Space Shuttle Shenanigans

17 responses to “Space Shuttle Shenanigans”

1. 

   jurvetson

   Nov 24, 2009 at 4:51 pm

   Sims Inside… from the other corner, camera at arm’s length, bathed in the green glow from the HUD:
   

   Bob Bobko, seen here, helped develop the glide slope protocols for the Shuttle. It has to come in at a steep angle to have enough air speed not to stall before landing. So you have to aim at the ground and then pull the nose up at the right time to land it. And since there is no propulsion, you get one chance to land it…

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2. 

   Leino88

   Nov 24, 2009 at 6:07 pm

   as u mentioned a few times in the video… "cool …. puppy!!"
   i say "INSANE!!"
   wow

   what happens to it now, since the shuttle is being retired…?
   …retrofit with an xbox?

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3. 

   Wind Watcher

   Nov 24, 2009 at 6:26 pm

   Looking good. Glad you got the bird back on the ground in one piece!

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4. 

   Head_First_Only

   Nov 24, 2009 at 6:27 pm

   Steve – great shots, and loved the video. You obviously had loads of fun! Sim looks like it has a pretty good database of the area round the Cape, too – although I guess there aren’t that many buildings to model apart from the VAB. 😉
   —
   Seen on my Flickr home page. (?)

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5. 

   schoschie

   Nov 24, 2009 at 7:29 pm

   The good thing about this is that I’m confident you are well aware what a spectacular opportunity this is 🙂
   In other words: this is so cool.

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6. 

   hallowed bicycle

   Nov 24, 2009 at 7:40 pm

   @Leino88–You joke about XBox retrofits, but the latest generations of commercial and military flight simulators use off-the-shelf graphics cards instead of custom hardware to generate the images and video used in training.

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7. 

   Dr DAD (Daniel A D’Auria MD)

   Nov 24, 2009 at 11:44 pm

   Loved the video. Imagine having one of those in your own game room! So when are you going to fly the real thing?!

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8. 

   msamaclean ©

   Nov 24, 2009 at 11:53 pm

   Oh, I am sooo jealous! Thanks for the video! What a blast!!!

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9. 

   jitze

   Nov 25, 2009 at 1:27 am

   Wow! Things have changed in the last 25 or 30 yrs or so. I was once privileged to have a sort of equivalent experience at NASA Goddard way back then – almost all of it analog powered rather than digital. A super computer of that period did the calculations to cause movement of various actuators, but the actual simulator consisted of a huge dome – on the inside surface of which batteries of projectors beamed static pictures of the heavens (slide carousels controlled by the simulator program – but basically static) and in the center of the dome, a jointed cherry-picker type arm that could move its head – 3 degrees of motion – to any point within the dome space. On the end of this arm was a TV camera that could point in almost any direction – another 3 degrees of motion – and the degree of zoom on the camera was also controlled by the simulator program. What the camera saw was what got projected on a remote screen as "the view through the pilot’s port-hole". The pilot sat in a conventional enclosed flight-simulator capsule whose attitude (also 3 degrees of motion) was driven via hydraulics also controlled by the computer

   Also suspended in the dome space was a model of the mother ship, with which a docking maneuver was to be completed by the aspiring pilot.

   Excessive speed on attempting to dock was greeted by a stereo recording of a very large whoopee cushion.

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10. 

    Oscar Sanchez Montaner

    Nov 25, 2009 at 8:39 am

    Wow… I’m very jealous 🙂 Congratulations and enjoy it!

    Reply
11. 

    jurvetson

    Nov 25, 2009 at 6:13 pm

    Leino: they can reconfigure the cab fairly easily to sim all kinds of vehicles, even helicopters.

    jitze: fascinating story. I just bought the Apollo 14 landing site model, with the surface and craters molded in 3D (for the overhead flying cam, one step beyond the slide show).

    I was just reading Michael Collins’ (Apollo 11 CM) book Carrying the Fire on the plane and he opined:

    “In many cases it is more difficult to simulate something than to do it, and in some ways it was more difficult to get the simulators ‘flying’ than the real McCoys which followed a couple of years later.” (p.103)

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12. 

    biotron

    Nov 26, 2009 at 7:32 pm

    http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/the_money_we_waste_on_nasas

    🙂

    Reply
13. 

    Kaets Ebut

    Nov 29, 2009 at 5:15 am

    > So I wondered: Can you buzz the VAB tower on the approach?

    Did you turn the headlights off, too?

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14. 

    biotron

    Dec 23, 2009 at 6:15 pm

    🙂 – astronauts will never be anything like György Lukács’ world either… although a close approximation might appear here *

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15. 

    jp_42

    Dec 28, 2009 at 1:31 pm

    nice these are awesome, thx for sharing and showing me something i would not normally see!

    Reply
16. 

    Astrocatou

    Apr 9, 2010 at 7:47 pm

    biotron;
    apparently EVERYTHING is now online…

    Reply
17. 

    jurvetson

    Apr 28, 2012 at 2:22 am

    …made manifest

    

    Reply