There was apparently a clog of some sort in the helium lines that go to the thrusters - when the computer detected the thrusters weren't pressurizing, it immediately did the right thing, stopped what it was doing, and let the engineers diagnose the problem.

The engineers cycled the valves & pumps, which unclogged the lines, and they got the thrusters working normally.

Unfortunately, it delayed berthing with the space station for a couple days, which may cause problems for some of the perishable items onboard the Dragon.

The rest of the supplies will be fine, according to the update on the OP link.

REAL FOOD? yep not jello monkey brains. which is rather tasty. you know JELLO wonder what happens to jello (when it's been well turned into jello. in space?? I'm sure they have footage of this..

Sounds kinda trivial at first brush, but I hope the stuff is ok, some of them have been up there a while, and that's a piece of home.

So the whole thruster problem delayed them by a day.

Sounds like fresh fruit will be OK. IIRC, there were also a few biological experiments on the Dragon that might also be perishable, but I'm thinking they'll be OK too.

I know that there are a plenty of "space junkies" on DU.

Last edited Sun Mar 3, 2013, 01:58 AM - Edit history (1)

Under TOPICS
is the heading
SCIENCE

Under SCIENCE are 4 forums:

"Anthropology"
"Science"
"Skepticism, Science and Pseudoscience"
"Weatherwatchers"


Is "Skepticism & Pseudoscience" more worthy of it's own forum than say:
""Astronomy and Space Science"?

The pseudoscience forum is, as much as anything else, one of those "sweep these under the rug" subforums like the I/P or guns forums: one of the main purposes is to give, e.g., electric universe kooks or Apollo landing deniers someplace to post that doesn't end up cluttering the science forum up with all that inanity. Its existence makes the science forum much less of a headache to read, especially compared to a year or so ago when, for some reason I've yet to fully get, we had a few really fanatic electric cosmologists pushing that everywhere they could.

The science forum's also low-traffic enough as is without being split off into several smaller groups.

I guess Astronomy and Space Science articles etc. could go into the general "Science" forum;

I just can't believe that there are DUers who think the Moon landing was a fake.

What the hell is the "electric universe?..So-called "Zero Point Energy"?

There were a lot of them back around the 40th anniversary of the Apollo landing; a lot of pretty amazing (in a "reach for the antidepressants" manner), drawn-out threads with all the standard conspiracy-theory silliness, etc. A lot of them either got bored after the coverage of the anniversary faded, or got banned for getting excessively flamey when people wouldn't drink their kool-aid.

Electric universe stuff is for all practical purposes a rehash of aether theory, where they deny the existence of physical forces other than electromagnetism and believe all physical interactions involve that with one form or another of plasma being the transmission medium. Some take it even further and, e.g., deny the existence of meteorites ("that crater was caused by a colossal ancient lightning strike from space!&quot .

For some reason I still don't get, every EU fan I've seen is really, really, really evangelical about it. The loudest couple here got banned a year or so ago but would regularly appear in various science threads, trying to make whatever was being discussed all about electricity, and showing baffling amounts of tenacity in Not Shutting Up About It.

debunking and/or mocking of all things pseudo-scientific. Anyone supporting such things will find themselves in a dogpile.

Creative Speculation would be a good place for Apollo project deniers while electric universe proponents would likely be more welcome in ASAH

Maybe it's some other private company, but you get the idea.

If it's to do with them having a mechanical problem, anyone that has ever attempted spaceflight has had them, and sometimes catastrophically.

And five years is a very short time frame. A significant problem like this on the third re-supply tells you something.

I think a lot of people think free enterprise companies have some special abilities over government entities (like NASA), and think they can do amazing things if this power is unleashed. This leads to a lot of unrealistic cheerleading. When lives and hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake, it can lead to catastrophe.

So far, public-funded spaceflight has killed more people than private. And NASA screwed up with plenty of unmanned flights in its beginning, too.

However, in this instance, the private entity managed to fix the problem in-flight. NASA and the rest may have had instances of similar fixes, yet they also don't garner the media interest as does a private entity. So, what it tells me is that their engineers are at least as good as NASA's in solving potentially catastrophic problems.

I'm not sure how the other company is going to manage their project in five years, either, but I wish them success. Because I don't care if it's public or private funded spaceflight. Any advances are to be cheered on.

I never did call this problem a catastrophe. Only that problems, whether catastrophic or fixable happen whether the entity in charge is publically-funded or privately. The member to whom I was responding seemed to think that only publically-funded entities should be doing space programs, maybe because their experience is tried and true. At least until they have another catastrophic accident.

No one is immune from mechanical failures and human error. And I applaud Space-X and all the rest for getting into space

Other than what they have done via government contracts with NASA, ESA, the military and so forth. There is no conceivable market in flights to Mars, especially in the next five years, so any talk about private enterprise trips to Mars are incorrect. They would still be taxpayer funded.

By the way, I have nothing against space exploration. My son routinely uses data from XMM Newton and Chandra, so I am very inclined to support space ventures. I just don't agree with unrealistic dreams that there is some untapped private market for anything but low orbit junkets for multi-millionaires.

Trapping them in Mars orbit, or making them miss a return to Earth window.

so the Falcon lift vehicle is pretty well proven at this point. The dragon capsule is good to go for 'stuff', has yet to be certified for human occupancy.

The Mars trip guy is a totally different group, but I would guess he'd be keen to leverage the Falcon Space-X platform to get all his shit into orbit.

N/T