What’s the haps in the world of Sailplane for the week? Unfortunately not too much. Our lab is still being modified, and we’re sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place until we get all of the materials for our wing section. Because of this, I decided to do a dual-post this week. I have a fairly interesting story about the Stuckeman Family Building here at Penn State, which I visited the other day on official Sailplane business. In addition, I thought I’d also reflect on the NASA Antares launch failure from Tuesday night.
First off, it may seem weird to dedicate half a post to a location on campus, but the Stuckeman Family Building, which houses various architecture-related majors, is a fairly interesting place. Anyways, for a little background information, the other day, my Sailplane group leader sent me up to Stuckeman. One of the professors and his Grad Students there help us out by cutting our foam ribs for our wing section using their LASER cutter. So I started off on the walk from Hammond (down by College Ave) to Stuckeman (behind Forum) with four pieces of foam board and no clue where I was going. After finding the building, it took me a little while to find this Professor’s office, but I did find some interesting things in my travels. Since it’s home to architectural engineering, naturally the setup of the building itself was very unique, but they also had landscape and structure models in little cases that were neat to look at. After finding the office and dropping off the materials and the accompanying CAD file, I started the trek back to Hammond. Fortunately, at that time I realized I didn’t get a run in that day, and since I only had my phone to carry and I was wearing running clothing, I just decided to jog back to Hammond. Unfortunately, we just found out last night that the LASER cutter is broken, so we might be waiting on those rib pieces for a while.
Now onto that NASA launch. For those of you that don’t know, NASA launched their Antares Rocket on Tuesday, October 28th. Antares was on a mission to resupply the ISS (International Space Station) with various different technologies and provisions. In a launch, NASA Safety Officers have the option to essentially hit the self-destruct button on a launch that they deem unsafe shortly after liftoff (talk about a stressful job). This is exactly what happened Tuesday. A few seconds after liftoff, the rocket began to respond incorrectly, however the exact reason for this issue is still unknown. Because of this mishap, a Safety Officer hit the self-destruct button, resulting in the colorful explosion shown above. What happens now? Well naturally, whenever a launch has to be aborted, NASA loses what little money the government still gives them. Factor in the loss of equipment in a scenario like this, and its basically like taking millions of dollars and chucking it in a fire. As in any failure, information can still be gathered from what went wrong. The loss is still a heavy one for NASA, but thankfully no one was injured at the Wallops Testing Center. And not to make “light” of the situation, but we did get to see a Fourth-of-July-worthy fireworks display in the middle of fall. You can read up more about the process of the mission here. If you’d like to see a video of the launch you can view it below: