Thread: Trivia and other useless but interesting items

I'm not sure that they had any qualified engineering staff in the early 1970s! A lot of stuff was done then and there by whoever happened to be available and said they could do it - and the 'experts' who flew in from down south mostly had zero tropical experience, so were unlikely to do a better job.

Originally Posted by JDNSW

I'm not sure that they had any qualified engineering staff in the early 1970s! A lot of stuff was done then and there by whoever happened to be available and said they could do it - and the 'experts' who flew in from down south mostly had zero tropical experience, so were unlikely to do a better job.

Timing is everything often, Engineers with billions of dollars and clock buggered the whole thing

"Boeing's Starliner capsule launches to wrong orbit in test flight, causing major setback"
"Ground controllers tried to send up commands to get the spacecraft in its proper orbit, but the signals did not get there and by then it was too late. The capsule tried to fix its position, burning too much fuel for the spacecraft to safely make it to the space station on Saturday for a weeklong stay.
All three astronauts assigned to the first Starliner crew were at control centres for the launch: Mike Fincke and Nicole Mann, both with NASA, and Boeing's Chris Ferguson, who commanded the last shuttle mission.

He's now a test pilot astronaut for Boeing and one of the Starliner's key developers.
"This is why we flight test, right? We're trying to get all of the bugs, if you will, out of the system," Mr Fincke said at the briefing.
"There's always something."
11820810-3x2-700x467.jpg

I recall a worse one where measurements in Imperial got mixed with Metric or the other way around

Originally Posted by NavyDiver

.....

I recall a worse one where measurements in Imperial got mixed with Metric or the other way around

A couple of examples - Gimli glider; Apollo 13 (not exactly). Also a Mars Lander, can't remember which one.

What is the betting they were using the same brand of Chinese clockwork Kitchen Timer I use for timing a water pump?

Bloody things are cheap & nasty & quite unreliable.[insert tongue in cheek emoji here]

Originally Posted by JDNSW

A couple of examples - Gimli glider; Apollo 13 (not exactly). Also a Mars Lander, can't remember which one.

I love maths

On June 4, 1996 an unmanned Ariane 5 rocket launched by the European Space Agency exploded just forty seconds after its lift-off from Kourou, French Guiana. The rocket was on its first voyage, after a decade of development costing $7 billion. The destroyed rocket and its cargo were valued at $500 million. A board of inquiry investigated the causes of the explosion and in two weeks issued a report. It turned out that the cause of the failure was a software error in the inertial reference system. Specifically a 64 bit floating point number relating to the horizontal velocity of the rocket with respect to the platform was converted to a 16 bit signed integer. The number was larger than 32,767, the largest integer storeable in a 16 bit signed integer, and thus the conversion failed.

Originally Posted by NavyDiver

Timing is everything often, Engineers with billions of dollars and clock buggered the whole thing

"Boeing's Starliner capsule launches to wrong orbit in test flight, causing major setback"
"Ground controllers tried to send up commands to get the spacecraft in its proper orbit, but the signals did not get there and by then it was too late. The capsule tried to fix its position, burning too much fuel for the spacecraft to safely make it to the space station on Saturday for a weeklong stay.
All three astronauts assigned to the first Starliner crew were at control centres for the launch: Mike Fincke and Nicole Mann, both with NASA, and Boeing's Chris Ferguson, who commanded the last shuttle mission.

He's now a test pilot astronaut for Boeing and one of the Starliner's key developers.
"This is why we flight test, right? We're trying to get all of the bugs, if you will, out of the system," Mr Fincke said at the briefing.
"There's always something."
11820810-3x2-700x467.jpg

I recall a worse one where measurements in Imperial got mixed with Metric or the other way around

Poor old Boeing just can't get it right at the moment.

Like some old songs or watching old movies? Good news
The TV repeats and old songs that help people with dementia - BBC News

_104880528_film-poster.jpg
Now the question of what is old may or may not be trivial

If Elon Musk's tweets are nonsense, why does he use them to break Tesla news?

Twitter is nonsense. Don't take it seriously. That, in essence, is what Elon Musk and his team of lawyers argued in the defamation case won by Musk last Friday.
Twitter is "infamous for invective and hyperbole," his attorneys said in legal briefs. Users "play fast and loose with facts," they said. Forums like Twitter "are not a source of facts or data upon which a reasonable person would rely." Twitter participants "expect to read opinions, not facts."
Which raises the question: If Musk's Twitter account, with its 29.9 million followers, can't be taken seriously, why should anything Musk says there about Tesla, SpaceX and his other companies be believed?



If Elon Musk'''s tweets are nonsense, why does he use them to break Tesla news? | Stuff.co.nz