Weeeeelllll… The Russians have had their share of fatalities and rocket mis-launches, plus things like Mir catching fire. It ain’t all sunshine and vodka on either side.
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In proportion to the number of launches, the Shuttle has been safer the Soyuz overall but not as safe as Soyuz since the 7K-T introduced in 1973.
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In honor of Apollo 11 here’s some interesting stuff:
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21 posts were split to a new topic: Threadsplit - Space Exploration : Star Trek Solar Sails
Fascinating, and probably worthy of a new thread. Thread has been split to avoid a sub-sub-thread detour.
Some zooming animation, and some old-film-flicker effects:
History of the discovery of our galaxy.
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Problem animation at the end.
But the clockwork rover is an interesting idea…
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Clockwork. What a cool hot idea!
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“It may have random bodge-wires running around, but at least the screws are in tightly.” 
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All-in-one printed circuit boards are overrated, especially in aerospace. Given the packaging requirements and the need for cooling and high-reliability and re-workability during endless cycles of testing and modification, being able to open the thing up like a book, having the option to “bodge” things from one part of the assembly to another, these are good things and not something to stamp on the engineers about.
Maybe I’m missing something from the video. I very rarely watch video links.
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What they’re joking about there is the way the device had an original design, and then clearly had a continuing series of “patches” made to the design, with each fix just being additional wires tacked into place to make things work. Which is not a great thing when it comes to making a reliable, repeatable device… if it’s meticulously documented and everyone all throughout the process very strictly follows quality control, fine, but it still adds a lot of steps to the build where something could go wrong.
It’s interesting that, with the number of fixes that are immediately visible, there wasn’t an iteration during the design/testing phases where they incorporated the fixes.
They definitely weren’t knocking the packaging or the opening up like a book, that stuff’s beautiful.
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Reworkability and tribal knowledge definitely have their own issues. A super-science laboratory functions just great until the people that built it move on to other things, like a ten-year time-out in Siberia or getting blackballed out of the American defense industry. It’s not something they show properly in the comic books.
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This is safe. You can trust Curious Marc.
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The name Perseverance was suggested by Alexander Mather, a 13-year-old student from Virginia.
“We as humans evolved as creatures who could learn to adapt to any situation, no matter how harsh. We are a species of explorers, and we will meet many setbacks on the way to Mars. However, we can persevere. We, not as a nation, but as humans will not give up. The human race will always persevere into the future.”
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This video gets far, far more interesting than the title implies.
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