
Orbital's Cygnus freighter reaches International Space Station - agnuku
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24306173
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th0br0
Thanks for submitting this - given the nigh-eclipsing popularity of SpaceX on
social networks I hadn't heard about this recent launch or Orbital's recent
activity at all.

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Kiro
SpaceX gets too much publicity.

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plorkyeran
I prefer to think of it as that SpaceX gets the right amount of publicity, and
their competitors get too little.

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MichaelSalib
Competitors like Orbital deserve very little publicity. I know something about
engineering practices at Orbital (my spouse used to work there) and they're
just not comparable to SpaceX at all.

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kiba
Please explain their engineering practices.

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MichaelSalib
An engineering culture obsessed with never innovating. Do you know what
happens when an Orbital engineer wants to verify that a satellite will have
enough battery power throughout its lifetime even given eclipses? They copy an
excel spreadsheet from a shared network drive that has the analysis for the
last satellite they worked on. This spreadsheet performs numerical integration
using recursive cell references. It takes several minutes for excel to crunch
through it. Of course, it involves lots of complicated formulas that are easy
to get wrong, especially given excel's interface (this is really, really not
what excel was designed for), and you can't even use modern features of excel
(like named cell references) because the group forbids their use since not
everyone understands them. You can't write code either for the same reason.
You certainly can't use matlab because that costs money and the company is
unwilling to pay. When you do find defects in the spreadsheets (say, for
example, when doing a power budget, the spreadsheet calculates current and
tries to compare it to the max current available but someone screwed up and
instead compared 1/current to the max current available), management will
insist that you NOT go back and fix the bug in the older spreadsheets for
satellite that have already flown: who cares whether or not they're going to
fail in space, we've already shipped them!

Most of the aerospace industry is like this: it is filled with people who
devote themselves to one singular goal: don't fuck up in a new way. You can
fuck up, you can even do so catastrophically. That's allowed. But if you fail
doing something new, your career will be terminated with extreme prejudice.

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th0br0
Well, isn't that to be expected? It's a big company and seems NASA-y

I'm not a fan of Orbital either - thanks for sharing your insight though! - I
think SpaceX's approach is far superior. But nonetheless, it's nice to hear
about the competition occasionally, too.

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TorKlingberg
It's interesting how many unmanned resupply crafts there are for the ISS now.
Russian Progress, European ATV, Japanese HTV and the Dragon. Now what is
really needed is something manned to complement the Soyuz. SpaceX is aiming
for it at least.

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InclinedPlane
SpaceX, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada Corp. SpaceX is certainly farthest along but
the CST-100 is a fairly mature design as well, and SNC have already completed
captive carry tests on DreamChaser test models. With any luck there may be 3
separate manned spacecraft being made by American companies within the next 5
years.

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avmich
And also Energia is working on the PTK NP project.

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chm
I'm not an expert in the field, but I think one advantage SpaceX has over
Orbital is that its capsule is reusable.

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JulianMorrison
Another is that, according to the BBC website, "Upmass: 6t" for Dragon versus
"Upmass: 2.7t" for Cygnus - a shade under half as much cargo carried to orbit.

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TorKlingberg
According to the Wikipedia article, the Dragon's cargo capacity to the ISS is
3.3t. 6t is for separate "DragonLab" missions.

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jmadsen
Real life becomes more and more like the SciFi movies I grew up with.

Off to watch "2001: A Space Odyssey"

