Comments on: Engineers at Lockheed Martin are adding structural braces to fix the cracks found in the first Orion capsule.

By: wodun

wodun — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 17:35:37 +0000

It would be nice to read Kelly’s opinion on this.

By: Pzatchok

Pzatchok — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 01:33:02 +0000

But I make sausage.

By: jwing

jwing — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 22:57:08 +0000

Reminds me of the saying…”You don’t want to ever see how sauseges are made.”

By: Pzatchok

Pzatchok — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 22:45:05 +0000

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.

By: Craig Beasley

Craig Beasley — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 20:48:01 +0000

Aw, crud, I mistyped. I meant to say:

“With Orion, as a federal program, everything is laid bare, by law”

By: Craig Beasley

Craig Beasley — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 20:47:09 +0000

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.