Take a peek at a shuttle cockpit

[puterdude]

Received this in an email ,thought some of you might enjoy.

http://360vr.com/2011/06/22-discovery-flight-deck-opf_6236/index.html

[JamesT]

holy jeebus!!! back when I worked for rockwell, I had a friend who also worked there as did his parents. His mom had a full time job working on inventory of spare shuttle parts. I didn't quite understand how this could be a full time job. Now I do lololol. I was fortunate to work on the tribological (friction and wear)properties of the liquid oxygen fill-and-drain valve. RIP shuttle. Good times.

[Pigsticker]

Beautiful, but shen I see something like that it makes me wonder how many poor people could've been clothed and fed with the money. Not trying to hijack the thread guys just my thoughts.

[JamesT]

I agree pigsticker...I heard the total cost the other night, can't remember, but it just blew me away.

[BassBlaster]

WOW, that thing is freakin amazing!!

One obsevation...on the back wall is a Canadian flag. Didnt see an American flag anywhere in there.

[fish on!]

Nice toy!
I want one.

Sent from my DROIDX

[Tokugawa]

I think the rad hard Dell is intriguing. Hahahahaha!!!

[billk]

but if you ever get to Houston, check out the Space Center. They have a full size shuttle cockpit simulator.

Went there several times during the 6 years I was stuck there.

Way too cool to describe. Definitely the type of place you can get lost in for the entire day and still not want to leave.

[ezbite]

Beautiful, but shen I see something like that it makes me wonder how many poor people could've been clothed and fed with the money. Not trying to hijack the thread guys just my thoughts.

really, you gotta be kidding me. all puterdude was doing was showing us something awesome and you go all hippy?? and yes, i thought before i hit the enter key. just give it a rest sometimes...

[JamesT]

whats wrong with hippies?:Banane40::Banane40::Banane40::)

[ezbite]

nothing is wrong with hippys, im sorry for sterotyping, i just dont see how something as cool as this video of the shuttle should be put on second stage because someone thinks someone should be fed with the funds that provide for the shuttle, please explain to me why? different programs last time i checked..

and by the way pigsticker, you ARE trying to hijack this thread

[JamesT]

Guess i didnt think he was trying to hijack. Even so, thats kinda how it is sometimes on www forums bc there is just so much info and people may feel strongly about certain topics that are tangentially related. Really imho if "hijacking threads" was not allowed, forums would not be as interesting and fun to read nor would nearly as much info get disseminated. There would be a lot less stuff to waste your time at work too:D. Heck i worked on the shuttle(thanks for paying my salary for a while fellers :D) and agree with pigsticker. I also worked in the body armor industry as a quality engineer and feel strongly about related things. We were trying to stop the m2ap armor piercing rounds, couldnt(we'd measure how many colimbus yellow page books theyd go through after going through our armor) went out of busness, yet only a small % of rounds fired at the time were ap and there were soldiers not wearing the klunky armor made by the only company that made the armor that had lobbied congress to make a law only to buy ap armor blah blah blah. That is one of the reasons i i changed from enginerring to education. Make better armor, someone makes better bullets/rounds where does it end? Now i am will start my 2nd year teaching math /science at a school that is 100% free lunch. Do i think i am making this world a better place than i did as an engineer? Heck yeah! Did i love my engineer jobs? Heck yeah! Did i cringe when i heard how much was spent on thenshuttle? Heck yeah! Do i think the world needs more people like EZ? Heck yeah! My point of this is that pigsticker had his reasons for bringing this up it is tangentiallyg related and i dont think he meant anh harm(try to hijack thread).

Having said that, i have been on here way too much, and will be finally going FISHING tonite. Peace.

[JamesT]

Btw That video IS one of the coolest i have seen in a long time!

[Agitation Free]

I couldn't help but notice the trouble lights. Is it possible that someone from NASA went down to the local Home Depot and bought them for say $10.00 ea. Or is it that the American tax payer coughed up say $121,000.00 ea. :p That is a very cool video. :good:

[Iraqvet]

Made me dizzy,but cool none the less....

[bobk]

really, you gotta be kidding me. all puterdude was doing was showing us something awesome and you go all hippy?? and yes, i thought before i hit the enter key. just give it a rest sometimes...

+1 sometimes it's better to keep quiet or start your own thread .

[dmills4124]

Can anyone list more items invented for the space program that is used everyday by us that I left out?
Here are a few of the items I can think of, off the top of my head; Velcro, crazy glue, kevlar and the super heat abating shield material used on the bottom of the shuttle for re-entry. Oh and on the space station they are making perfectly round ballbearing that cant be made on earth because of gravity. Jet propulsion advances and rocket technology. How about the advances made in astronomy because of the things discovered by the Hubble telescope and the SOHO telescope sytem in orbit that is studying the sun. GPS and cell phone satelites. I really think it is money well spent including the heros' who lost there lives to bring us all the new knowledge we have been able to cull from the entire program. I was surprized that there were so many manual switches in the shuttle. What a work of art. Cant wait to see what is next. Rest in peace shuttle program and thanks NASA.
More than my two cants worth worth.
donm

[puterdude]

Here's an interesting link that shows just some of the common advancements we've gained from the space programs.

http://techtran.msfc.nasa.gov/at_home.html

[JamesT]

there are a number of low friction/low wear coatings (I was in the interfacial processes dept at the rockwell science center) that originated in the aerospace industry then made their way (as-is or modified) into other industries such as automotive, manufacturing, food, etc. I worked a lot with this place in ventura (they are worldwide).

