NASA Will Have To Wait For Mars

mattg writes, "Auntie is covering NASA's timetable for recent explorations of Mars has been called "wildly optimistic". Dr. Carl Pilcher, leader of NASA's planetary exploration program (whose sweater at the time said "Obey gravity: it's the law") has admitted that they do not know if they have the technology to bring rocks back yet. The report into the loss of the Polar Lander is due out at the end of the month. "

Comments

Do we have the capability to eliminate NASA?

[roystgnr]

I fear we don't; like a Mars landing, we've had the technology for decades but the political obstacles are insurmountable.

If you believe the most die-hard grassroots space advocates, the controversial question is no longer "Are expenditures on NASA programs more beneficial for space development than money going directly to tax breaks on orbital R&D and industry?" the controversial question is "Are expenditures on NASA programs more beneficial for space development than setting money on fire?"

It's horrifying that we're spending billions of dollars per year on Space Shuttle "operations", and a billion dollars on the worst submission (currently falling behind schedule, over weight, and over budget as you read this) for the X-33 project, while companies like Kistler Aerospace and Rotary Rocket are stalling on creating the world's first truely reusable orbital rockets because they can't raise a fraction of that money in investments.

It's shameful that they never bothered to even build a second DC-X rocket after NASA took over the program and crashed the first one.

On the one hand, NASA keeps lots of aerospace engineers employed doing something; on the other hand that something is arguably much less efficient than what they would be doing in more dynamic private companies.

On the one hand, NASA is a nice customer for the big commercial aerospace companies' rockets; on the other hand, the government is a hell of a competitor to explain to potential investors in aerospace start-up companies.

And now NASA says we don't have the technology to put an Earth Return Vehicle on Mars capable of lifting a few pounds of rocks, less than a month after Scientific American spent an article detailing plans (specifically Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct Plan outlined in The Case For Mars and NASA's Mars Semi-Direct modification) which would put humans on Mars (and leave infrastructure there, unlike Apollo) in this decade for less money than we spend on the Shuttle and ISS.

Reuse the damn designs!

[davek]

I have just one question: why don't they take the designs of the probes that have been lost, and rebuild them? Isn't most of the cost of these million dollar probes the research and testing that goes into their design? Didn't somebody write that stuff down? Both missions were failures because of us humans, the hardware seems to work just fine.

I say GPL NASA. Can't hurt.

-davek

Re:Government Programs

[ronfar]

It's an odd philosophy within government departments I've known about (I've had members of my family working in civil service for many years) that however much money you get in your budget, you'd better spend it all because if you have money left over your budget will be cut next year.

Of course, this is the exact opposite of a desire to economize, people will try to come up with anything they can think of to use up their budget to use it up. I won't say they waste money, exactly, but let's just say they always have enough office supplies.

I think, therefore, that the reason why NASA has been economizing is the fact that the axe had already fallen on the budget, the people at NASA knew it, and they wanted to put the best face on it. So, my question is, do you think the desire to do thing on the cheap is coming from within NASA or primarily from forces outside NASA who are putting the screws on it?

I figure its the latter, because i can't imagine anyone in any government department wanting to have budgets which shrink every year.

Re:Sounds good to me

[samantha]

If you actually bother to know any history and to compare current situation to the past you would know just how huge a difference science and technology has made. I am not going to sit around on this rock listening to morons like you tell us why we shouldn't do anything much but wring our hands indefinitely.

Pollute space with ourselves? Excuse me, what do you thing is out there? Heavenly angelic beings? As far as we know all of it within reach is a barren wasteland without life at all. Exactly what would you be polluting?

Take your human hating vitriol and your cynicism and crawl deeper in your hole if you wish. The rest of us can find something better to do.

It's the Infrastructure, stupid....

[wowbagger]

To paraphrase the last couple of US presidential elections, "IT'S THE INFRASTRUCTURE, STUPID!". To whit: while we have far better technology than we did in the Sixtys, we don't even have the infrastructure to put a man on the moon today.

Consider:

Day after tomorrow, the 20th of March, every nation on earth receives the following message, clearly origonating from the moon:

People of earth, greetings! We represent General Products, an intersteller retailer. We'd like the opportunity to do business with you: we have total conversion, FTL, nanotech computers, a complete breakdown on protein folding, an Open Source replacement for DVD, and can probably crack the genetic codes of every living thing on your planet. We just want interstellar distribution rights to some of your Great Works (Shakespere, Tolkein, you know).

Just to reassure you, we are absolutely forbidden to take anything by force or without your permission. We are also absolutely forbidden to do business with any race that isn't a spacefaring race, so here's the deal: You have to meet us here, on the moon. We're a hundred meters away from your Apollo 12 landing site. Once you've sent a representative of your race (living, not a machine), we can deal.

We'll be here for one year. After that, we have to leave. We look forward to your business.

Now, let's suppose that the message is confirmed absolutely genuine. No doubt about it. My point is, that even under these circumstances, with the entire world pulling behind the mission, we couldn't get a man to the moon in one year. We just don't have the infrastructure to build a launch vehicle and landing craft that could get to the moon. I assert that even if we were willing to sacrifice the man we sent - give him a one-way ticket and a pat on the back - we couldn't get him to the lunar surface in one piece and keep him alive long enough to do anything of value. Let alone Mars.

