UPDATED: See more at the end.
Sure, “crazy” and “stupid” are obvious. But I’m thinking more along the lines of “vapid.” There’s something about the woman’s voice here that I find to be *really* grating. Not just the insane worldview on display, but just the voice itself, the speaking style that seems… I dunno. Like, omigawd, old-school Valley Girl but with a dash of stoner thrown in, so that her *voice* sound… what? Lazy? How to describe it?
Take a look at the video after the break and despair.
Well, this ain’t good. During propellant loading operations, an explosion occurred at the Falcon 9 launch pad, destroying the rocket and the Amos 6 communications satellite.
Details are fuzzy, but some reports suggest that it was the hydrazine propellant for the *satellite* that was the cause of the explosion rather than the Falcon 9 itself.
So far, very little to go on. All the videos I’ve seen start well after the explosion; not too many people were filming the rocket at the time, as nothing was scheduled to happen right about then. I’m sure more will come out later. The engineer in me say “probably just one of them things, sometimes mistakes are made or mechanisms fail,” but the more paranoid part of me wonders about:
So, which would be worse? Bog-standard engineering/operations failure… or sabotage?
UPDATE: Video of the explosion itself:
Time between visible explosion and audible is about 12 seconds, so the camera is probably about 2.5 miles away.
Here are some craptacular screenshots from the above video:
Note that the explosion seems to originate from just below the payload fairing…
The explosion starts up top, and you can see it march down through the booster, bursting the tanks.
A few seconds in, you can see the payload fairing drop. By this point the booster itself is long gone; it seem like the fairing was actually being supported by the tower. Note that the top of the tower is now bent over.
Since the explosion originated below the payload shroud, my guess is that the *payload* didn’t initially explode. Looks like either the upper stage or the feed lines leading into the payload. In either event, it’s damned odd to have an explosion at the point in the process. A static discharge event? A hydrazine leak onto something catalytic?
Apparently, the science is sound (UPDATE: Maybe not so much). The headline and the subject might be *slightly* NSFW, so it’s after the break.
China will be building them based on the Ukrainian design, presumably with Chinese engines and equipment. The question is: why? What ginormous payloads do the Chinese think they’ll need modernized Mriyas for? The An-225 was designed to carry the Soviet “Buran” space shuttle orbiter on its back… *perhaps* the Chinese are thinking of doing the same thing. Feel free to speculate.
The article suggests the Chinese believe that the first of an unspecified number of new AN-225’s will fly in 2019… only three years away. That’ll be a neat trick, unless the Chinese have been working away at this for a while, or are going to work themselves to death to get it done, or are going to half-ass certain aspects of the process. I wouldn’t bet against any of those.
The 1980s were terribly awesome… if you were there at the time. Looking back a lot of it doesn’t hold up, but the nostalgia will never die.
In the previous installment I worked out what I think the diameter of the individual modules is on the very large Lockheed Space station in this piece of art:
At the time I devoted my efforts to diameter and just kinda half-assed the module length. Now behold, in this latest installment of Don’t You Have Anything Better To Do Theater as I work out the module length with greater precision and less guesswork, using image processing programs (specifically Paint Shop Pro) and CAD programs (specifically Rhino 3D).
News out of Germany:
The small northern German town of Parchim has only 150 Muslims and no dedicated mosque, so they meet in a transformer station. But someone bricked-up the entrance to said “mosque” with cinderblocks, and added a number of flyers explaining why. Terrible, just terrible. I mean, look at this:
Whatever happened to craftsmanship? To taking pride in doing a quality job? For the love of God, Montressor, learn basic bricklaying.
The fliers included things like quotes from Turkish president Erdogan: “The mosques are our barracks, the minarets our bayonets, the faithful our soldiers”. Left unexplored in the article is *why* the “far right” might take issue with sentiments such as that.
I can’t add anything here except to suggest reading this and preparing to become upset.
The true story of U.S. soldiers left for dead in Iraq, their epic battle for survival, and the military cover-up that kept them silent – until now
Military hardware design programs often have code names that are random or nearly so, so you can’t figure out what they are if you overhear them. Concepts like “Have Blue” or “Copper Canyon” or “Science Dawn” or even “Silver Bug” are pretty opaque. But every now and then there are concepts like Avro Canada’s 1960 idea for a truck capable of carrying and launching two Minuteman ICBMs: “Big Wheel.” For once, the name matched the product.
One wonders what sort of career these might have had in the Monster Truck circuit after they became obsolete.
This is a document I scored off ebay a little while back; it arrived and I’ve scanned it and will include it in the very next APR Patreon catalog. If you’d like a copy, a monthly contribution of as little as $4 will get you the full-rez 300 dpi scan of each months reward documents and diagrams… currently, three documents, one large-format diagram or piece of artwork. That’s a buck an item. Give the APR Patreon a look.
