Aerospace thread

Aerospace thread.

I'm an aerospace engineer. AMA.

Will bump with hopefully cool pictures.

General profession thread as well.

How often do you play Kerbal Space Program?

bumpin, yo.

i've actually never played it. I have a screen shot of it though as one of my desktop wallpapers

I need to know this

see

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Is anti-gravity real?

Naw, at least not with present technology. Interestingly though, a while back the air force commissioned a study on it. Crazy shit.

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here's another plane

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found my aunt yet at area 51?/

tell us on progress on the alcubierre FTL drive

Lol, sorry user no luck. I've worked with a few guys who've been to Area 51 though.

Hypothetical? I did see that NASA's been doing some work on propulsion using only EM fields though...

bump

Are there any jobs in Aerospace? I want to major in it but i am not sure if it'll come to fruition. Do you like it? Is it difficult? challenging? pay and benefits? Whats your daily life like?

PIlot here. not as good as you think.

What would it take to send my sides into orbit?

I'm currently a freshman in college with a major in mechanical engineering, looking to land a position in the aerospace field. What steps would you recommend I take.

Yeah, the industry is cyclic though, so sometimes it's pretty flush and other times it can be hard to find a job. if you get in it's not too hard to stay in though. I love it personally, it's challenging and i see some really cool things. It can be difficult in different ways, depending on the job you do. The pay and benefits i'd say are above average, more so if you get a security clearance. daily life...varies. meetings, emails, analysis. i travel about once a quarter.

get an internship with an aerospace/defense company if you can. bigger than that though is just be willing to move. it can be tough finding work in your ideal spot, but if you're willing to go where the work is you're much more likely to land something

I invented rockets. The only problem with colonising Mars is lack of Merntos.

I see, thank you for your answer. I am just torn between either Mechanical engineering or Aerospace. I've ALWAYS loved airplanes as a kid and now I love cars so i am seriously 50/50

Go mechanical. if you get a ME degree, you can always go into aerospace or something else. if you get a degree in AE, it's harder to do something outside of aerospace

I never post on Sup Forums so excuse the noob.

Can you extrapolate on why NASA got rid of the shuttle program before having something to replace it either immediately or shortly after ?

Is that the em drive they have been talking about online last year? What kind of timeline are they looking at to a working model?

Also, back ten years ago ion drives were entering limited service with satellites. Has that technology continued to evolve our been dropped at this point? It seemed like it had great potential for long distance space travel economy.

OP, what's the main resource-limiting factor in aerospace technology right now?

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Magnets.

What kind of aerospace do you work?
I see a bunch of airplane shit.

Cost I think was a big driver. it was expensive to maintain them and each launch was pricey. ultimately it was cheaper to go a different route. that's mostly speculation on my part though..

i think it's probably the same one, or at least something similar. as for building a working model i guess it depends what you mean. i'd read they'd 'proven' it in the lab so in that sense they have a working model, but if you mean something commercially viable, you're probably looking at least a decade out. As for ion drives, they use them all the time on satellites. they've gotten a lot better, but the total thrust is low so they're mostly just used for station-keeping.

Oh so ME would be a good "general" sort of major and then I can then get into other fields?

Money, i'd say. aerospace work is expensive - the materials are pricey, labor costs are high, and the industry is heavily regulated

Is it still all obscure Ti alloys, or cabon fibre, some of A, some of B... ? I've heard hellish things about trying to machine and/or repairing Ti.

Looking to major in Aerospace Engineering, specifically things that go into space. Hope to eventually land a job at SpaceX. Any advice for landing future jobs? Do you do any space related work? Are space related jobs out there?

OK, here's some space for you then. i used to work on aircraft, then i did ground-based systems, now i work on spacecraft.

yeah exactly

Thanks. What firms would you recommend?

>be willing to move
I live in the same county as the C-130 factory, but with a lot of aerospace firms leaving the area, I'm probably going to end up in Texas.

Do niggers nig over there?

Actual Space systems engineer here.

There were a few studies which were supposed to lead to a second generation RLV to take the place of the shuttle. But too little, too late. the commercial manned vehicles were supposed to be viable sooner and the shuttle was around longer than it should have been.

TL/DR - bad planning, stupid ideas.

Ah, that's good. I think I'll go ME and then once I am comfy in the field, I'll most likely want to go into Aerospace. any more advice? thanks.

lol yeah, a lot of composites too which require fancy manufacturing. machining titanium can be done but it requires the right tools, the right shop, and yeah it's pricey since it's so tough. carbon fiber will eat through machining bits too though, so it can be a bitch.

yeah, see:
yes, i currently work on space systems. the jobs are there. if you want to work at spacex be prepared to work 70 hour weeks regularly.

You worked at Bigelow?
That's practically not aerospace! The owner is a loon and he only hires people who know shit about spacecraft!

My guess it that you have already left or been fired.

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depends on the culture you want. big companies = big company culture. you could try a startup if you like the pressure. Nice, i've been to that factory, it's impressive to see. there's still a lot of aerospace down south, if you want to stay more local than going to Texas.

No, it's just a picture i found on the internet. i work someplace totally different.

