Winding the thread back a little ...
Varangian wrote:Atheistoclast wrote:According to you interstellar spaceflight can only come about through evolutionary processes entailing trial and error. If we go down that path we will still never make any progress.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qeX98tAS8[/youtube]
Thank you for providing that neat little demonstration of the concept I was expounding upon.
Indeed, what we see above illustrates this even more graphically than the comical aircraft failures I posted earlier. Because the failures in that video clip above weren't comical, they were
catastrophic. Just as well the rockets seen failing in that video clip were
unmanned, wasn't it?
The simple fact of the matter is, that even though the people responsible for those rockets
thought that they has put together a working rocket, and
thought that they'd applied their knowledge of physics correctly,
REALITY turned round and bit them on the ass.
REALITY turned round and said "er, sorry guys, back to the drawing board, you didn't know as much as you thought you did". When pushing the envelope in this manner, and trying to apply knowledge acquired earlier in an entirely new realm, the above video clip teaches us that sometimes, assumptions that our past knowledge of a given set of scientific phenomena will apply in this new realm, in the same manner as they do in other, more familiar realms, need to be tempered with a
lot of caution. Sometimes,
REALITY turns round and demonstrates to us in spectacular fashion that such assumptions are made at our peril.
I'm minded at this point to consider the Space Shuttle. This vehicle, in the 1980s, flew 24 successful missions, starting with STS-1, with the 24th successful mission being STS-61-C, carrying aboard it a US Congressman and putting a Comsat satellite in orbit, launched on January 12th, 1986. Then on January 28th, 1986, the 25th mission was rolled out, namely STS-51-L. The launch proceeded initially as all the previous launches had proceeded, and the 'stack', as the assembly of orbiter, external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters is known collectively, lifted off the pad, and climbed into the sky before an assembled crowd of hundreds of thousands of observers. At about 50 seconds into the flight, the crew eased back the throttle in order to reduce stress on the airframe as it reached the point known as Max Q, the point where the dynamic balance of aerodynamic forces is at its maximum, and the point at which the stresses on the airframe are at their greatest as it climbs through the atmosphere. Once the point of Max Q was passed, the crew requested authorisation from Ground Control to re-apply maximum thrust to provide the impetus to reach orbit. They duly received the instruction, "Go for throttle up", and moved the throttle to 104% of rated thrust (this is standard procedure for Shuttle missions - the engines have a specific rated thrust, but are designed to exceed that rated thrust for limited periods during the initial phase of the flight to orbit). The engine thrust duly increased, and the Shuttle passed through Mach 1, as it began the ascent to orbit and acceleration to a speed of around 18,000 miles per hour ...
... whereupon, the Orbiter and external fuel tank disintegrated, and the mission came to a catastrophic halt.
That was the
Challenger disaster, about which a lot is now known, and indeed, physicist Richard Feynman was instrumental in blowing apart a number of misconceptions, including the
vast disparity between the engineers' understanding of the risks, and the manifest
lack of understanding on the part of management (the
Dilbert phenomenon was apparently alive and well in the management hierarchy). Indeed, the engineers themselves, when questioned by Feynman, told him that
their estimates of likely catastrophic mission failures lay between 1 in 50 and 1 in 100. In other words, the engineers themselves
regarded the Shuttle as sufficiently risky a vehicle to warrant planning for between one and two percent of all Shuttle missions to end with the destruction of the vehicle and the loss of the crew.
The idea that this in any way supports fantasies about magical design involving perfect foreknowledge and zero error is fatuous to put it mildly. Indeed, Feynman said as much in the Rogers Commission report:
Richard Feynman wrote:For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
by 
As he's seen off Schlafly on these same grounds...
