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What you say is just common sense but as you can see from the downvotes, average people do not like smart people. And the exact same thing happened before the l

• ben_w 6y ago
  One of the standard examples of common sense is “everything that goes up must come down”. When it comes to space missions, common sense starts bad and rapidly gets worse — there is no down, there is no “now”, metals can contact-weld without any supply of energy, exposed fluids boil until they freeze, radiation pressure is relevant, ionising radiation doses can be enough to break things, impact damage is radically different, launch times are prescribed by orbital dynamics, engines are more efficient when they are moving faster, fuel use is exponential with regard to change in velocity and nothing to do with distance, and the launch mass is heavily constrained. And that’s just the stuff I know from following Scott Manley and similar on YouTube — I’m a very long way from being a rocket engineer.
  • GoToRO 6y ago
    Is that your justification for not testing the actuator? Space is hard, let's not test things?
    • ben_w 6y ago
      If you want to launch on the Grand Tour, your launch options are the 1970s and the 2140s. You hit the date, you test what you can, within that constraint. (They were also heavily budget limited, and I’m sure everyone here has an example of a project which became more expensive because someone decided they “couldn’t afford testing”). Even then, even despite people who probably have PhDs in specific engineering topics I can’t even name, half the time you can’t even tell what’s important to test vs “it’s common sense this will work fine for a thousand cycles” — hence the long list of missions which failed catastrophically. It is rocket science.
• bakedbeanz 6y ago
  Ah, but of course you are one of The Smart People whereas we plebians (and the NASA scientists who designed and launched the probe) are merely average.
  • GoToRO 6y ago
    Thank you! now you get it!