I remember when they were launched, I saw an article saying somehow the engineers added better components some functionalities even when they were forbidden. Somehow they hid it.
I forgot exactly what the articles said, but it indicated this was done due to a once in many centuries of the alignment.
[1] Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vJT8AW0wYw , Free with ads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIP1p5gAoak
For every Climate Orbiter "we made an oopsie converting metric to imperial" story, there are three "we figured out how to get the crew of Apollo 13 to fit a square peg into a round hole and they can breath now" miracles.
I mean, sure, there's Apollo 1's "we put people and a bunch of wires in a pressurized can of pure oxygen", but there's also the Perseverance Rover's "we made a crane that holds itself aloft with rockets and lowers a one ton rover gently to the ground on a tether."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...
The Apollo flights in particular were interesting. For example, in the case of Apollo 14, when Houston was literally reading new machine code to the astronauts over radio who were punching in POKE instructions by hand to change the code.
I looked into its Viking Computer Command Subsystem (CCS), but there's little documentation out there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Pictur...
Such a human experience this probe is having
If anyone was curious where residue comes from in hypergolic fuel systems, the answer is it's SiO2 (silica) from decaying rubber components,
"After 47 years, a fuel tube inside the thrusters has become clogged with silicon dioxide, a byproduct that appears with age from a rubber diaphragm in the spacecraft’s fuel tank".
┕ https://science.nasa.gov/missions/voyager-program/voyager-1/...
An HN commenter tracked down relevant documentation on NTRS,
"They expel the Hydrazine(N2H4) fuel out of a spherical Ti tank by inflating a rubber balloon that involve Teflon inside the tank using helium supply. I guess N2H4 was potent enough to degrade even those space age materials."
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19810001583/downloads/19...
Ummm, no thanks
mrbluecoat•5h ago
gerdesj•4h ago
Proper job.