Space Exploration,astronomy & Cosmology

Yes, we tried that but to no avail. On the flip side, NASA have contacted an electrician to have a look. They can get here for Friday but cannot give an exact time. Can somebody be in all day?

 

Had to re-write a lot of this over last month as they got the coordinates wrong when they sent the data through. Testing phase has gone green. Found a lot of bugs in the code that another programmer wrote so had to fix all those as well, do not know how they were missed. Fingers crossed no more modification is required and Isaacman's flight can go ahead on the date (still to be officially confirmed).

One SERIOUS bug I caught, fixed and sent back was this. We have to comment the code that needs fixing by the original author. Each line that has an error is then amended and the error line is copied above but commented out.

Code:

Constant Flight_Path := 0.65.0;
type Direction(N, S, E , W);
sub type Direction := S; -- erm??? why would the launcher go south from take off? Jesus who wrote this! 'comment by Rose_Skyla 12'May 2023'

 

PBS and Nova carry the flag for intelligent, thought provoking television in the USA. While other channels like Disney and the like continue to pump out mindless drivel to fill slots.

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Thanks Smudger, I've added that to my watch list.

 

One of the perils of SpaceX is deadlines. Everything has to be done by a date, and although true in almost every other field of work, when something as critical as "does the landing software need changing?" is reported back to the design team leader when the craft is already in orbit, yeah that's a bit of a problem. Thanfully, there are ways around this and one of the most common is to actually have a member of the software team on the craft to change or totally re-write part of the orignal code. For example, let's say:

Craft 3A had to move from X to Y, was doing so under a simple formula of

C = spX ** nm . sp . gv . th = epY

Where:

C is the craft
spX is the starting point of corr X
nm is the number of miles
sp is the calculated consistent speed
gv is the gravitational pull
th is the thrust resist
epX is the end point corr Y

This was calculated within the code to tell the landing protocols when and how to operate. If there a slight change in the path of flght such as say

nm-2

This would mean the number of miles would need to be reduced by a factor of two, there is no way the original code would of known this - so it's up to the engineer to get on the case ASAP, especially if the craft could be veering off course. One slight mis-typed command or mis-calculated value can cause total havoc as you might expect. I know I go on about the Challenger Disaster, but it's what got me into the field myself. I would of loved to gloss over the information about the O Rings and the elastic vs freezing temps that day. It could and would of saved seven innocent lives, if the people at the top had thought of science and safety over their wallets.

 

Well put. Patents are a there of course for legality reasons' but they do hold back new and exciting ideas. If companys as big as NASA continue to fail to embrace new, tried and tested technologies we will never move forward. Hanging onto technology from the 1980s is only going to fail eventually, and we could have a chain of events that would cause disasterous results. Nothing lasts forever, no matter how many coats of paint you apply to cover up the scratches and dents.

I for one am all for new advances, and the more "Green" we can get the better for the planet and everyone. I do not think we will ever invent a craft that will be able to travel at the speed of light (at least not in our lifetimes) or even a few seconds slower, What we can do is continue to build on gained knowledge of how such concepts work and how they interact. Getting past the financial and legal parts of a new process needs to be more of a gateway than a brick wall.

 

There is no point really. Look at the man who invented moving film. He had everything he ever needed and was travelling by train to present his new invention to the world. Mysteriously vanished on the train. Never seen again, was taken up by somebody else who took all the glory for it. That goes back centuries I know, but it's the same idea of it. A patent is supposed to protect a product/idea from rivals copying it and sharing it around. It's just a peice of paper to most and they don't flaunt the laws when they abuse it, they walk all over it. Science is a very, very dog eats dog world. You could have the best idea in the world and it takes the slighest thing clink of a rumor to snowball and that idea is out to the world. What needs to happen, in my view, is the entire work of how patents are designed and what they stand for need completety scrapping and re-designed. Make it a full criminal offense to abuse it, but before that for a patent to be granted, their needs to be proof of concept and a lot of money behind it to actually make it stick. Having the invention to go back in time for example would be useless if somebody was able to go back in time before you and invent it themselves. There are way to many loop holes in the current way these things are done, and that needs to change.

 

Got a full article on it now. Launch date is confirmed (at present) for September 2023. Originally this month but had complications with paperwork or something.

https://polarisprogram.com/

My team and I have been working hard to get this beauty into space now (had to change the runtime a few times due to thruttle force and gravitational thrust). Fingers crossed for a safe and successful five day cruise among the cosmos. Finally managed to fix a few bugs in the landing source from an original design pattern, and the automated test of the launch/landing simulation software went green today. So all systems go from our end! So excited!

 

It's classed as a "Super Heavy Lifting Craft" SHLC for short. At present, no, but that doesn't mean the team will not be asked to "patch" code in the future with updates. I've seen some of the early design specs for Starship's launch code and it was mostly completed even at that stage. I would love to work on it personally but it's very much an "in house" project at SpaceX. Since we deal with out-sourced projects, it's highly unlikely we will see anything of that but you never know. Still have a lot of other projects lined up so won't be short of work. Whatever happens to Starship I hope they manange to get it going. It's an amazing looking craft and very, very impressive from a technical stand point.

 

It's all going to be guess work right now but I would think if the problem with lift off needed some extra work to rectify the problem there is every chance they could out-source it and have the primary engineering team work on other parts. If it is the OLM then that is nothing to do with software engineering it's more of a design problem. Hot staging is pretty risky, your technically asking the next boost to ignite before the previous one, but if it's handled with care then it can work. If that is indeed the route they take, then the launch code will need amending for certain in that case. Whether or not that is a job they would give in house is at this point not known, but it's certainly something to keep an eye on.

 

India blast off for a hopefully second attempted controlled Moon landing today. Looks like take off went well. Only Russia the USA and China have managed it to date.

 

They probably have a backup emergency comms in case anything drastic happens. But I do agree it could turn into something worrying, if it's temporary then you would think they have the problem nailed down.

 

While it's good it will recall, the downside is that's a fair bit of time without any comms. Space is full of some pretty dangerous and surprising things, there is always a chance a rouge space rock could damage it for instance. It's going to be squeaky bum time for NASA.

 

Maybe, but at this point trying anything (even if it could fail) is better than nothing.

 

Thank goodness. I have to admit it was worrying due to the length of time it could of been in free flight mode. Hopefully they can safegaurd this so it never happens again.

 

Falcon 9 Polaris Dawn take off been delayed again till December this year. Few coordinates need changing and the we are doing some minimal changes to the landing module. Still nothing major stopping the new date and I really hope this one can come to pass.

 

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The explorer Vikram is already exploring the South Pole region looking for ice which is a potential fuel source for vessels launched from the Moon in the near future.

 

That was really interesting. However we would need to create technology which can get to a fraction of the speed of light to get there in any reasonable time frame. People generally feel as a species on earth we probably have less than a billion years (ice age, asteriod, solar flare) in our existence, so it seems there is more than enough time to come up with it. Right now though, it's really great that we continue to look for new planets far outside of our reach.

As Andromeda gets closer to the Milky Way there's going to be more excitement of what worlds exist within that galaxy also. It's just a shame witnessing such an event would mean as a race we haven't done the unthinkable by then.