Sisyphus — Subsystem
Launches
Every Sisyphus flight that carried a logging flight computer, replayed from the vehicle's own telemetry. The rocket you see is flying its real recorded attitude and its real recorded path, so you can watch what happened rather than read it off a chart. Earlier flights in the programme flew without instrumentation and are not here.
What you are looking at
- The rocket's angle is real. It is reconstructed from the attitude the flight computer recorded, so when it leans or tumbles, that is what the vehicle actually did. The dashed line through it is true vertical, which is what makes the lean readable.
- The nozzle steers. It swings to the gimbal deflection the controller actually delivered, drawn six times larger than life so it is visible. It turns red when the controller asked for more angle than the mount could give, which is the moment the vehicle stops being controllable.
- The blue line is the flown path. It is the vehicle's own inertial solution. On flights that never logged horizontal position there is no line, and the replay says so rather than implying the rocket went straight up.
- Some flights are honest about being unreliable. Early flights predate the quaternion attitude estimator and their recorded orientation winds up without bound. Those are labelled on the replay rather than quietly cleaned up.