Damper
Design (Design)
Design review this morning for the precession damper
Andre is designing for Whorl-I in the SSSL.
I'll post some details later.
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Posted by cdhall at 07:31 AM | Comments
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February 17, 2005
Virginia
Tech Sounding Rocket Project (Design)
The VTSRP
launch date is getting closer; the launch window opens on March 14, and will
remain open for about one week. The Improved Orionwill launch from the Wallops Island Flight Facility
near
What's next for VT Rocketry? We're working to evolve the
project into a club, with rocketry projects including model rockets, amateur
rockets, and sounding rockets. Watch this spot.
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Posted by cdhall at 07:12 AM | Comments
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February 16, 2005
Commander
Binnie & SpaceShipOne (Exploration)
Yesterday, Virginia Tech had a distinguished visitor,
Commander Brian Binnie, one of the three SpaceShipOne pilots, who had the distinction of being the
pilot of the X-Prize-winning
flight, as well as the flight where he
"got dirt all over the plastic spaceship." The university gave the
event a lot of
publicity. He was supposed to arrive on Monday evening and be here all day,
including a tour of our Space Systems
Simulation Lab. The students worked hard getting the lab all shiny and some
demos ready to show. Alas,
He did, however, spend a couple of hours with a small
group of students and faculty in the early afternoon, had dinner with another
group, and gave the Big Public Lecture at 8 PM last night, in the 3000-seat
auditorium in Burruss Hall. I attended all three of these events.
The "small group" seminar began with an
informal "gather around the astronaut" session where the students got
to interact with Binnie. A few of them had posters or
newspapers that they got him to autograph. Very cool.
Then there were some introductions, and he spoke informally for about 35
minutes on "How I Got Here." Unfortunately, his comments included a
bit of NASA-bashing, which I thought cheapened it a bit, and sent the wrong
message to the students. Again, mostly very cool. Then
the floor was opened for questions, and several students asked good questions.
One student asked an excellent question: Of
the other X-Prize competitors, which do you think had good design ideas?
Aha, I thought, here's his chance to be a good sport; criticizing NASA is one
thing, but surely he'll have some good things to say about the competition.
His response was first that they weren't paying any
attention to the competition, but he then went on to describe some of their
concepts in a manner clearly intended to illustrate that they were amusing but
not serious approaches. I found his reply to this excellent question to be
disappointing, to say the least.
Later in the evening he gave an entertaining 90-minute
lecture with powerpoint
slides and embedded video to an audience of at least 1000 folks. Needless to
say, he charmed the crowd with his anecdotes about the development, test, and
successful flights of SpaceShipOne. He got quite a
bit of laughter when he presented his one-chart description of "The Other
Space Agency": Nay-Say. Continued laughter greeted his
comparison of the $30M crew compartment door of the Space Shuttle to the $20
crew compartment door of the SpaceShipOne. He
described at length the differences between the two doors' designs in both
concept and implementation. He did not mention, however, that the Shuttle
version is required to take 6-10 people and 20,000 pounds of spacecraft parts
into Earth orbit for 7-14 days, as compared with SpaceShipOne's
taking 1 test pilot to the edge of the atmosphere for 5 minutes. Well, those
distinctions probably aren't that important anyhow.
In summary, much of his talk was fascinating,
illuminating, and inspiring. But a substantial bit in the middle seemed to be
based on the premise that anything that makes my competition sound bad makes
me look good. In general, I disagree with that
premise, and I hope that many of the VT students in the audience recognized the
less-than-graceful tone that it set. I would rather that he had focused on the
many challenges that the Scaled Composites team faced and how they overcame
them, rather than spending time denigrating NASA and other X-Prize competitors.
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Posted by cdhall at 11:14 AM | Comments
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