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Nano tape seems interesting alright. If I am looking at the right stuff it uses van der Waals forces for adhesion rather than a traditional adhesive. Thats pretty cool, and re-useable if kept clean.

Others have mentioned some nice tapes, as a person who makes a living from taping spacecraft together here are some of my favourites:

- Kapton P-224 - Excellent all purpose tape with good adhesion and no residue. High thermal performance and insulation

- Black Kapton 100XC - Great for increasing thermal radiative communication. Pressure Sensitive Adhesive forms a very strong bond that can be easily removed with IPA/Acetone.

- Cho-Foil - thick Aluminium tape, much stronger than the normal off the shelf aluminium tapes, commonly used for electrical grounding. Conductive adhesive, decent thermal range.

- ST150 Vacuum Sealing Tape - Used with plastic liners to create a vacuum around odd shapes. Niche, but very reliable and fun to work with (texture like taffy).

- Teflon tape - plumbers and space nerds love it for sealing things, very easy to use too much of it though.

- Glass fibre tape - excellend performance in vacuum, useful for labelling or protecting something that may be exposed to rubbing or friction.

There are a whole host of thermal tapes out there to give you lots of different optical properties that are very useful for cooling/heating: https://sheldahl.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/RedBook.pdf

If I had to choose I would probably choose a place to live over a car. Be that renting or a mortgage. I am however a European, so perhaps less in love with cars than some cultures.

Oh wow, I work for a supplier for ABL and am today in the process of putting some of their stuff into our thermal chamber for cycling. Thats neat.

We work for a lot of launcher companies, but ABL is the most interesting for me (even though we do relatively little for them). The containerised approach to the entire system is a really clever adaptation of existing methods to create a rapid launch system.

For me it was Hirens BootCD. Seems like a slightly different implementation but we swore by it to fix the most awkward of issues.

Have been collecting fountain pens for a good few years now (not quickly, mind, but steadily).

I annecdotally find that i remember things much more clearly when I write with them, particularly when I use varying ink colours. And when I flick back through notes seeing the colour for a topic makes it much easier to skim and recall knowledge.

To add to tge recommendation list, the Muji fountain pen is perhaps the most enjoyable pen I have, including all of my (embarrassingly) expensive pens.

Agreed its quite old now, and for work I have to use the up to date standards as specified by the customer.

However, as a pictoral reference the newer documents arent as clear for me, so this online database is still very useful.

Have used this site a lot over the years, really useful resource. I wish ESA was more willing to do this sort of guidance document rather than just the requirements.

The NASA workmanship guides provide a great set of options for various methods: https://workmanship.nasa.gov/lib/insp/2%20books/links/sectio...

The forst model of that rover was on the ispace lander and I had the pleasure of working with the Jaxa team integrating it. Was super fun to see it rolling back and forth and taking images in the test facility.

It was the payload I was most sad to have lost on our crash.

Hon the Shannon siders!

Yeah I was on the ispace M1 integration team.

I would argue that we havent forgotten how to do spacecraft or even landers. We have the documentation and plenty of engineers in the workforce that have had success in landings, its just that its really hard to do these things.

And on top of that we are doing this in a totally new way with the rise of the 'New Space' approach.

As someone who built, tested, launched, and crashed another commercial lunar lander in the last two years the media around this lander has been quite frustrating.

Sorry to see the lander fail though, I know what they are feeling now and it sucks.

As a spacecraft integration engineer I can confirm that most spacecraft are about 80% kapton tape.

I am in the process of house hunting and buying my first place at the moment (Ireland), and there are many aspects of it that frustrate and anger me, but I think the most aggravating part of it is everyones obsession with the value increasing over time.

I think I get the idea that its an expensive thing to buy, and paying a bank significantly more money that you actually borrow makes you feel like you need to be making money on the investment. But no other object I buy for regular use and functionality would I expect to increase in value. So why should we feel the same way about a house?

Honestly I think if people were less obsessed with their house increasing in value they would see that the terms of a mortgage are crazy, and would refuse to play the banks games.

Built in translation is a big one that I rarely see mentioned.

I was long time fan of FF while living in Ireland and the UK, but when I moved to Sweden and later Germany I was effectively forced to switch to Chrome.

Being required to interact with websites in other languages regularly meant that FF (circa 2018) was just not an option. The chrome experience for translating webpages was vastly superior to any other browser, which I needed to use 3rd party translating apps to get anywhere. These were clunky, low performance black boxes that I tried to live with and failed.

