General Discussion

[b]Day 14: 23 January 2018[/b] @VincentAnderlin @kallimabutterfly @NotarySojac @Firra @BezimiennyRaptor @Cunea @Kirmon64 @RainbowRay @SpottedSorex @OMGAKITTEN [img]https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a13/ap13-S70-35139.jpg[/img] I finally finally finally got to the chapter of [i]Failure Is Not An Option[/i] (Gene Kranz's autobiography; no, I'm not ready to shut up about it yet) about Apollo 13! :D So here's an image of Gene watching the TV transmission from the spacecraft. So I've got a little more detailed context about this image. [b]TL;DR The oxygen tanks did some funky stuff RIGHT at the end of this guy's shift, pretty much only a few hours after this image was taken. No one noticed what was going on for like 3 minutes because an alarm had been disabled so it wouldn't wake up the crew. Warning for terrible book paraphrasing and multiple paragraphs of infodumping.[/b] From here on out is a really bad paraphrasing of what's going on in the book. If you want a refresher that's a little more detailed, it's pages 309-311. [rule] The TV transmission occured during one of Gene's shifts. After it ended, his shift was going to end with the crew going to sleep, at which point another team of controllers was going to take over. The team arrived and began handover as they went through the pre-sleep checklist. One of the minor decisions they made concerned an alarm in a hydrogen tank, which had sounded during the last sleep period and woken the astronauts. They'd decided not to reset the alarm because they didn't want it to go off randomly and wake up the astronauts for the second night in a row. The EECOM for Gene's team also had glitchy telemetry from oxygen tank 2. After reading normally throughout the mission, it cycled up and down before settling at 100 percent; basically, it was pretty obviously invalid. Beyond that, there had been a communications glitch earlier which they didn't have time to troubleshoot since the crew needed sleep. Ironically, this was Gene's primary concern, since he didn't like leaving the issue open for the next control team. Anyways, so the EECOM decided in the interest of how much sleep the crew would get to request them to stir the oxygen tanks. (This was something they did periodically to get precise measurements on the pressure inside the tanks. Tl;dr at launch they were liquid, but as the mission goes on, some of it becomes a gas; stirring the tanks helps them measure it because it mixes up the liquid/gas combo. Was that a good explanation? No. Does it work? Yes.) While CSM pilot Jack Swigart stirred the tanks, EECOM's focus was on the exact time the stir started, rather than the oxygen flow, where spoiler alert, the glitch was about to occur. So 16 seconds after the stir started, a faulty wire sparked inside tank 2. This caused a pressure rise, but it didn't set off an alarm. Why? Because they'd turned off the pressure alarm so it wouldn't wake up the crew. It also made the oxygen flow do a buncha weird stuff, but EECOM didn't notice because he was focusing on the fuel cells, which, if the spacecraft weren't in the process of breaking, was a decent place to focus on. Then they lost telemetry for straight up 3 seconds. When telemetry was regained, the pressure in the oxygen tank was ridiculously low and the crew was reporting strange sounds and all that good stuff. So that's the story of how at the very end of his shift, specifically the shift in this image, EVERYTHING WENT CRAP (from his POV).

[b]Day 15: 24 January 2018[/b] @VincentAnderlin @kallimabutterfly @NotarySojac @Firra @BezimiennyRaptor @Cunea @Kirmon64 @RainbowRay @SpottedSorex @OMGAKITTEN [img]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/276515100465299456/405826727097401345/buran4.jpg[/img] The construction of the Soviet Space Shuttle Buran! Buran was the Soviets' response to the American Space Shuttle program. Soviet officials were concerned since the Shuttle could be used to launch payloads for the American military. (This is because a huge chunk of the funding for the program originally came from the military; in return, they would be able to use the vehicle to launch classified military payloads.) They began developing their own shuttle-like spaceplane as a competitor. They also thought having a Soviet shuttle would inspire patriotism, the same way the American shuttle had inspired patriotism here in the US. The name [i]Buran[/i] means "snowstorm" in Russian, and was given to the program as well as the orbiter itself. Buran was to be joined by two other orbiters, Ptichka and Baikal, but they were never completed. Buran was launched once for an autonomous test flight on 15 November 1988. The orbiter separated from the vehicle as planned and performed two orbits around the Earth. The onboard computers then landed the vehicle successfully. The automated landing was an important landmark; no shuttle, American nor Soviet, had ever completed such a landing. Unfortunately, history is rarely kind, and it certainly wasn't kind to Buran and the Buran program. After the fall of the USSR, the program was suspended indefinitely as funds were reallocated to the Soyuz program, which had been successful since the late 1960s and was still the primary manned spaceflight system in Russia. Buran was stored in a hangar in Kazakhstan, which collapsed in a storm in May 2002. Its sister orbiters Ptichka and Baikal were never completed.

@VincentAnderlin @kallimabutterfly @NotarySojac @Firra @BezimiennyRaptor @Cunea @Kirmon64 @RainbowRay @SpottedSorex @OMGAKITTEN

Hey guys, no post yet, because today's picture is gonna be from the launch of GOLD! NASA is launching a satellite called GOLD into a geocentric orbit to study the ionosphere.

If you wanna catch the launch like me, head over to http://nasa.gov/live at 5pm EST (that's 2pm server time); that's when the launch stream will start.

Hope your day is going well so far!

