem with vibrations making the screen unreadable. That's because they don't have a vibration problem. Soyuz and Shenzhou are launched on liquid rocket boosters.
Similarly, astronauts on Dragon won't have any problem seeing the screen due to vibrations. The Falcon 9 is also an all-liquid rocket.
The reason that SLS/Orion will vibrate so badly is that it uses solid rocket boosters. The SLS uses SRBs because it is required to use shuttle-derived components. The shuttle used SRBs because they were cheaper than the proper solution of designing liquid rocket boosters.
This sums up, in a nutshell, what's wrong with the American space program. A budget expedient from the 1970s is forcing technical workarounds well into the 21st century.
Even today, in the 21st century, the US Congress mandates Solid Rocket Boosters in all NASA heavy lifters, as a Congressional mandate with strong oversight on design to ensure compliance.
The reason is purely political. There is no engineering or scientific benefit to SRB's, not a single one.
But there are benefits to propping up SRB companies with NASA purchase mandates that we source ICBM stuff from.
[1] http://cache.preserve.io/q8grbgyj/56bf2d42b93df82c576f20f05b...
edit: Actually, I'm wrong. It seems Microgramma and Manifold are used for HAL's displays, but the panels seem to be set in Futura and Univers.
[1] http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kncX0RhY9G8/UEsQLfuICsI/AAAAAAAAXR...
Endeavor spacecraft controls: http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4f803e53ecad04f5620...
I understand these are two different machines, but now it feels like we are in the future.
It should also be made clear that even when an astronaut is 'manually' controlling the space shuttle, they are only providing inputs to the outer loop of a very complex feedback control system.
You could demonstrate, but I don't think it was possible to verify safety with such small a fleet in a decent timeframe. Let's say you accept a 1:100 chance of disaster, and you want to verify that experimentally. You certainly can't do that with fewer than 50 normal launches. That would have taken NASA over 5 years (assuming a vastly sped up launch schedule made possible by the lack of danger to humans)
Alternatively, suppose you decide to test beyond the normal flight parameters, and launch a few shuttles with ice on them, a few with O-rings that aren't 100% up to standard, a few in high winds, etc. Even if you try to stay just on the edge of destructive testing, you would run out of shuttles to launch before you know it.
For example, there were a lot of O-ring leak incidents in the years leading up to Challenger. Almost every flight had a problem with it to some degree. It just wasn't bad enough to destroy the craft until various factors came together.
Similarly, leading-edge damage from debris was a problem throughout the Shuttle program, but it wasn't severe enough to lead to disaster until Columbia got unlucky.
Once you were confident in the cause of the disasters, it would be reasonable to mitigate them, then fly a couple and look for any sign of these smaller failures, which should also be stopped by the fixes.
That's pretty much how the human brain works, with the astronauts in this case being the cortex.