Rocket Report: ABL loses its second booster; Falcon 9 cleared for return to flight
- by Ars Technica
- Jul 26, 2024
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The agency would like to move toward an era of commercial space, in which the agency shares development costs with the private industry and benefits from the ideas and nimble development practices of entrepreneurs. Everyone wins. However, the space agency has encountered serious turbulence in this endeavor. For some time, the agency has been hoping that other new space companies would step up and similarly thrive like SpaceX in environment of purely fixed-price contracts. To succeed over the coming decade in low-Earth orbit and on the Moon, the agency is counting on a new generation of companies, such as Axiom Space and Intuitive Machines, to take this next step. But what happens if they don't? Click to expand...
True, and this occurs even when the obstruction was approved by the FAA erroneously. For example, the FAA authorized the construction of a three-storey hotel just to the right of the approach end of runaway 4 at LaGuardia, but their specifications for the exclusion volume didn't leave enough margin, and the new structure interferes with the ILS glideslope signal. As a result, LGA was required to modify their ILS RW4 approach procedure to prohibit autopilot-coupled approaches. The pilot has to hand-fly the approach because the ILS signal is not reliable enough for the autopilot to blindly follow. This was a contributing factor in a recent incident where a Southwest flight almost collided with the air traffic control tower.
Another such policy failure played a role in a tragic crash in Burley, Idaho. The FAA approved the construction of exhaust stacks on top of a potato processing facility in line with the approach course. Then the potato company decided that the stacks needed to be taller than originally planned, so the FAA just revised the approach procedure with a steeper 3.5-degree glidepath to clear the taller stacks. However, they didn't account for the visibility impact of the steam billowing from the exhaust stacks, and they didn't account for the sudden change in air density as the plane flies through the warm exhaust. It was just a simple geometric analysis of the structure heights relative to the glidepath. A young aviator died as a result.
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