Migraineman - Slashdot User

Submission + - SpaceX Falcon 1 Flight Analysis

Submitted by

Migraineman

on Friday March 30, 2007 @01:42PM

Migraineman writes: "Elon Musk has posted a preliminary post-flight analysis of the Falcon 1 flight. Initial indications are that the oscillations of the second stage were caused by a combination of slosh in the LOX tank and an impact event between the interstage ring and the second-stage rocket nozzle — ultimately the sloshing caused the LOX to move away from the fuel sump, starving the engine of oxidizer and resulting in premature engine shutdown. Baffles are to be added to the LOX tank, and the thrust vector algorithms are getting updates. They're also considering changes to the first-stage engine shutdown profile to reduce the chance of nozzle-smackage.

In spite of not getting to LEO, the Falcon 1 flight is being considered a success, and SpaceX is moving forward with the TacSat-1 launch scheduled for September."

Submission + - Print Messages on your Beer

Submitted by

Migraineman

on Saturday January 13, 2007 @01:09PM

Migraineman writes: "I stumbled upon a clever hack by Sprite. He reverse engineered the pin functions on an HP inkjet cartridge, and built a simple driver board that converts the cartridge into a hand-held inkjet printer. The driver board is programmed with a fixed message. Moving the "print head" is your responsibility, but it leads to some interesting applications. Printing messages on a whiteboard was the original inspiration, but printing messages on the foam head of a Guinness is just inspired."

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