A first-hand report on Michael Mann’s disengenuous and unhappy visit to the Happiest Place On Earth.
[Update a while later]
LOL. I just noticed the graphic over there.
Diagnosing Falcon
Well, as I expected, that didn’t take long:
Engine pressure anomaly traced to turbopump valve. Replacing on engine 5 and verifying no common mode. #DragonLaunch
So it’s a good thing it shut down — it could have resulted in a catastrophic engine failure in flight, something that SpaceX has theoretically designed for (they claim to have engine-out capability from liftoff, and sufficient inter-engine blast shielding to prevent fratricide), but probably doesn’t want to test, at least this early in the program. Also, they had no performance margin on this mission, so it probably would have meant an abort to a low orbit, and perhaps an inability to get to the ISS.
[Update a while later]
Here’s the story over at Popular Mechanics.
Barack Hussein Obama
Just who is he?
I hope he’s right that people will start to finally get curious about all of the oddities, but I don’t expect it.
Spending Other Peoples’ Money
This is the kind of stupidity that occurs:
It didn’t make sense to buy the same size routers for a 1,800-student high school and a 100-student elementary school, according to administrators in the Department of Education’s technology division. The state is distributing 471 of the high-priced routers to schools.
“The WVDE asked if the size of the routers could vary based on the needs of a school,” said Liza Cordeiro, spokeswoman for the Department of Education. “At that time, it is our understanding that, for consistency and future expansion, the plan was to buy all the same size.”
Gianato said putting the same size router in every school was about “equal opportunity.”
“We wanted to make sure a student in McDowell County had the same opportunities as a student in Kanawha County or anywhere else,” he said. “A student in a school of 200 students should have the same opportunity as a student in a school with 2,000 students.”
Technologically illiterate idiocy.
Dumber Than A Bag Of Hammers
“…and sickles.”
A Successful Failure
As others have pointed out, the Falcon did exactly what it was supposed to do under the circumstances — it was a successful abort. It’s too bad that they have the three-day constraint for the next attempt. Hopefully there’s nothing wrong with the engine itself. They didn’t see this problem in the test firing a few days ago. But I wonder if there’s something about the geometry that causes the center engine to be a little higher pressure than the outer ones. If I were them, I’d be going back and looking at the pressures from previous flights and tests. If that’s the case, then the solution to this problem might be to just allow a slightly higher pressure on it.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Here’s the story from Spaceflight Now. Looks like if they have another scrub on Tuesday, they won’t have to wait another three days — they can try on Wednesday. If they launch Tuesday, that means a docking attempt on Friday, right in the middle of the ISDC.
Genocidal Eco-Fascism
Tyler Durden has found its face. Frighteningly, a lot of “environmentalists” agree with him, but they’re not quite as up front about it.
[Update a while later]
The environmentalists’ war on the poor.
Give A Man A Fish
My colleague at CEI, Iain Murray, says it’s time to give fishermen property rights. Some of the thoughts here could potentially apply to an asteroid mining regime as well.
Funnier Than Cordova
The Challenge For The Dragon
Here’s an article describing the pre-rendezvous testing that it will go through. This is misleading, though:
“This is pretty tricky. And also, for the public out there, they may not realize that the space station is zooming around Earth every 90 minutes, and it’s going 17,000 mph,” said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. “This is something that is going 12 times faster than a bullet from an assault rifle. So it’s hard.”
The velocity relative to earth isn’t really relevant, and doesn’t make it harder. All that matters is the relative velocity between the spacecraft and the ISS. And that, of course, is what they have to demonstrate their ability to control.
[Update a while later]
More thoughts from Tom Jones.