So now I'm guessing you work on satellites, since you are forcing us to guess.

Where'd you go to school? Gonna be going to Georgia Tech in the fall for AE as well

Civil Engineering major from Marshall in WV here. You guys stick to your confound spacey stuff. I'll just be over here playing with rocks, steel beams, and pipes.

I saw the launch was scrubbed earlier today over a stage 2 software malfunction. Will spaceX ever get it together? It is private company IRS ruining the program? Sorry for the loaded question. I know privatization has its percs but shit, NASA was better when it was funded like it was in the glory days

lol, no i'm not forcing you to do anything. i'm not going to say where i work, or really anything personal (including my alma mater, sorry ). i've never worked directly on building satellites though. as for school, i double majored, both in engineering.

Are*

And why the fuck IRS? Jeez fuck my mobile

Aw :(

ehh, yes and no. i like that NASA has the freedom and budget to do risky, exploratory R&D, but ultimately i don't think they'll be the ones to bring space travel to 'the common man.' it'll end up being private ventures because they believe they can make money doing it

I get the impression that NASA can do lots of pie-in-the-sky R&D - but when it comes to specific concrete missions, they're super highly constrained by Congress. (See e.g. the Space Shuttle.)

You're a fucking fraud dude. This is now a spiderman thread

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i can't say i'm an expert on their inner workings, but as i understand it they different directorates get proportional amounts of the overall budget, which they get to pick how they spend it. the big programs take up huge chunks of their development budget (like the SLS), and then the individual missions are additional costs on top of that. so to design, develop, and build a new launch system costs like 2billion, then each mission after is an extra cost

lol, ok? not sure what i said that makes you think i'm fraud, but ok dude.

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What was your thoughts on the scrub? Answer the question. And if yes and no was your answer you're paid by one of them or it's bait. If you really work the field you know what's going on is shit and you have to have an opinion

Fuck you for living out my dead dreams
:(

Originally i'd heard there was a leak in an upper stage valve, but after they got that fixed there was a problem with an upper stage engine nozzle trace. i guess i'm kind of confused by what you mean when you say what's going on is shit. despite whatever flaws they have, spacex has brought down the cost of a launch significantly. it used to cost hundreds of millions to put a payload into orbit, now US launch providers are talking about 100m dollar launches, so i think the competition has done a lot of good. compare that to the cost of the SLS, which is running into the multiple billions of dollars. i'm not saying that NASA is obsolete or that the future of spaceflight is exclusively privatized, but i think it will be a big component of the total market going forward.

Same brother, let this thread die

why are they dead? i'm not an astronaut or anything, just an engineer

How well would aerospace engineering work with Astrophysics? I've been looking a for a minor to go with an Astrophysics major, and my friend is taking aerospace engineering at UB

unless you end up doing specific mission or trajectory analysis work, i think astrophysics wouldn't help too much. the people i know with astrophysics degrees work either in a university or at a government lab.

And the subsidies? Gtfo dude, we still have to launch astronauts from Kazakhstan. It's detrimental to our image and we are no longer leaders. All our physics degrees go abroad and are from abroad. The fact that the cost is down is just propaganda. You know it

ALL AROUND ME ARE FAMILIAR FACES
Astronaut is my unrealistic childhood dream
I wanted to become an aerospace engineer after I got denied by the military, was going to be a pilot.
Figured the next best thing was engineering that way I'll at least be able to work with the them.
Now they're dead and everything's dead and I'm going to be a stupid paramedic fuck this stupid life I DIDN'T ASK FOR THIS SHIT

I figured I'd do it as a minor for a fall back Incase I couldn't get a job for a whole, cause the astronomer and Astrophysics market is small af. So do you work for a private corporation ?

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show me an aerospace or defense field that isn't subsidized by the government. you're right, but the point is to get human launch back to the US. look at the dragon capsule, or the CST-100, hell Robert Lightfoot just asked what it would take to make SLS EM-1 human rated, bumping up the schedule significantly. even the engines are now going to be US vs russian. we're trying to bring it back here. and the costs are down, if you don't believe that ask the commercial satcom companies - they wouldn't continue paying so much for launches if the costs weren't down. and none of that is government money.

aw fuck, sorry dude. are you still working to be a pilot? what happened with the engineering thing?

ah ok i got it, my bad. yeah, i work for a private aerospace firm

I manufacture calendered material for various airplane parts!! Maybe I have had a hand making something you have designed (I am assuming we work for the same company)

We run a lot of fiberglass inserts with red thermoplastic silicone rubber in thin passes (.002-.005 of an inch) on each side and we have a huge problem with the material peeling off and not sticking. We used to use PTFE (teflon) but it was shrinking material over our 10% so Boeing noped that.. Do you have any suggestions to prevent or improve this??

Hey guy!

I'm looking for a chemical propellant to use with ceaseless ammunition.

It has to be able to perform as well as smokeless powder but it must burn cool as possible, be only ignitable by electricity or very high temp, and only a few milligrams of it to propellant a standard .223 projectile to over 2000 FPS.

As for the volume I'm talking, imagine a pen cap. You use the pocket clip to scoop up sand using only the last quarter inch.

