Slashdot Mirror
Amateur Rocket Launch a Failure; NASA Debuts Shuttle-cam
Anonymous Coward writes "CNN has posted the story of the failure of the amateur rocket launch that was reported in a previous Slashdot story. 'The launch was spectacular and the rocket was performing as planned. However, the rocket experienced motor failure during the flight and the flight was terminated," said Eric Knight, co-leader of the CSXT mission.' NASA is planning to mount a camera on the external fuel tank and broadcast an October 2nd shuttle launch.
Allow me to be the first to say:
SONOFABITCH!!
GODDAMMIT!!
fuck
crap
*sigh*
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
Is that what they call 'just letting the fucking thing crash into the ground' nowadays?
Just look at the original proposal and plans, and look what they've cut it back to. All it is a big jobs project. And the Space Shuttle technology is so old they are having to scrounge eBay for old computer parts.
I'm sorry, but it just makes me sick. And we actually think NASA some day will send someone to Mars. Yeah right. We need someone to come along and either replace NASA entirely, or at the very least scare them into cutting back the beaurocracy and actually performing again.
John! When is Armadillo Aerospace going to show these n00bs how it's done? Screw Doom 3, get your ass to Mars!
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Actually, it probably was.
AFAIK, for flights such as these, even when the flight path has a low population index, you STILL need to have a "remote detonation" capability to keep it for veering off course and crashing into important things/people.
With rockets, since the fuel is itself reactive/explosive, they can usually keep the explosives package fairly small and secure against false authorizations (your "Picard four-seven-alpha-tango).
I'm more bummed that all the instrumentation was destroyed, so it's going to be *very* difficult for them to figure out why the motor barfed. I wonder what they were collecting from ground sensors... It would definitely be neat to see how their avionics package compares to say Carmack's http://www.armadilloaerospace.com lander...
I mean, it's not rocket science...oh, wait...
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Pretty much the same thing that would happen if an aged driver had a heart attack and crashed his car into a Department of Motor Vehicles service facility.
Or if a restaurant exploded because of a faulty natural gas valve.
Or if an airliner had a mechanical problem that caused it to crash into a suburban neighborhood.
Or if a cosmetic medical device caused unforseen side effects later on.
Liability insurance, my man. Liability insurance.
Guess who doesn't have to have it: NASA
Guess who doesn't have to pay if they fuck up: NASA
Guess who picks up the tab if they do: you and me
Edith Keeler Must Die
The Darwin Awards Club is calling it a "promising success".
:-)
Motto: "To boldly die like no man has died before"
Table-ized A.I.
...open source software is bound to fail and we should all use Microsoft software since they employ some of the smartest and most experienced people in the world and I would not trust anyone else to be writing operating systems to control my servers.
"Our experiment to study the smoke and debri dissapation patterns of atmospheric explosions has been a complete success!"
Table-ized A.I.
Nasa employs some of the smartest and most experienced people in the world and I would not trust anyone else to be launching rockets in to the sky. I believe NASA should have a monopoly on space travel as they are the only ones who seem to get it right.
Oh? Feet != Meters
When I submitted the article (yeah, little bit of bitterness), I added the following link:
Web Sources for NASA TV, or http://www.nasa.gov/ntv/ntvweb.html for the link-fearing.
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
"Rockets" are hard to get right. If they weren't, everyone would have ICBMs by now.
-Paul
Nasa employs some of the smartest and most experienced people in the world ...
That's the same bunch who screwed up metric --> english conversion and crashed a martian lander, right?
Boeing employs some of the smartest and most experienced people in the world....
Thats the same bunch who had a hydraulic system fail and a plane crashed right?
NASA has launched more missions than anybody else, and they have had more successful missions that any body else. They have also had more failures than anyone else, but thats thanks to a little thing called the law of averages.
Face it, NASA has been sending things in the sky for 40 straight years now. In all that time, they landed on the moon, helped fly four craft to the farthest reaches of the solar system, landed 3 successful missions on Mars, and have helped run two successful space stations.
All this, with only 7 astronauts lost. How many people do you spposed died in the first 40 years of aviation? How about the first 40 years of automobiles?
So don't give me any of this "NASA can't even even get metric conversion right" crap. For the last four decades, NASA has regularly pulled off shit that other countries only dream of.
Do you have Linux and a DotPal? Click here now!
Still, a remarkably good safety record.
I helped out at this launch attempt as part of the recovery team and I can tell you the following:
Amateur rocketry, like all rocketry, is used to failure
If you've met or heard of Ky, you'd realize that he has had plenty of successes and failures to deal with. And Ky is just the CEO of sorts to what amounts to a massively talented technical team. Having gotten the rocket off the ground was an accomplishment itself; the FAA puts enormous safety restrictions on the launch, of which very few are satisfied at any given moment.
The failure itself wasn't that dangerous either. The rocket did not explode like a fireball. It just made a sort of "pop" sound and broke into pieces. The selection of the launch site has a lot to do with ensuring that such pieces don't come down and harm anyone.
Strapping a camera for a shuttle launch is not going to cost NASA too much in the grand scheme of things.
For an agency that is in desperate need of government funding, however, I think it is a wonderful idea.
Little things like the camera will only get people interested in space and science and bring public support for NASA.
I cannot wait to see the video. The animation was great as it was.
Now I just need to find a friend with a true satellite dish. A web-cast days later will not be the same.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
> NASA has launched more missions than anybody else
NASA has launched more manned missions than anybody else, but the Russians have launched nearly TEN TIMES as many space mission.
This is when someone adds "Yeah they had to, because their electronics suck, so they need to replace their sats more often", but that doesn't change the point about launches.
John Carmack
Feet != Meters
Well duhhh! Everyone knows a meter equals a yard, not a foot!
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
If you want to see some other videos taken by this camera, visit our RocketCam Gallery. They're not of the shuttle, but they're pretty inspiring nonetheless.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.