NASA’s rocket technology not for real space exploration but here is one.

Sir, don’t be dismayed to see how little information there is on the internet. Despite that, I hope you totally understand my need for anonymity. Assuming that the technology is as effective as I say it is, releasing it to the public in all its splendor could make the world think that a) I am off my rocker, b) that I’m completely wrong or c) just some sci-fi aficionado who’s gone a bit too far.

Sad state of affairs, but hey, that’s the price of true innovation right?

http://nlspropulsion.net

Regards,

The Inventor

for oscillations, run lowpass filters, for vibrations, do highpass. there are some others that are useful.

in the SpaceX test flight, the stage behaved like it didnt know it was messing up, while it was immediately obvious for human eye.

i have worked with robotics extensively enough and done lots of different control loops, only the simplest control algorithms look at only a few current data samples.
normally you record both your input and output samples, and run couple of obvious analysis filter over them, not every loop but often enough to detect anomalys.
oscillations like these are easy enough to detect this way and at least flag an alarm, if not take corrective action.

sort of a watchdog over a primary control loop.

Prudent that way.

(It was in the STS program lessons learned presentation)

They kept improving baffles in the Apollo LEMs too (had too little at first), although of course it’s a very different environment.

So why the bs statement that if the fuel had not sloshed away from the inlet that it would have made orbit? The thing was in a spin and had no chance of recovery as the nozzle went hard over to its stop. You can see the increasing travel of the nozzle as it attempts to compensate for the pitch/yaw motion. It did not couple to a roll until very late in the mission. The motion does not even look like a slosh mode, rather a vortice mode as the fuel/oxidizer is drawn down in the tank

If they don’t understand what was happening, how are they going to fix it?

actually, a hundred seconds later, that spin looked like a dryer cycle, according to Wired Magazine’s article. See http://www.spacex.com/media.php?page=45

For those who watched the extra video that was on Youtube you will see that the nozzle went hard over to its stop and the stage spun around 180 degress while it was still firing.

Note that the engine gimballed *towards* the same side that got the impact, thus yawing the second stage further in the same direction as the impact had. That’s because both were caused by the pre-existing rotation.

Also, for those who haven’t read the report, the first stage underperformed because of the mixture ratio problem, but they still would have made the correct orbit if they’d been able to keep propellent going into the pump intake.

It probably depends a lot on how underperforming the launch was. If it’s something like this where they were just trying to go into a high LEO, doing the burn with the satellites, then retopping off the satellite using an Orbital Express like platform would likely make sense. If the satellite was bound for GEO though, Mr Wingo’s tug might make more sense, if it got stranded in LEO. If it got stranded in a messed up GTO, it might be trickier, but there probably are solutions. So long as there’s a way to retank satellites, or to attach a ion-tug propulsion package, you can probably eliminate at least a decent fraction of the current “partial failures”…

…anyhow, back to that thesis…

~Jon

~Jon