The short bursts are just the period of the control cycles. Control cycle starts, loop sees error, commands thrust; next control cycle starts, loop sees error is nulled (or in deadband), commands no thrust.

It was for attitude adjustment.

You're a VC arguing with an aerospace engineer about aerospace engineering.

I'm also a pilot (CFI). My day job is space operations. And I can tell you've had too many hangar arguments about how wings work.

Pilots don't understand lift. Aero engineers understand it just fine.

I love this comment. Thank you. For what it’s worth, I’m not a CFI but I did study actual astronautical engineering. Not much good once we’re in an atmosphere, which, granted, is where the boats and planes go. But I’ll stand by my statement that nobody—apart from interplanetary reëntry and drone teams—fundamentally understands lift. (I certainly didn’t when I was solving analytic solutions by hand.)

The first-order approximations are easy. When you start adding up all the other factors, it gets complicated fast. The solar wind, which isn't constant, affects trajectories. Earth's atmosphere is neither homogenous nor perfectly predictable along many dimensions: upper-level wind speeds and directions, air density, and temperatures, to name a few. The Moon's gravitational field is very lumpy. Earth's gravitational field, while relatively smooth compared to the Moon, also isn't perfectly uniform. Propulsion systems have tolerances. Same with parachutes. The location of the vehicle's center of gravity affects everything.

All of these factors and more have to be taken into account if you want your predictions to be accurate. Aside from telemetry processing, most of the computing power on the ground during a space mission is used for churning out navigation solutions.

Yes, Challenger - although program management knew they were violating a launch constraint (temperature), and it was the low temperature that produced the conditions necessary for SRB failure.

As with any aerospace mishap, it's a chain of events, not just one cause.

Helicopter -> large boat is much easier, and much faster, than small boat -> large boat. And it's not riskier. I know the inherent risk in flight is greater, but it's also much more managed, so the actual risk is less.

That is... not true.

Social media may have been an important tool for creating some of the circumstances we're in, but the causes go back much farther.

There are degrees.

I worked on a board (a switch, not a router) with a chip that could saturate all 10 of its GigE ports all day long if you stayed in the fabric. But if you had to pass anything over to the built-in single-core 250 MHz CPU, you were in for a bad time. (Thankfully it also had pins for wiring up your own external CPU.)

Moons get tidally locked because they're very close to their planet, so the planet's gravity is by far the strongest influence.

The planets have much more complicated gravitational interactions because in addition to the Sun's gravity, they influence each other. So you end up with things like orbital resonances instead.

A planet that's close to its star and far from other strong gravitational influences will tidally lock to the star.