That's around the propellant limit.

Very miniscule amounts.

I figure rocket propellant these days might work, fringe propellant that's electrically ignited has been developed so the burn time can be shut on and off etc

No, I'm not
I'm not allowed, I'm going to have to take private lessons later on in life if I don't fucking kill myself
Engineering was a failure because as much as I like science and as good as I am, math is the bane of my existence and my skills are laughable.
I'm going to shower op
Enjoy your thread

Look, I'm not trying to be mean, but you can't defend our aeronautics program with that engineering degree. It's much deeper and you know we could do better. We deserve better. We are by essence explorers: breaching the new with the ideas of more. Get it together, spaceX has failed. This experiment is shit. Things need to go back to why it was to even come snider the program respectable

Well I mean if I have a minor I'd like it to corolate with an Astrophysics major, but I didn't know any engineering fields that coincided with a major like that

>spacex has failed

That's bad news, I heard that they were better than NASA.

Must of heard some alternative facts. Sorry for your ignorance

When do you personally see humans going to another planet?

Im actually into an ITs degree, is there a possibility to get into the aerospace industry? should i make some kind of complement studies in a more specific field of ITs?

No. Just really ambitious and with a good budget.

Not OP but it'll probably be cheaper and easier for us to turn deserts into farmland so the need to go to space is not as crucial as people think.

Cool man, do you like the work? do you mean you make like a prepreg, or material with a backing and the backing is coming off?

do you mean caseless ammunition? possibly..i don't know a lot about the solid propellant. Maybe try a zinc-sulfur or high-energy composite?

sorry bro. i hope things look up for you.

yeah, i agree we could do better. but who would you say is doing better than us? the russians? the europeans? who has a more advanced or technically capable aerospace industry you want us to emulate? maybe spacex has failed, but that doesn't mean we should give up on privatized spaceflight entirely. what was so good about the past you want to duplicate?

Yeah, but different planets man. The world appears to be crumpling and with our new cabinet and I don't see anything doing better, so if our planet heats up too much there won't be any growth.

So when can we expect a working Alcubierre drive, and how do we overcome the whole radiation cooking everything to a crisp inside the bubble thing?

i think the 'proposed' date is around 2023. i'm not sure if we'll hit that, but i could see it being in the 2020's.

IT isn't my field, but i'd say yeah absolutely. every big company has an IT side, and there's not that much aerospace involved with it. so just be really good at IT, then apply for an IT job w/ an aerospace company.

>Arse thread.
>I'm an arse-ineer. AMA.
>Will pump it open fully.
>Giant fingers thread as well.

Sweet good to hear.
Also, what's your stance on Global Warming?

Im an AE student currently, where do you work?

It sucks, i like cold weather lol. the thing i don't get about a lot of people arguing it isn't man-made...is even if it wasn't, why would you argue against limiting pollution? i mean it's still a bad thing, so even if it's not warming the planet why don't we try and stop it? above my pay-grade, i guess.

see:

I've heard that i should major in mechanical engineering instead of aero because mechanical engineering is more broad and marketable. I've also been told a mechanical engineer can still get a job that a aerospace engineer can do. What are your thoughts and what do you think i should major in? I mostly want to work in the space industry.

Yeah it pays pretty good. You know the aerospace hours lol we always have OT on our checks.

Nah prepreg is easy to run. I'm talking about ceramic-style like Nextels and 3M's. Some of them are easier then others but the one I hate running the most is a .021 (-.003+.002 tolerance) insert and the fiberglass is already .016 so that leaves little room for error.. The rubber peels off the fabric while being ran and we have problems getting it to stick on the material. Our engineer has done as much as he can to help us but atm we cross our fingers and hope we don't have a lot of scrap.

What do you think about alien life? Do you think that we have already made contact with them secretly?

Yea, its a caseless ammunition.

Its for something I've wanted to build for decades.

Minigun rifles around the 20lb range that have a thousand round magazine.

I knew it! I am an architect ( I specialize in technology for eco buildings) and recently we did a project about a GW safe buildings. If our work works out we could decrease the total amounts of Carbon Dioxide used by 30% but, that would mean that at least 34% of all buildings are using technologies and design like the ones we made. I hate global warming and being a skier makes me hate it soo much more.

If co2 and co1 are so severe they'll find a way to use them as a fuel source or consumable material.

I've been wanting to find a way to use regular atmospheric gasses as the primary fuel source in motors with a highly reactive substance as a catalyst...

Imagine a 30 gallon tank lasting 10,000 miles because the fuel tank doesn't hold the fuel, the atmosphere does.

You make a good point but until private companies can do this competently (which I know NASA hasn't fiscally), we need to leave this to the "people" (democracy) and not them. In the end, NASA is tax dollars: done. SpaceX is NASA blueprints with NASA funding and our tax dollars: with their profit margins. Doesn't make sense really. You can't privatize space. At least not yet. Forgive my nostalgia, but I think we still don't know shit and we need a leader of a president or politician to just say let's go to the moon again, or fuck it, mars for all I care. Just to stabilize our program again and let private companies worry about tourist trips to lower orbit and refuel missions until we get our shit together