Selenian Boondocks

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May 8th, 2009 by Jonathan Goff

Posted in MSS

14 Responses to “It’s Alive!”

on 08 May 2009 at 1:10 pm1Tiffany

That’s just beautiful! Your baby is growing up. Haircuts for everyone!
on 08 May 2009 at 3:16 pm2Roderick Reilly

“”"”Your baby is growing up”"”"”

How appropriate, what with new fatherhood going on as well.

Congrats!
on 08 May 2009 at 8:11 pm3MG

Haircuts for everyone… except Dave. Though we can hope…

Congrats!
on 09 May 2009 at 10:08 am4Daniel Chisholm

My gosh that’s beautiful. (and loud too, I would imagine
on 09 May 2009 at 10:13 am5Jonathan Goff

Daniel,
Unfortunately I was playing roadblock, so I was about a quarter mile away. Still was cool from there, but it looks like we have more dust abatement work to do.

~Jon
on 10 May 2009 at 9:14 am6Chris Winter

Congratulations!

Dust abatement? This is required by some local regulation, I take it?

BTW, A housekeeping heads-up: The URL for Unqualified Offerings is “highclearing-dot-com”, not org.
on 11 May 2009 at 6:34 am7Adam Greenwood

Happiness.
on 11 May 2009 at 6:51 am8Jonathan Goff

Chris,
Dust abatement just so we can see the thing on a long flight.

And thanks for the link correction, I’ll fix that.

~Jon
on 11 May 2009 at 8:14 am9Roderick Reilly

“Dust Abatement” = Big Friggin’ Fan?
on 12 May 2009 at 8:56 am10Roderick Reilly

Question on the landing struts:

I noticed that both Your (Masten’s) and Armadillo’s landing struts aren’t that widely placed, but kind of a narrow base. That was true with DC-X (I was a graphic designer working for the Pentagon portion of the DC-X team). Instinctively, I woud have the struts splayed out more, but, apparently that’s not considered necessary.
on 12 May 2009 at 9:35 am11Jonathan Goff

Rod,
It’s a tradeoff. Wider spacing tends to weigh more, and make the loadpaths on the landing gear less favorable. But wider spacing does making tipping less likely. I didn’t do the latest vehicle’s landing gear, but I did do the ones for 0.2, and they’re probably too long. We’re still at an early stage on the landing gear development, we may yet end up with something splayed a bit longer for the final system. We’ll see–this is an iterative development process.

~Jon
on 13 May 2009 at 8:54 am12Roderick Reilly

Thanks for the feedback, Jon.

I suspect that, a decade down the road, carbon nanotube technology will be mature enough (and affordable enough) to allow for truly robust landing gear with less weight penalty.
on 13 May 2009 at 9:00 am13Roderick Reilly

Different question, if I may:

I notice that you and Armadillo have no aeroshells on your vehicles. Is this merely a function of this testing phase, or is the intent to not have aeroshells at all for your suborbital vehicles?
on 13 May 2009 at 9:22 am14Jonathan Goff

Roderick,
The lack of aeroshells in our case is just for these early vehicles. Post 0.2, everything will have an aeroshell. Armadillo is also planning on aeroshells for later vehicles (and they had some on earlier ones as well).

~Jon

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It’s Alive!

14 Responses to “It’s Alive!”

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