[AR] Re: shuttle SRBs (was Re: Re: Phenolic regression rate)
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2018 12:28:28 -0500 (EST)
On Thu, 8 Feb 2018, Florin Mingireanu wrote:
One could even think of an active system that "tracks" the remainder of
the rocket and modulates the extraction accordingly. If it seems SF...
it is SF until someone actually does it :-)
Whether it's possible and whether it's desirable are two separate issues.
:-) There is usually a strong preference for making emergency equipment,
like escape systems, *simple*. That's partly to make them reliable,
partly to minimize the possibility of subtle bugs (since they don't get
tested much in normal operation), and partly to make them less dependent
on case analyses that never manage to cover 100% of the cases.
Smart systems are a two-edged sword. Rockets and spacecraft have died
because smart fault recovery was faced with a weird unexpected situation,
and picked the wrong response. Stupid fault recovery that always does one
thing, rather than trying to make clever choices, is usually preferable.
Henry
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