Nebakenezzer posted:

Rocket and People, Vol. 2: Catastrophes

Chertok has opinions on the Nedelin catastrophe. Officially it was a state secret that it happened, not officially acknowledged until 1989, but obviously there's a spectrum between educational monuments and S-4 at Area 51. Chertok mentions he used the catastrophe when teaching in his later career as an extended example as what not to do.

That said, I'd be interested to hear from people ITT if there's some sort of spectrum at work here, from "department email" to "guys I'm concerned" to you running away while screaming.




~* To Be Continued *~

Nebakenezzer posted:

You'd definitely like Rockets and People, then. I've been posting little summaries in several threads, but I'm pretty sure it's this thread where Chertok recounts the 30 day rush to make a dog go into space. They skipped the whole hand-sketch thing there, the engineers were just there telling the millwright/electrician how to do things

Tias posted:

give us a top three of oh poo poo moments you had working for rocket racoon and his merry rocketeers

FuturePastNow posted:

aphid_licker posted:

An Afghan guy we've been working with is screaming for us to get him out of the country. We have just about zero wherewithal or leverage to do this, we're a tiny company, and it's the worst fuckin feeling.

InAndOutBrennan posted:

Pretty sure the answer is going to be "just post" but one of the guys on the ground in Vares wrote a series of blog posts and later a book about the whole hosed up affair. If there's interest I could translate at least parts of it (the posts not the loving book).

Murgos posted:

The real trick is probably that personnel budget is probably tracked in a separate bucket from equipment so they can spend money where they have money (equipment procurement) and reallocate personnel to where they are short.

Nebakenezzer posted:

e: not sure what China is doing but it sounds like they are grifting the poorest nations: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/worl...obox=1633052479

hypnophant posted:

this is like treating a graham greene or john le carre novel as a primary source

e: anyway whataboutism aside, the point here isn’t to wag the finger or moralize, it’s that the inexperienced chinese financial sector may have made a bunch of real bad loans. despite being a lender nation, china’s net investment income is deeply negative

chitoryu12 posted:

That entire article's assumption is that there's no way we're seeing what we're seeing. Russia must be on the verge of a Deep Battle encirclement and will win any day now. Please ignore all evidence to the contrary. Their failures to take objectives are on purpose.

CainFortea posted:

When I was quite small my mother took me to a park to feed the ducks.

The geese decided that this little featherless biped who is shorter than they are could be easily bullied for more food.

My mother, all 5'5" and 100lbs of her, came screaming into the hoard of geese, weaponless. She solve this issue by grabbing two geese by the necks and swinging them around like flails at all the other geese, until she got them away from me far enough. She then yeeted the two geese at the others with a mighty yell and picked me up and ran back to the car.