You’d better hope not
VB
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I practise homeopathic soldering. Medical grade, natch.
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To be fair, if you have a chance take a good luck at the NASA fuel cell they have at the National Space Centre. The level of detail in construction is something else.
better pull your socks up for the “S” then 
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Indeed. Almost everything they did was at the absolute cutting edge. Testing stuff on the ground is simply not the same as testing it in flight and if it doesn’t pass the test in flight then the consequences are rarely trivial. All the same, the Apollo 13 O2 tank wiring was iffy. Like the o-rings on the Challenger SRBs.
VB
At least one of the attendees here works in space related engineering. He said we’d be surprised what they don’t have to comply with (such as RoHS regs on lead in solder). They work to a different set of standards.
I had a tiny bit of contact with the Space Science team at work who built and tested satellite stuff - both hardware and software - mostly for ESA, but that meant sometimes via collaborations for NASA too. Their procedural controls were in a completely different league from everything else the organisation did - even the radiation safety management on our big machines. That said, their project costs and the rigidity of their deadlines imposed really serious pressures. Irresistable force meets immovable object.
VB
Technically not iffy when used within design parameters.
Fuck that old shite, what was the pork meal like?
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How many of those amp does it take to make 1w?
Don’t know but that Phillips valve on the right is a monster.
Well, the devil is in the detail I guess, of which there’s a great deal. The o-rings were iffy enough that they had been doubled up so that if one failed the other was there as a backup. There had been instances on earlier flights of one failing. Morton Thiokol were then pressured into saying that despite the cold the o-rings would not be sufficiently iffy to cancel the launch. It was a judgement call and they got it wrong.
VB
Dinner. Roast duck, red cabbage, two kinds of potato, some berry based jelly and a very nice gravy. Tuborg Classic on draught
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Apparently yer new fangled lead free solder doesn’t behave well in space. Forms whiskers I believe. Needs a nice bit of yer old tin lead.
Used to dick about with x-ray stuff that was used to prove there was lead in the solder at EADS.
Fuck, I am bored of my own posts.
Going to go and do summat.
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The plinky plonk jazz starts…
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