I see now that other browsers are starting to properly do built-in translation, but Chrome was way ahead for a long time. So for non-English speakers I imagine Chrome was a must use tool for a long time.

I asked one of the launch managers last year about the soot, and apparently they used to clean them after each use, but it was taking several days and costing quite a lot. So they just stopped doing it.

Location: Ireland

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Am willing to travel for campaigns and short duration (<3 months)

Technologies: Spacecraft AIT, space system engineering, ECSS crimping certified, harness manufacture, electrical and mechanical integration for flight and lab hardware, spacecraft propulsion testing and integration, Network analysis, Python, office software

Résumé/CV: https://ie.linkedin.com/in/ptisdall

Email: peter.tisdall (at) tutamail.com

I hadbt consudered a stuck locking helicoil in fairness. And seeing the pictures of the fasteners it does seem unlikely to be an access issue, so you are probably right about the torque.

From what I can see the TAGSAM head did use stainless steel screws, but the majority of the structure is aluminium [1]. So its possible there is a galvanic corrosion issue that caused the screws to bind, but I would be a little surprised at that based on how the TAGSAM has been handled throughout its life. Still does feel like the most likely issue though.

Regarding lubrication on screws in space, it is done quite regularly with a variety of lubricants (as well as thread lockers) [2]. I can imagine that none were used in a system that is meant to be kept as free of contaminants as the TAGSAM is though. Hard to know with any amount of confidence.

From experience with spacecraft integration, when the article mentions that they didn't have a suitable tool for removal of two screws, my head immediately jumps to an access issue. Its amazing the number of times I have heard 'it fits in the CAD' from the designers, when you have no access at all for getting a screwdriver to the screw, let alone a torque wrench. So it could be as simple as that.

[1] - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-018-0521-6 [2] - https://ecss.nl/hbstms/ecss-e-hb-32-23a-threaded-fasteners-h...

> Most (>70%) civilians support Hamas and probably a much larger percentage (>90%) would happily mass kill the Jews.

Do you have sources for this, as it seems quite the claim to say 90% of any group of people want the same thing.

Cold welding is a concern that we have to account for during spacecraft assembly, sometimes you really really don't want two pieces of metal to weld themselves together after all.

To prevent it we wither ensure a reasonable gap (if possible). Which has serious impacts on heat transfer. Or use dissimilar materials to prevent it from happening.

Oh sweet, hey Valispace. I can vouch for this software as a spacecraft integrator. I worked with it a few years back as part of a trial and the power of inputing real world hardware measurements of equipment back into a system and see the impact of the measurements system wide is very powerful.

While it is aimed at the spacecraft industry, I can see any industry with concurrent engineering taking advantage of this sort of system.

As someone who has worked onmultiple spacecraft, including a lunar lander, this is no surprise. Cleanrooms are great but ISO 8 (the most common cleanliness standard for spacecraft manufacture) isnt perfect.

Missions to Mars and other planets have much much stricter cleanliness requirements, so much so that it becomes a real barrier to work and cost.

I quite enjoy the idea that some of my DNA is now on the moon.

Can confirm it was hard to sleep last night. I knew there was a high chance of failure but still, not the best evening.

> Incidentally I'm probably selling my house an hour from Dublin a bike ride from the train with gigabit fibre on 3.5 acres soon if anyone's interested.

Christ I would love to be, but 3.5 acres is way out of my league. Good luck with the sale man!

Yes basically. I am in the process of getting a mortgage in Ireland and they will give you up to 4x the gross income of those applying. This doesn't include any deposit or savings you may have of course.

As someone who builds spacecraft I wonder how the engineers who built this particular one might feel.

One of the odd things about this industry is that once its built and launched, it is basically understood that it is never seen again by human eyes. I know I would deeply appreciate being able to see one of mine in orbit. Sort of a pride in knowing it is working away.

I have spent months of my life trying to diagnose issues with spacecraft hardware that ended up being caused by cross-talk from a noisy clock signal in AWG30 wires. Added some shielding and everything worked perfectly.

In the most recent case, the clock was interfering with a series of motors, causing an antenna pointing array from getting lost and moving erratically. We had had some issues with the motors in the past so assumed it was an issue there and performed 100s of tests to try understand the issue. When we realised it was crosstalk I was quite red in the face.

In spacecraft we talk a lot of precaution to avoid crosstalk when laying out our harness. Shielding is not always an option.