But I'm not so sure it's not needed for Johns, or your stuff. I think within the atmosphere, the kind of accident that John just saw indicates a design problem. However he's trying to get above the atmosphere and once you do you lose aerodynamic stability, and then you are at the mercy of your flight control system, and often times that is electrically controlled.
As an example, Chuck Yeager once got into an unrecoverable spin when he lost some of his HTP thrusters during reentry from high altitude. I don't know what caused that- actually the comments I saw indicated Chuck didn't know either- but it's not unlikely that it was an electrical problem; and electrical issues are often sensitive to vibration, and can be discovered in such testing.
Another example: where I worked in telecommunications we did vibrations testing on our 300 gigabit telecommunications equipment; even though most equipment never saw more than an accidental kick. However, during an earthquake our equipment usually carried on working, sometimes even with most of a building on top of it. I imagine an earthquake is closer to the environment in a launch vehicle (well not the building bit ;-) ), so I feel some vibration testing would be valuable.
In John's case the test might consist of a box, a guy, a light mallet, and instructions not to overdo it ;-)
Aleta Jackson wrote:
Ian Woollard wrote:You probably should consider shaking you equipment for an hour or two in an environmental test chamber before launch.XCOR has never done any such thing; with proper care in construction that's not needed.Aleta _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
