02:20
@uhoh on the "why didn't they think of that", one of my favorite examples is the Morpheus lander, though it's arguably more obscure than "why didn't they think about the basic torque issues here"
2
Morpheus evolved out of the Armadillo Aerospace landers, and though it was different Armadillo folks definitely met with the Morpheus folks at JSC. I was never involved directly but a friend, who got me my NASA job in the first place, was on the team
I had read the Armadillo blogs during my freshman year in college, back when I thought I was too dumb to be a programmer and was pursuing flying, which I was good at, instead
John Carmack did a really good job writing those blogs too
anyway one of the things that happened during Armadillo's test campaigns was they did all this testing suspended from a crane, got the vehicle flying reasonably, then moved on to having it take off from the ground and the vibration that induced completely killed their avionics. Iirc they still had the cranes so they didn't kill the vehicles (that happened later during free flight I think) but it was a real learning moment
Fast forward about a decade, Morpheus has done its test campaign at JSC suspended under cranes, started a few grass fires, made some noise, and they take it to KSC to do free flight
they hadn't read the Armadillo blogs
not that it would've probably helped, but they were actually already down a SIGI (a combined IMU+GPS box) when they started that test and then they found out the hard way that taking off from the ground, the vibrations kill their electronics dead
and then I helped my friend sail his boat back to Houston from FL
oh that video I linked omits one of the funniest parts, the person doing the countdown skips one
anyway, the history of aerospace engineering is a history of great triumphs and astounding incompetence. I've helped a little with both I guess.
