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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • People keep saying that, but it isn’t true that the leak being in the disposable part of the vehicle means it’s not a safety problem.

    It’s the pressurisation system for the thrusters. If that fails, then they won’t be able to control the capsule until it hits the atmosphere. That could mean they get stuck on the ISS, in the most extreme case, or it could mean that they lose thrust mid-manouvre and they re-enter the atmosphere incorrectly. That could be anywhere from inconvenient (they miss their landing spot and someone has to come get them), to dangerous (they land so far away that they’re in danger of sinking or being eaten by bears before anyone reaches them) to outright fatal (they skip off the atmosphere, or tumble their way into reentry and burn up)
















  • The black box isn’t like a modern hard drive, with terabytes of storage. They’re often old, and even the modern ones need to put so much effort into protection against things like fire, seawater and collisions that they don’t have as much space as you might imagine.

    They have to rely on someone going out of their way to take the box out, or shut down the plane, because the alternative would be for them to have some way to decide for themselves to stop recording. If they could do that then a false positive would cause them to miss potentially important data, so they’re designed to keep going until someone makes it stop