http://www.magnaplate.com/

my fave coating was their hi-t lube. That stuff really is incredible. You could coat a metal disk with it, rub it against another metal and it could go on what seemed like forever (we ran tests for multiple days sometimes) with minimal (basically none) change in friction coefficient as well as extremely low wear. It is also in the guinness book of world records as having the lowest friction coefficient of any material.

http://www.magnaplate.com/coatings/hi-t/

The stuff I did on the shuttle came about bc the shuttle had failed a few pre-launch tests due to a sticky liquid oxygen (oxidizer for the liquid hydrogen fuel) fill-and-drain valve. So they had to delay some launches. I ran some tests (we had a custom tribometer that my boss built with all the whistles and bells, sem-scanning electron microscopy, auger electron specroscopy, xps-xray photoelectron spectroscopy, ultra high vacuum(necessary for surface science), dual wavelength IR to get temp,could run at liquid N2 temps, more whistles and bells than any other tribometer at the time. Tribometer is just a fancy word for friction and wear tester(when we got into automotive brake testing we built one from an old lathe), you rub stuff together(metal disk on flat surface, but we could also doing rolling tests or slip/roll tests), its got load cells and tells you friction coefficient, wear, etc)at the time. Basically, in addition to just the friction coefficient and wear measurement data, we could look at wear surfaces with SEM, get chemistry as a function of every 10-20 atom layers of surfaces/friction film by sputtering if we wanted to (we actually tried to apply this to automotive brake pad film later on, but thats another story lol....brake pads, 20 ingredients that kept getting added over the years and no one knows what they do then try to isolate variables to study lol).

So I coated (sent them out to be coated) the outer diameter of test disks (2" diameter, a little over 1/4" wide) with the material that was currently used and ran tests by loading them into a flat surface to simulate conditions(there were feedback loops we could run at constant load or constant output/friction coeffient). Then coated other test disks with potential candidate coatings(base was same base metal as actual valve of course), ran tests, collected data of friction and wear, then looked as surfaces in sem for galling, etc. I found a material that seemed to perform better than what they were currently using and suggested it to the person at boeing (this was after rockwell sold aerospace to boeing, contract work for boeing). I'm not sure if they ended up changing to it, but I do know that at least twice since then, I read of delayed launches due to sticky fill-and-drain valve. That was probably the coolest thing I got to do, look at actual LO2 fill-and-drain valves that had been in space in the SEM. We had a set of the actual SSME (space shuttle main engine) bearings in the lab from previous work my boss had done. I was told the set cost 200K. I used to roll them around in my hands like meridian balls (I had to google that as I originally put ben wa balls) lol.

[buckzye11]

JamesT, congrats on the record.... the most words by one person on one topic... ever HA!

[Minnowhead]

All that so we could enjoy "Tang" at breakfast when we were kids! :D

[JamesT]

All that so we could enjoy "Tang" at breakfast when we were kids! :D

lololololol

[JamesT]

JamesT, congrats on the record.... the most words by one person on one topic... ever HA!

you want me to post the rest?:D

sorry I got a little carried away. This thread brought back some memories, and now I miss engineering(kinda). Those were some good times, the rockwell science center was amazing - all kinds of cool stuff going on.

[morning jigger]

JamesT, congrats on the record.... the most words by one person on one topic... ever HA!

Lol, just what I was saying to myself. Thanks for sharing though James T, its obviously a passion of yours

[JamesT]

I got into tribology bc it was the only project available at the time(ohio state). And that was after waiting for a funded project to become available after ta'ing for a year. My advisor, david rigney is an amazing person(in addition to genius). He retired after 40 years and used the same chair for all 40 (story told by daughter at retirement party) bc he didnt see the point in the university wasting money on a new chair when the one he had "worked perfectly fine". You should have see that chair....But yeah it was very cool. Then i got into microoptics where there is no wear...

at ohio state I studied the friction and wear properties of "environmentally friendly" chrome based coatings that were known to have good corrosion properties(they were already used in industry for molten metal handling and other corrosion applications). Nothing was known about their friction and wear properties and it was hoped that they would perform as good or better than electroplated chrome (nasty to make, nasty byproducts, hexavalent chromium) from a friction and wear perspective. The electroplated chrome generally performed better until it catastrophically failed/spalled - think old flaky car bumpers. I'm pretty sure none of the coatings I worked on ever made it to industry in tribological applications, but thats how a lot of research goes. You learn what doesn't work (as well as other info) but you don't know it until you try it.

[fish on!]

Not to change the subject, but is that an alien?

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-NRaqiF9ddHs/Tixho1zjQLI/AAAAAAAABKk/eKc1Y3xBEas/s720/aaaaaaaa.jpg

[JamesT]

Getting back to the original cockpit picture. I wonder if technology will ever get to the point where there is no need for all those controls. I mean, the pilot just thinks and the shuttle just goes. I hear segways are kinda like that, you could call it "zen technology"...:)

[JamesT]

Not to change the subject, but is that an alien?

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-NRaqiF9ddHs/Tixho1zjQLI/AAAAAAAABKk/eKc1Y3xBEas/s720/aaaaaaaa.jpg

bigfoot is not an alien. Excellent eyes, I bet you're great at where's waldo.:D

[fish on!]

Getting back to the original cockpit picture. I wonder if technology will ever get to the point where there is no need for all those controls. I mean, the pilot just thinks and the shuttle just goes. I hear segways are kinda like that, you could call it "zen technology"...:)

Do not try and fly the shuttle. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
What truth?
There is no shuttle.
There is no shuttle?
Then you'll see, that it is not the shuttle that flies, it is only yourself.

[JamesT]

But I haven't flown in quite some time. Really. :D