11th October 2005, 8:02 PM
Nice. Oh, as to the nature of parachute failures, it was a wide range. Everything from the plastic they use to make them melting from the heat of ignition to the strings breaking from the strain of the obviously too heavy rocket finally decending to Earth.
That's IF we found the thing and could figure it all out. Thank goodness GPS exists now. Those things tend to travel pretty high, and I had a hard time tracking them in the sky. Also as a kid I couldn't really gauge larger distances very well.
But anyway, sometimes the parachute did work. Nice, unless the wind suddenly picks up right then and sends the thing going a distance that requires a car trip to retrieve.
That's IF we found the thing and could figure it all out. Thank goodness GPS exists now. Those things tend to travel pretty high, and I had a hard time tracking them in the sky. Also as a kid I couldn't really gauge larger distances very well.
But anyway, sometimes the parachute did work. Nice, unless the wind suddenly picks up right then and sends the thing going a distance that requires a car trip to retrieve.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)