Checking the cracks on the first Orion capsule to fly.
Checking the cracks on the first Orion capsule to fly.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Checking the cracks on the first Orion capsule to fly.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
How much larger is this space capsule than the Apollo capsule, and how much more of a load can this vehicle handle? Looks like they(the engineers) have a handle on stress testing and understanding the stresses that this vehicle will encounter.
Its not how much more load it can handle.
Its why they couldn’t manufacturer it in the same way they did the Apollo. Which obviously did handle all its pressure and didn’t need repairs like this one did.
The root cause here is almost certainly overreliance on computer-aided engineering software, specifically, whatever package was employed to do finite element analysis of the cracked part. FEA has been around quite awhile and practicing engineers don’t typically doubt the veracity of results obtained from numerical load/stress simulations. Obviously, in this case, that faith in crunched numbers was at least somewhat misplaced. More disturbing than the unfortunate finding that a real-world object subjected to real-world stresses doesn’t behave quite like its numerically simulated virtual counterpart is the action taken – or not taken, more to the point. Instead of revisiting the design of the partially-failed component, NASA finds it adequate to just slap on some patches and plough ahead. One has to wonder whether NASA would accept a similar course of action from, say, SpaceX, Sierra Nevada or Boeing were a similar test failure to manifest itself on the crewed Dragon, Dreamchaser or CST-100? I’m betting not. And of course the hard-core NASA fanboys and the Congressional NASA porkmeisters would have a field day. As things stand, the sound of crickets is all we here from those quarters.