Wednesday, June 23, 2004|
playing with GMail It's true. The GMail threaded "conversation" view is fantastic. A wonderful bit of programming. Seems to me that a gmail account is the ideal place to put mailing lists. Especially technical lists that have information you never know you are going to need in the future. And then to have the power of the Google search engine to find that information. Your own private Google. Think about it. The mistake is to think that GMail is about email. It's not. It's about creating your own little storehouse of useful information, available anywhere.
I do have some problems with the fact that all the information is on a
server I don't control. I'm hoping that the security is good,
certainly. But what I'm getting in return is searchability and
availability. |
|
sometimes begging works... Well, I took a chance and it paid off. I begged for a GMail account in an earlier entry here, and sure enough, it worked.
If you go back to my post, and read the comments, you can see how you
might be able to get one for yourself. |
|
SpaceShipOne After the euphoria of the achievement died away, reality set in. Not everything happened flawlessly. There was the premature shutoff of the engine. The buckling of the fairing around the engine (which is primarily cosmetic, but still, to hear a 'bang" while you're pushing the performance envelope cannot be a confidence inspiring event). What is most disturbing to me was the report of a loss of attitude control at apogee. 'Loss of attitude control' means that he couldn't control the direction or orientation of the spacecraft at that point. The pilot commented that if this had happened earlier in the flight, he wouldn't be here. A loss of attitude control at Mach 3 would mean loss of crew and vehicle. So, they lost attitude control at apogee. That corresponds to the point when they passed the threshold of space. And the threshold of space is where the atmosphere stops being a going concern. So, if you had a craft that relied on airflow for attitude control, suddenly there would be none. It occurs to me that in all of the diagrams I've seen of SpaceShipOne, they make a lot of fuss over the hybrid engine and the "feather" recovery method, both of which are very cool innovations and unique to the ship. But one thing I don't see called out (which doesn't mean that they don't exist, but...) is a system of attitude control thrusters for when the craft leaves the atmosphere. For when there is no airflow for the control surfaces to manipulate. Hmmm. I hope this isn't true. I hope they didn't leave this critical system out. I'm going to do more research and see how they planned to handle attitude control outside of the atmosphere. Even the X-15 had control thrusters (and the X-15 ultimately went higher than SpaceShipOne has). followup According to this page, SpaceShipOne has a "cold-gas RCS." My assumption is that RCS stands for "Reaction Control System," which is another name for a thruster.
So it has the capability of being controlled outside of the atmosphere.
Which makes the loss of attitude control even more mysterious. Did the
RCS give out? Did the pilot forget to switch it back on? |
Last update: 6/29/2005; 4:25:26 PM .
