@ErinAnne pallet of batteries news! NASA confirms origin of space junk that crashed through Florida home

@uhoh oh, okay! It's an enormous hunk of inconel! Of course it made it to the ground

I wonder if that stanchion is overengineered or not. I've overengineered something that went into space before

"why does this need to be a half-inch thick" someone should have asked me, but they didn't

undergrad was a hoot

@ErinAnne goodness, that sounds fun! It's understandable; nobody wants it to be their component that fails and ends the game for everyone.

And without good solid modeling and failure analysis for the metal under all those crazy vibration loads during launch, you probably didn't have the tools to evaluate how much you could thin it without increasing risks. As long as you weren't over your weight allocation, it was probably a reasonable choice.

It sounds like you've had a lot of "space fun" over the years! :-)

we were way over the original weight. I don't remember the exact details and I don't know if it's discussed anywhere. I think all the Nanosat-3 / FASTRAC theses are public, so I might have to look back

but I'm pretty sure each satellite of the two-satellite stack ended up going over the original mass allocation

turned out not to be a big deal. Might've been resolved by a launch vehicle shift

I know we ended up launching on a big rideshare on a Minotaur

those big lifting points are my fault