Engineers at Lockheed Martin are adding structural braces to fix the cracks found in the first Orion capsule.
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Engineers at Lockheed Martin are adding structural braces to fix the cracks found in the first Orion capsule.
Engineers have designed a “doubler” to place over the cracks to ensure the craft can sustain loads from pressure, launch and landing. Geyer said two of the structural aids, similar to devices regularly used on airplanes, could be added to the spacecraft. “We’ve come up with a great plan to basically bridge over those cracks to distribute the load so we don’t see any issues on orbit,” Geyer said.
How reassuring.
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Engineers at Lockheed Martin are adding structural braces to fix the cracks found in the first Orion capsule.
Engineers have designed a “doubler” to place over the cracks to ensure the craft can sustain loads from pressure, launch and landing. Geyer said two of the structural aids, similar to devices regularly used on airplanes, could be added to the spacecraft. “We’ve come up with a great plan to basically bridge over those cracks to distribute the load so we don’t see any issues on orbit,” Geyer said.
How reassuring.
I can only imagine the sorts of development problems that SpaceX and others have had with their items, but we’ll never know. As a federal program, everything is laid bare, by law.
What? You think SpaceX gets everything correct 100% of time? Of course they don’t. But they are not compelled to tell you anything about their missteps.
Aw, crud, I mistyped. I meant to say:
“With Orion, as a federal program, everything is laid bare, by law”
What they are adding, the rest of the world just calls ‘gussets’.
It just means they cut their design way to close to the structural limits of the material they are working with.
I bet they cut the material thickness back as far as possible just to save weight. And now that they have to add material to the structure to strengthen it they are losing a portion of that savings.
Just engineers over engineering something and typically running into problems easily foreseen that they thought they were smart enough to get around.
But this could be excused as exactly what we want NASA to do. Push the boundaries of everything right up to the breaking point so that private industry has a better idea of what they themselves can do in the real world.
I just wish their working projects didn’t cost so much and fail so regularly.
Reminds me of the saying…”You don’t want to ever see how sauseges are made.”
But I make sausage.
It would be nice to read Kelly’s opinion on this.