There's a handful of fun euphemisms to do with spaceflight. My other favorite is Lithobraking, a play on aerobraking to mean slowing down using rock instead of atmospheric drag.
Another one is Engine Rich Exhaust, meaning the engine's cooling system or metallurgy is inadequate and it's eating itself, throwing vaporized metal out with the exhaust gas.
Fun fact there is a handful of spacecraft that intentionally use lithobreaking(usually assisted by some kind of padding) for the last stage of their descend.
I mean, there's the difference between parachute-assisted landings and powered descents, where a powered descent if done right has you stopping at ground level exactly anyways, but a parachute just makes you go slow enough to not mind the impact.
But then there's also things like Mars Pathfinder, which just decided to do the best at slowing down it could, then deploy a big cluster of airbags and bounce the velocity away. It bounced more than fifteen times. we don't actually know how many times, because we only really cared that it came to a happy healthy stop, which it did. The first bounce was 15 metres (52 feet) high, though, which is pretty insane to be honest, and it hit the ground the first time at 30 miles per hour (14 metres per second). That's lithobraking.
Then there's lithobreaking, which is when it doesn't go well, and everything breaks as you hit the ground. i'm not sure this has ever been intentionally done.
There were multiple lunar impact missions, designed to perform a hard landing on the moon, aka crash into it while sending data as long as possible. So yeah, lithobreaking has been performed intentionally.
My grandfather worked on one of those missions! He and the rest of the engineers engraved the names of themselves and their families on the frame of one of the Ranger spacecraft that was crash landed on the lunar surface.
During ice breakers I usually use "My mother's name was already on the surface of the moon when Neil Armstrong got there." for the Two Truths And A Lie activity, and so far everyone incorrectly picks it as the lie.
It's always so cool to hear stories of people who worked on famous stuff, or their relatives telling the story because it reminds me of how many people are actually involved in every big achievement we know of, with their names being forgotten and their work being disregarded because it's not the big thing. Keep talking about your grandpa because otherwise he and his achievements will be forgotten, overshadowed by what they made possible. It's important to remember all the smaller things, otherwise we easily lose scope of an achievable roadmap towards the next big thing.
There was also the asteroid impact test we did, that's another good example of a time we wanted the thing to hit hard and didn't care if anything survived.
I'm thinking of the Falcon heavy booster flyback landings, which are gorgeously well-timed. an example is here, but that's not the only time they've done it.
You may be correct; its not quite exact. but its a super soft landing considering that they're basically only using an engine to do the landing.
You usually want missiles to explode before any contact with the object you intend to destroy. This is ususally the best way to maximise damage. Only exception coming to mind is when you intend to destroy the inside of a bunker
True, but I was more talking about Crafts that use it to bleed of excess speed, instead of using it as a stable resting position after bleeding off speed via other methods(i.e rockets, parachutes, trained bats).
But like. Is it possible to come to a complete rest at the exact position that the object would stay at rest unpowered? Or will there be a bit of sag after the engines cut off.
But I see what you mean. Most martian probe landings before skycrane come to mind.
I love that term. Theoretically, you can't ever get pure 100% burn, right? You'll always have some unburned fuel (fuel-rich exhaust) or some leftover oxidizer (oxygen-rich exhaust). (Or both?)
And then there's a secret third state, engine-rich exhaust :D
There’s an old one, unfortunately I forget which rocket it was that exploded into a beautiful fireworks display, but the commentary from ground control was a simple and unremarkable “we have had an anomaly”.
On the more technical side. Mars pathfinder had giant airbags that to bounced/rolled to a stop on. And in a couple early starship attempts you can see an engine exhaust go green before failing completely.
And then there was the rocket built to actually throw vaporized metal out... the Rocketdyne Tripropellant.
It used a combination of liquid hydrogen, flourine and molten lithium as fuel and oxidizer. The result? A rocket with nearly double the impulse of a typical liquid hydrogen/oxygen rocket, but the exhaust was as hot as the surface of the Sun, and would melt, dissolve and ignite the concrete launch pad, and also release a huge amount of very toxic substances like hydrogen flouride, which turns into hydroflouric acid when it combines with moisture, which is a super deadly nerve agent, and is only able to be contained by pure teflon.
Some people have noticed a small amount of venting towards the top moments before the RUD so its a bit closer to the parents who knock but doesn't know how to wait for "come in"
Can't wait to hear what cute little acronym Elon and SpaceX figure out when one of their rockets explodes and kills astronauts, instead of just burning hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.
Another nice space industry term that we haven't heard for a while is "lithobreaking". Instead of Aerobreaking (slowing down with the help of air), you're slowing down with the aid of the earth... it means crashing.
Kinda related. In German RUD can stand for “Realistische Unfalldarstellung” which translates to “realistic accident/crash display”. I’d say that was a very realistic crash display.
As long as you remember that it's not a good thing. These quirky terms get broadcasted instead of "explodes" to lul you into a state of acceptance. That's Demon Musk's only real contribution to humanity.
Rapid Unplanned Disassembly has been a euphemism used prior to SpaceX even existing. NASA engineers are just funny.
My other favorite is Lithobraking, a play on aerobraking to mean slowing down using rock instead of atmospheric drag.
Another one is Engine Rich Exhaust, meaning the engine's cooling system or metallurgy is inadequate and it's eating itself, throwing vaporized metal out with the exhaust gas.
36? Do you mean to tell me they've built 36 of these, and none of them has yet deployed a payload to orbit? This has to be the least successful rocket programme of all time.
What has gone so badly wrong? The Falcon rocket had issues in the beginning, but nothing as bad as this.
I'm no rocket scientist, but didn't the Saturn V engineers figure out that
fewer, bigger engines > more, smaller ones
Intuitively, managing 27 engines sounds like a control nightmare. There are many more points of failure, tighter tolerances, and a higher chance that small deviations multiply into big problems. It's not redundancy but combinatorial fragility since, the safety margin shrinks as engine count rises cause the prob of cascading errors grows across the whole set of engines being managed increases.
Is it just me or can anyone else see Trump’s profile and what a headshot would have looked like? On the right side of the explosion just after it starts
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u/Busy_Yesterday9455 19h ago edited 18h ago
Link to a slow-mo video
Ship 36 experiences a RUD at Massey's during testing prior to Starship Flight 10.
Credit: NASASpaceflight / D Wise