Posts by Vulch 527 posts • joined 28 May 2008
There's an ISS pass due over the UK starting just after 22:50* this evening. Watching last night I saw the ISS itself with two objects chasing it, one of those was Nauka and I suspect the other was the second stage of the Proton.
* Use something like Heavens Above to get exact timings for your location.
The ITV company I worked for once upon a time hired summer work experience students. One summer the maintenance department were contemplating putting calibrated markings on the floor by the monitor repair bench so they could estimate the EHT voltage by how far their student jumped/got thrown back when he touched the internals in an inadvisable manner. You'd think he'd have learnt after a couple of shocks, but this went on for weeks...
The delay on the first shuttle launch meant that the studio booking at Televison Centre for the BBC's coverage had run out. The only spare (BBC) studio available was in Bristol so all but one of the production team had headed down the M4, but Bristol had no videotape machines free. As a freshly minted VT engineer in the dungeons of TV Centre I was known to be a bit of a space enthusiast, and myself and a housemate got the job of feeding the inserts from machines in London to the studio in Bristol (and even editing some of the packages ourselves) for the duration of the mission, along with the remaining member of the production team who had been in her job about as long as we had in ours. We even got a day or two of overtime out of it as it was going to be tricky enough without the Bristol end having to deal with multiple sets of London engineers.
There's another problem in that the tankage is only certified for something like nine fuelling cycles. They've already used up two, the repeat will use a third, and they'll need at least one when it gets to the Cape to prove all the pad facilities work. A couple of last minute problems during launch attempts and they're looking at the possibility of having to take it all apart and use a new core stage.
Many years ago I had a removeable pack disc drive that would pick three questions from a pool of around six to make sure you really wanted to format a pack. Half the questions in the pool needed an answer of "No" rather than "Yes" so just clicking the "Yes" button three times usually wouldn't work.
From an interim report a while ago I think it wasn't so much a plug put in upside down as the plug that was supposed to go to unit 1 of something was plugged into identical unit 2 and vice versa. This meant that when the flight computer said "Left hand down a bit" the wrong unit responded and it screaming "No! Your OTHER left!" just made things worse. Splitting the routing of control and sensor feedback would be a sensible solution if it isn't done already, a test of "Left hand down a bit" with the feedback going through a different route would need at least two wiring errors to not give a result of "Left hand moving up a bit".
China may be far behind the Soviet/Russian space programme when it comes to automated docking, but it appears they beat the USA by a few years.
(Russia 1967, ESA 2008, China 2011, USA 2019. Corrections welcome, NASA did try an automated docking earlier but it failed and I can't spot a reflight)
Maybe if UK members of the EU fisheries committee had bothered to turn up to meetings, and voted in favour of better policies when they did, and the UK government hadn't decided to put no restrictions on fishermen selling their quotas to foreign boats?
The source code for the apps and the back end was uploaded to the NHSX account on GitHub this morning. Not much in the way of activity between the original upload and this one.
Hmmm... Take half a dozen Starlink frames and bolt them together, keep the command and control bits, propulsion system and solar array from one of them, and you've got a nice bus for a 1m telescope that could be launched along with a batch of actual Starlinks. Feels like a nice student project to sort out a design that could be easy to manufacture and put several into orbit.
The SpaceX crew Dragon deliberately went on a slow journey so the systems and habitability could be properly tested, in fact after the first launch attempt was aborted for weather the next opportunity was skipped because the flight would have been too short. Future Dragons may well take a quicker route if the timings are right.
All launches to the ISS from whatever launch site are timed to go up as the ground track of the ISS orbit passes over the launch site, but the ISS can be at any point along the orbit. This means the station and craft land up in the same plane but have to wait until the Soyuz/Dragon/Cygnus/Whatever catches up before they can dock. The different rockets can cope with different amounts of off ideal timing by doing a small (it costs fuel and payload) dogleg manouevre, and the latitude of Baikanour means the ground track gives a lot more flexibility in exact launch times when combined with the Soyuz capabilities. The Russians are thus able to pick launch times and dates to minimise the flight time, NASA and JAXA could pick launch dates that would give a 2 orbit 3 hour trip, but that would drastically reduce the number of possible launch windows.
It appears to be important to know exactly what is meant by "It can be made to work". I've been poking around reading various articles and papers as I think up new keywords to look for. Best paper I've found so far involved using the Iridium satellites and suggested a likely accuracy (CEP) of around 10km, with various post-processing (which seemed to be mostly a case of waiting a while to collect more data) that could be reduced to around 400m. So yes, it can be made to work, but...
Handily, if you take the Flanders and Swann London Omnibus* and fill it with concrete the result is near enough to 100 ton(ne)s to visualise the Chelyabinsk meteor as being comprised of such Monarchs of the Road.
* 30ft long by 10 ft wide. Not mentioned in the lyrics is 15ft tall making it easy to create a cube using 6 of them. NB Dimensions of actual buses may not be the same.
Elsewhere speculation is split between him having rejected proposals from Boeing for both Lunar Gateway resupply and the Lunar Lander and them leaning on people, or for having included the Blue Origin bid for the Lander and the Orange One getting upset because Bezos is so supportive of the White House occupant.
Strictly speaking it was Apollos 15 and 19 were the second batch of cancellations, with 16-18 being renumbered to become 15-17. In the original schedule Apollo 16 was going to be the first to carry an LRV so the less capable all-walking version of 15 was the one that got the chop.
IT Admins/support group concensus on tickets for VPN problems seems to be "Are you using wifi? Yes? Then I'm closing this ticket, open a new one if you're still having problems with a wired connection".
Lots of interference with everyone, their kids and their dog all trying to use wireless connections in multiple adjacent premises on a limied number of channels.
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