Pretty cool, saw a gigantic jetstream going through the air and realized they had launched it, watched it dissappear. I hope they get home safe that old bucket of **** is pretty scary if you ask me.

 

yeah one little thing goes wrong, it blows into a million peices

 

We had a professor at my university that worked on the Apollo program and he explained to us how hard it is to not have a failure.



He started by asking if we thought having a 99.9% success rate for components was adequate. As that sounds like a damned to good rate we of course all said yes, he then went on to explain just how many individual components there are on just the Apollo rockets. If they used success rates of 99.9% as a standard they would never have gotten of the launch pad. When designing components they need to meet some ridiculous success rate, it's something on the order of 99.9999%



Crazy stuff. I liked how they showed the launch on TV showing telemetry and such. Kinda like an F1 race, it made the launch more exciting than just seeing the camera on the main tank. Also, I think the commentary explaining just what was happening made it more interesting and understandable for the lay person watching it.



So props to them for getting a good TV deal, NASA needs to get some kickass PR going if they want to stay a legitimate and even reasonably successful agency. I don't think most people understand the need for their existence, mainly because they don't know how much kickass stuff they do, or just how complicated and difficult it is, especially with such a stingy budget.

 

I cant agree with you more on that, almost like they scrubbed those days to have the biggest rocket shootin off on the 4th only to get shown out by North Korea.

 

We actually did a study in college on the one that blew up because of the O-ring failure on the SRB's. And everything we came up with pointed toward the launch being safe even with the bad O-ring. It somewhere in the upper 90% that everything would be ok. It was actually very very hard to debate against it, since he split us up into groups one for, one against.

 

Failure props are calculated our to 1 x 10 -7

 

if people were meant to fly we'd have wings and feathers, if we were meant to go to space we'd be able to breathe there.

 

the earth is flat you know!

 

we cant breathe under water either, but we still go in the water!

 

I didn't say were meant to breathe under water either.