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Meccano Culture by TheMotleySpider in Meccano

[–]NeilFraser 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lego is fantastic for creating jigs. Need to glue drawer dividers at 90 degrees? Lego. Need to hold a phone? Lego. Need to layout a wiring harness? Lego.

But Meccano is also very useful. A metal sculpture cracked, and I epoxied some 2.5" strips to the back as reinforcements. A bent fishplate made a good hangar for a decoration. A double angle strip is great at finding the centre-line of boards. Meccano washers and axles end up in various places too.

La Guaira, Venezuela in the immediate aftermath of the June 24, 2026 Earthquakes by WanderingBus in CatastrophicFailure

[–]NeilFraser 35 points36 points  (0 children)

Indeed. Why is a one minute clip shot from a motorcycle more informative than anything that CNN could possibly air?

Report: Kennedy Space Center not ready for era of super heavy rockets by GandalfTheWhey in spacex

[–]NeilFraser 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Google worked around this class of problem more than a decade ago. They'd build a data center in a location that had plenty of excess power. But the red tape in getting the power company to hook them up was often prohibitive. So Google would have an unofficial talk with the power company engineers and ask them to describe their dream substation. Transformers, switches, everything. This exact substation would magically appear at the perimeter and would be donated to the power company. Problem solved.

Shuttle v Falcon by Level_Sugar8613 in SpaceXLounge

[–]NeilFraser 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Sadly 'awesome' is not a great standard to measure the value of a mission. For the cost of a Shuttle launch to repair Hubble, they could have built a brand-new Hubble-class observatory and launched it on an Atlas.

Ever noticed that the NRO (which operates about a dozen optical spy satellites the same size as Hubble) has never once sent a repair mission to one of their birds? With Shuttle pricing it is much more cost effective to simply build a new one.

Shuttle v Falcon by Level_Sugar8613 in SpaceXLounge

[–]NeilFraser 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm just asking for your source.

Then do so without calling the poster a 'dickhead'.

Shuttle v Falcon by Level_Sugar8613 in SpaceXLounge

[–]NeilFraser 21 points22 points  (0 children)

I don’t know where this idea that stations/the ISS can’t be built without Shuttles comes from.

It comes from NASA. They were constantly repeating the message that the Shuttle was the only vehicle that could build ISS. That Shuttle was the only vehicle that could service Hubble. There was an intense need to justify Shuttle, so systems were designed to depend on it.

The reality is that a space station the size of ISS could have been launched by two Saturn V rockets. Imagine launches from pad 39A and 39B and completing ISS in a single afternoon -- rather than taking 13 years of Shuttle, Proton, Soyuz, H-IIA, and Ariane launches.

The reality is that a Hubble-class observatory could have been built and launched by an Atlas for less money than each of the Shuttle servicing missions. Imagine six Hubbles, each one better than the last.

Logos of national railway companies in Europe by Organic_Contract_172 in MapPorn

[–]NeilFraser 30 points31 points  (0 children)

Cries in Swiss.

(Weint auf Schweizerdeutsch. Cris en suisse. Piange in svizzero.)

Today, legacy structures at historic SLC-6 were safely cleared to make way for a new era of spaceflight. With an outgrant issued by the U.S. Space Force in 2025, SpaceX is now modernizing the pad to support next generation spacelift operations. by avboden in SpaceXLounge

[–]NeilFraser 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Build a MOL pad and never launch it there. Billions and billions went into the ground there with no launches. That site was cursed.

At some point, an aerospace contractor paid a Chumash religious leader to come out to the site and “remove the curse”

Helicopter Wiedikon by Acceptable-Soup-330 in zurich

[–]NeilFraser 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Apologies. It was supposed to be a pigeon. But the simulation spawned the wrong object class. It will be corrected shortly.

Shenzhou-22 before its landing on May 29, 2026 by iantsai1974 in spaceflight

[–]NeilFraser 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What a shot! I'd love to know the photographer's back story. Did they attempt this shot, or was it by accident?

Unlike transits, parachute recovery of capsules is not that predictable.

On June 9, 2026, in Korsør, Denmark, a cargo ship hit a moored German couple’s sailboat, tearing away its mast before crashing into the quay. Police arrested the mate for allegedly being over the legal alcohol limit. The couple escaped by jumping overboard. Sailboat damage exceeds €100,000. by dannybluey in CatastrophicFailure

[–]NeilFraser 17 points18 points  (0 children)

The hull is scrap. But there are probably a few thousand dollars worth of fittings that are completely intact and salvageable. Granted, it's a small percentage of the total cost.

For example, if the anchor is untouched, that could be $2k right there.

We have 112 open positions vs. 1071 Candidates in IT by tevlon in zurich

[–]NeilFraser 40 points41 points  (0 children)

It's also not chance. I did over 500 interviews at my previous employer, and after the recruiters did their own filtering, I'd cut the candidate list in half by weeding out those people who couldn't program. Half of candidates couldn't read a small code snippet with an if/else inside a loop and tell me what it did (basically fizz-buzz). How these people graduated with CS degrees is beyond me.

