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Comment by MrGilbert | Hacker News Reader

I would have expected that the manual has way more pages and a bigger scope. I'm surprised it has "only" 270 pages.

The guide is just an overview to help potential customers ("users") decide if the Ariane 5 would work for their payload and mission. Nothing to do with Arianespace operating the rocket.

I'd expect a detailed manual to fall under the Missile Technology Control Regime, MTCR, which is kind of the sister of ITAR for the EU.

They wouldn't make a more detailed manual for customers that they couldn't show to those customers. They do provide more detailed interface and system documentation, but they don't share the restricted implementation details. Even for internal use, they'd want to confine the controlled information to a smaller subset of documents because otherwise it's difficult to circulate information.

Very true. What I was saying was they probably couldn't provide what MrGilbert was maybe thinking this would because it would constitute restricted arms information. As neat as it would be to get some juicy details about the rocket even as it's being retired that info is very tightly regulated in most countries.

Gotcha. Most of the system-level information is under less restrictive control than ITAR or MTCR, but the effect is the same.

Honestly though, the information isn't all that juicy. What most people would find interesting has been out there for a long time. The hardware in any rocket looks basically the same since Saturn V, and the only remarkable thing about the software is that it's organized.

Is there anything you'd like me to point you to?

being peripherally involved with aerospace, I can say that this is, for reasons unknown to me, not the full comprehensive manual.

A much, much (2 orders of magnitude) simpler system I'm familiar with has a set of manuals that is far over 20,000 pages and it's really not that good or comprehensive. It's really terrible actually. So this is off by about 4 orders of magnitude.

For a concrete example: one tech manual for a 2 1/2 truck is 1200 pages long (http://www.jatonkam35s.com/DeuceTechnicalManuals/TM9-2320-36...). But there are about 50 other manuals in the set (http://www.jatonkam35s.com/jatonkaM35sTMdownloadpage.htm). This is for a TRUCK, not a rocket.

I don't know what this thing is, but it's not the manual.

Well, actually, the basic manual inputs of an orbital rocket are "go up" and "explode". The rest is automated.

(Has anyone trained a neural networks to play Kerbal Space Program?)

The user is the party who is concerned with payload integration: dimensions, center of gravity, electrical, thermal, vibration, orbits etc.

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