Ok, what gives? Why have plane ticket prices suddenly gone through the roof? Is it the higher gas cost? What? My mom is coming to visit next week and the cheapest reasonable ticket I could find was $350. Now I’m trying to find a ticket to Boston in mid-July and I could get it for $260…if I left Sunday morning at 5:35 a.m.! Any reasonable times are $350 or more. Suck.
The first lesson in “how to fly the space shuttle” was on the DST. I don’t actually know what DST stands for. (Dynamic Systems Trainer? That’s an educated guess.) Anyway, the DST is a computer that’s hooked up to the translational and rotational hand controllers (i.e. the sticks) so that you can practice flying the shuttle. It’s like a shuttle on a desk top.
First of all, I probably should not have attempted to do anything that required serious thought yesterday, as I am still recovering from my cold-that-strangly-had-no-associated-congestion-just-the-achiness-and-general-malaise and as such, my head has been very fuzzy. Trying to fly the space shuttle with a very fuzzy head is hard. I found it very difficult to concentrate.
Secondly, I am going to have to get a little space shuttle model and label it with the +X, +Y, and +Z axes and sleep with the darn thing under my pillow in hopes of learning through osmosis what the body coordinate system is, because I can’t for the life of me remember it. For the record, +X is out the nose, +Y is out the right wing, and +Z is through the belly.
Daniel says
So, isn’t that how a aircraft axis system is normally defined?
Jen says
Dynamic Skills Trainer, I believe. Scary how close you can get with a guess, though, isn’t it?
Becca says
Its always bad this time of year. I just spent $370 to get up north.
cari says
I’m assuming that you’re going to have to learn local veritcal and velocity vectors, too. Find one orientation that you know so well that should someone say, oh, “-ZLV, -XVV”, you can respond automatically with “upside down and backwards”. Then, you can extrapolate from there and you’ll also never get your ‘LV’ and ‘VV’ mixed up. (-ZLV, -XVV was what the orbiter usually flew – the overhead windows pointing at Earth being key – for our KidSat/EarthKAM missions so I have that one down pat; thanks to that, I can usually spit out the correct orientation faster than most people in my group.)
Of course, this is coming from a lowly ACO and what do we know about shuttle orientation (or state vectors)?
Pony says
I think Petey refers to the DST as the “paper tiger”. Not sure why…
Is X, Y, and Z the same as pitch, roll and lift? It might help to think of it that way. It always helped me to visualize how the airplane moves through the air. As soon as you said nose, wing and belly, the picture popped into my head!