@Violalore
Thanks for the update!
I didn't realize there's a launch today, now I'm excited :)

[b]Day 16: 25 January 2018[/b] @VincentAnderlin @kallimabutterfly @NotarySojac @Firra @BezimiennyRaptor @Cunea @Kirmon64 @RainbowRay @SpottedSorex @OMGAKITTEN Sorry for the double ping; thought you guys would like the launch! Here's a picture from someone with a better connection than me: [img]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/276515100465299456/406318695686602753/7efbc1717264aa14.png[/img] Looks like there was a glitch with today's launch! I had to watch on mute because I had class, so I didn't hear about it at the time. It started shortly after the second stage ignited. A tracking station in Brazil lost contact with the vehicle, and for an hour or two after that, no one was in contact with either the rocket or its payloads, the two satellites GOLD and Al Yah 3. Because it occurred pretty much exactly at the ignition of the upper stage, there was concerns that the spacecraft and its payloads had been lost. They never regained contact with the vehicle. Thankfully, contact was restored a few hours later. There was some concern because early telemetry readings showed that Al Yah 3 had never been deployed, but at the moment, both satellites seem to be in operation from their respective control centers. If I hear more about the story, I'll update you guys in tomorrow's post; I think two pings a day from a daily thread is enough.

Oh wow I didn't know about the glitch they had.
The launch itself was pretty interesting though.

@violalore , May I be added to the ping list please?

[b]Day 17: 26 January 2018[/b] @VincentAnderlin @kallimabutterfly @NotarySojac @Firra @BezimiennyRaptor @Cunea @Kirmon64 @RainbowRay @SpottedSorex @OMGAKITTEN @NoDragonHere [img]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/276515100465299456/406709843886604288/apollo_mission_control_cutaway.jpg[/img] Here's a cutaway diagram of Apollo Mission Control. It's labeled so that you can see exactly where each flight controller would have sat. Apollo Mission Control teams were larger than any team NASA had attempted before. Early on, this raised concerns about whether or not rapid decision making would be possible, and rapid decision making is, well, kind of important when you're trying to do stuff like landing a thin-walled four-legged bug with two astronauts inside on the surface of the moon. It was especially important because, as light from the moon takes about 1.3 seconds to travel towards Earth, there would always be a delay between Mission Control and the crew. If they had to command the crew, it would take over a second to get there, and every second counts in the exacting field of spaceflight. If they needed to check a telemetry reading, the crew's reply would come almost 3 seconds later. One thing that I wish there was more information about in this image is the display equipment room; it's behind the big display, labeled 23. I'll have to do some research about that! This image was accessed from the U.S. Library of Congress; the digital entry for the image can be found [url=http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/tx1134.sheet.00004a/]here[/url]. There's a [url=https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/Apollo_Mission_Control_Isometric_Cutaway_-_NASA_Johnson_Space_Center%2C_Apollo_Mission_Control%2C_2101_NASA_Parkway%2C_Houston%2C_Harris_County%2C_TX_HAER_TX-109-C_%28sheet_4_of_4%29.png/800px-thumbnail.png]slightly higher quality version from Wikimedia Commons[/url] if you're interested.

@violalore
Please, can I be added to the pinglist?

[b]Day 18: 27 January 2018[/b] @VincentAnderlin @kallimabutterfly @NotarySojac @Firra @BezimiennyRaptor @Cunea @Kirmon64 @RainbowRay @SpottedSorex @OMGAKITTEN @NoDragonHere @TeenyTinyDragon [img]https://68.media.tumblr.com/572d428971d61bf3712ecbf850d855cb/tumblr_p37tuzETbp1tgclxpo1_1280.jpg[/img] Today is the anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire, so I want to take a moment to remember the crew of Apollo 1. [center][b]Mentions of death past this point[/b][/center] I'm going to make this brief because it's a pretty upsetting topic for a lot of people I know, and I don't know if that's you guys as well. The crew of Apollo 1 died in a test on the launchpad on this date in 1967. The exact cause of the fire was unknown, but the most commonly cited issue is faulty wiring in the pure-oxygen environment filled with flammable materials. The other issue is that, after Liberty Bell 7 had been lost to the sea due to the hatch opening prematurely, NASA had designed their spacecraft to have hatches that were hard to open. When there was a fire and explosion inside the command module, the crew was trapped and had no means of escape. I'm not one to post graphic images, so I didn't want to post pictures of the remains of the command module. I'm sure if you're on this pinglist, you already understand the weight of the situation and don't need shock fodder to feel it. (There are images of their bodies, too, but that's just... incredibly distasteful.) I think what we forget easily is that the Apollo 1 fire was really the canary in a coalmine of the situation at NASA in early 1967. President Kennedy had promised in the fetal stages of the space program that they would have Americans on the moon by the end of the decade, and people were in a rush to honor his words (and his memory). The Apollo program at the time of the disaster was a complete mess; huge portions of the spacecraft were lagging in preparation, and, if having flammable materials in a pure-oxygen environment can tell you anything, it's that people honestly needed to pay closer attention. NASA astronauts had survived some incredibly close calls, but the emotional reality of the Apollo 1 fire struck deep into the hearts of everyone involved. It was a cold slap in the face from reality: the less effort you put into the space program, the more likely astronauts are to die, and the more blood you'll have on your hands. To summarize: without the Apollo 1 fire, NASA's Apollo program would have never been successful, and they never could have landed Americans on the moon by the end of the decade. Because let's be honest: inevitably, spaceflight was going to kill someone. It's a high-risk job, and the astronauts who took the position knew that; they were all pilots, most if not all of them at that point test pilots who knew what it was like to escape death so narrowly you could feel it on the hairs on the back of your neck. If it hadn't been Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White, it would have been someone else. But these men died to pave the way to the moon, the planets, and all the stars beyond, and for that, I think it's important to reflect on where we are today in the world of spaceflight, and the trials it took to get there.