On the 7th day after a shuttle launch, the video retrieved from the two solid rocket boosters is usually played back on NASA-TV. This is really amazing video, as it comes from six different cameras (three on each booster), and shows the launch, booster separation, and fall back to Earth including the landing in the ocean.
Yeah, I've seen some of that stuff. The one I liked best was one as one of those boosters was coming down, shutes deployed, and then it hit the water, and glub glub glub as it went under water, then it popped up to the surface, and you could see the parachute floating beside it on the surface. Pretty neat.
Yeah, I know that the shuttle launches have cameras running during the launch. I'm not sure what impressed me so much about this one yesterday, perhaps part of it was that it was all so fast, ie while you're still watching the rockets lifting it off, you hear them say that they achieved orbit. The other part of what was different is that you got a view of the stearable rocket nozzles. If I read right, this didn't have solid fuel boosters, but were kerosene and hydrogen burning with liquid oxygen through controllable nozzles. It was a slightly different view from what we normally see with the shuttle. I was also a bit confused relative to where it was launched from. It seemed to be a much more primative launch area, even though I read that it was from the Cape. Shortly after the launch, they announced that there were some grass fires near the launch area.
I saw a comment on TV where they said that these private companies are just learning, and don't know what they don't know yet, but it was pretty impressive for a commercial attempt. Plus, we all think of NASA as being government, whereas in reality, NASA is primarily a bunch of contract officers, and it's the contractors doing much of the work anyway, and these days the federal government is even contracting out the contracting, putting anyother layer of spending between the tax dollar and the actual work.
Ie it used to be that the government agencies actually did stuff, but then they started farming the actual work out to contractors, but since they no longer did the work, they no longer had people who understood what was being done, so they didn't have the expertise to manage the contracts, so now they are hiring companies who supposedly have the expertise to manage the contracts, but even these companies don't have the expertise either, since they don't do the work either.
I know that there was a lot of criticism of the government being inept when they did the work themselves, but I think I'd rather have that instead of 6 layers of paper pushers. .....Grumblings from someone who was once a contractor then a government employee doing the work and a government employee monitoring contractors, seeing no logical way out of the waste cycle.
Oops... drifting off topic yet again.