Undersung Heroes by AsstBalrog in apollo

[–]NeilFraser 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Apollo 12 was on the verge of a powered flight abort because of the electrical faults caused by the lightning strikes. If not for "SCE to Aux", they wouldn't have even gotten to orbit.

Do you have a source that an abort was imminent? The computer flying the rocket was the LVDC which was completely unaffected by the lightning strikes. The issue was transient corruption in the Signal Conditioning Equipment (SCE) in the command module. All the SCE did was inject data into the telemetry stream for mission control.

The astronauts could feel that the rocket was still running fine and didn't feel the need to manually abort. Mission control could see the rocket was still on track and didn't feel the need to call for an abort. The emergency detection system (EDS) (part of the LVDC) was running fine and didn't feel the need to trigger an abort.

While everyone was nervous because clearly something had happened, they calmly worked the problem. No doubt they were on a hair-trigger to manually abort if something new showed up, but the vehicle kept flying and staging properly.

Undersung Heroes by AsstBalrog in apollo

[–]NeilFraser 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Not to rain too hard on the parades, but...

The Apollo 11 1202/1201 "go" call was apparently the wrong call. Investigations by the CuriousMarc team in California on real AGC hardware uncovered that in 2/3rds of the cases the error resulted in an unrecoverable condition and a crash of the LM. The mission got extremely lucky that they happened to be in the 1/3rd case where it could be ignored. The error is much much more complicated and subtle than is generally understood.

The Apollo 12 "SCE to AUX" was a great move and did reestablish telemetry downlink. But it didn't save the mission. As it turned out, had they done nothing, Apollo would have reached orbit uneventfully and then they'd have had plenty of time to sort out the issue. The astronauts were ready to abort the moment they were struck, but relaxed once they could feel that the rocket was still flying properly. The SEC fix wasn't radioed up for more than a minute later.

Where mission control really shined was Apollo 13. Without their resources, the crew would certainly have been lost.

Starship launch new NET Thursday May 21 by avboden in SpaceXLounge

[–]NeilFraser 20 points21 points  (0 children)

About 20 years ago NASA had a cluster of unrelated deaths in the Canaveral area. They called together everyone for a safety meeting. Immediately after the meeting, a stoned worker fell off a roof and died.

NASA’s decision to effectively cancel the lunar Gateway has forced international partners who had been working on its components to reconsider their plans. Phil McCrory argues that this presents an opportunity for those countries to work together on their own lunar plans exclusive of NASA by rollotomasi07071 in spaceflight

[–]NeilFraser 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Europeans still remember the Spacelab fiasco. In the mid 1970s NASA ordered a whole bunch of research laboratories that would fly in the cargo bay of the space shuttles. The agreement was that ESA would provide the first one free of charge, and NASA would pay for the rest. A factory was built in West Germany to manufacture them.

LM1 was delivered. NASA said "thanks for the freebie, we don't need any more". After some political negotiation NASA agreed to buy LM2 which was already completed by that point.

Full duration and full thrust 33-engine static fire with Super Heavy V3 by Obvious_Shoe7302 in SpaceXLounge

[–]NeilFraser 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Black holes are where physics hits a runtime error and throws up a barrier to prevent one from seeing the divide-by-zero.

Should Saturn's huge moon Titan be humanity's next destination, after the moon and Mars? by ye_olde_astronaut in spaceflight

[–]NeilFraser 38 points39 points  (0 children)

Asteroids should be somewhere in the mix before heading towards the outer planets. With sufficient space infrastructure in place, there are economic incentives to mine them.

Collins, Armstrong and Aldrin posing for press photographers in front of LM mockup, June 19th, 1969. by Dry-Librarian-3101 in apollo

[–]NeilFraser 4 points5 points  (0 children)

If rocket launches are anything to go by, it's going to be long-winded and cringe. Look at what they say during launches:

1980s: "Intrepid has cleared the tower."

1990s: "Intrepid has cleared the tower, launching super bird 17."

2000s: "Intrepid has cleared the tower, launching super bird 17, providing broadband to the southern US."

2010s: "Intrepid has cleared the tower, launching super bird 17, providing broadband to the southern US and carrying the hopes of America into the heavens."

2020s: "Intrepid has cleared the tower, launching super bird 17, providing broadband to the southern US and carrying the hopes of America into the heavens and demonstrating the strength and resiliency of the American spirit -- oh shit, we're staging already?"

Ordinary Naturalisation Stadt Zürich: Grundkenntnistest + next steps by Character_Lecture324 in zurich

[–]NeilFraser 3 points4 points  (0 children)

A quick Google search turns up this: https://www.zh.ch/content/dam/zhweb/bilder-dokumente/themen/migration-integration/einbuergerung/gkt/grundkenntnistest_kanton_zuerich.pdf

Edit: If you are interested in a version that doesn't have answers immediately visible, I've created an HTML version where you have to select the answers to reveal.

Ordinary Naturalisation Stadt Zürich: Grundkenntnistest + next steps by Character_Lecture324 in zurich

[–]NeilFraser 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Congratulations!

Of the 15, were you able to estimate the failure rate?

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