Now, I know I am preaching to the choir here, but most sheeple think that the Space Program is a huge waste of money, even while they are talking on their cell phone in their car with radial tires and checking their stress level with their pulse-detecting watch. What we in the pro-space community must do is tirelessly try to educate these downers (read Larry Niven's Sprials for the reference) about why spending money on the Space Program is A Good Thing.

If we .....

[|deity|]

... had the same drive that got us to the moon. We would already hava landed on mars and had a research station on the moon. Sending robots to mars is a great way to learn about the planet, but the only way people are going to get excited about mars missions is when a person is on his/her way to Mars.

The way our country and society is heading I would volonteer to be the first to go. Let the MPAA try to serve me with a warrent on the moon.
The interplanatery lag would suck but I wouldn't have much competition for bandwidth.

The World Won't Wait For NASA

[meckardt]

Our space agency has become an outdated dinosaur, capable only of ponderous movement, when it isn't mired in the swamp of bureaucracy. A number of up and coming private companies (including, but not limited to Cerulean, Pioneer, Kistler, and Kelly) are working on inexpensive launch systems. One or more is certain to manage it in the next few years.

Once we have this cheap access to space, there are any number of Entrepeneurs waiting to exploit it. Most well known is Bigelow, but there are others.

Space, and our activities therein are popular with a lot of people. The growth of such private organizations as Permanent, The Mars Society, and Artemis is strong evidence of this.

NASA may not be prepared to go fetch some rocks from Mars anytime soon, but they may find others already there when they do.

Gonzo

election year

[rnd()]

As someone who has a friend who
is voting for the most "pro mars"
candidate, I think it is important
to note that Mars is a very big
issue in the geek community. I would say
it's probably number two right now,
with crypto legislation being number
one.

This is an election year, folks. Who is
the most "pro mars", anyway? I can picture
the dirty campaign ads -- accusing Al Gore
of inventing the Iridium system.

Three cheers for earth!

NASA does a better job than

[el_guapo]

most people give them credit for - IMNSHO - these guys have, arguably, one of the toughest jobs on the planet - and while they certainly aren't the epitome of efficiency, they pull off some impressive stuff. Think about all the stumbling blocks in their way - CONSTANT media scrutiny, government beurocracy (ok, i totally spelled that wrong), budget constantly getting jacked around by congress. I'm certainly not implying that there's not considerable room for improvement, but given the fact that the deck is TOTALLY stacked against them, I think they do a better job than most people give them credit....

I saw this on the Discovery channel.

[Wah]

It was great. The first mission had some problems. They lost contact for a while. But finally the decision was made to go on a second mission in the back-up Mars Transport Vehicle&copy(tm). And thank God they did. Not only did we make contact with an alien race (who had mastered holographic recording techniques), but we rescued the poor chap WHO HAD BEEN LIVING ON THE SURFACE FOR A YEAR IN A CANVAS TENT!!!!!!!

--
ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.

It won't be us. At least, not now. . .

[Sith Lord Jesus]

But future generations may have other ideas. I believe that right now we (Americans) are in a period of sloth and introspection, and do not have anymore what our ancestors had--the drive to explore, to challenge, to test ourselves. We're comfortable, the economy's going good. . .why bother with all that space stuff, y'know? The only reason we went up there the first time was to beat the Soviets to the moon. Once that was accomplished, well. . .

But the U.S.A. isn't the whole world. Even if we over here remain too fat and lazy to get out there and conquer the stars, other nations may not. China and India are just getting their space programs off the ground, for example, and later they may decide that mining Luna and the asteroids for their minerals or building a solar power satellite to beam solar energy to earth would not be a waste of money at all. Also the Russians could always put themselves back together down the road--never count Ivan out for long! And of course there's Japan, the European Space Agency with their Ariane (sp?) booster, and last but certainly not least, all of the privately run space organizations that an above poster mentioned (Rotary Rocket, XCOR, etc). So I'm not giving up hope just yet--you'd be surprised how fast things can change.

The decline and fall of the Space Age

[John Miles]

There was a time when we did things like this "Not because it is easy, but because it is hard."

The only way to acquire the technology to bring rocks back from Mars, is to stop talking about it and actually try to bring rocks back from Mars.

The year after I was born, we walked on the moon. Now, 31 years later, it's considered an impressive feat of science to grow tomatoes in low Earth orbit.

It may be about time for us to disband NASA entirely. If we aren't going to give them the money, resources, people, and most important of all, the popular mandate to do the job right, there's no sense in pretending to do the job at all.

Re:I can see it coming

[bughunter]

It gets worse than that. I've worked as a systems engineer for 10 years on NASA contracts, and lately, the "faster, better, cheaper" has exacerbated what I have always considered to be the worst problem in the aerospace industry: underbidding.

When NASA issues a request for proposal (RFP), the bidders have a good idea of what the proposed cost should be in order to have a competitive proposal.

In the old days, programs were "cost plus fixed fee" (CPFF). In other words, whatever the cost of the project in the end, the customer (NASA) would pick up the cost, and the contractor would get an additional fee on top of that (gotta make a profit, of course). But there were a lot of abuses of CPFF proposals, so there are few left (mostly DOE nowadays - check out the Savannah River operating contract). I never had the leisure of working on such a program, but I have heard some "war stories" from the older engineers, and some of the abuses were astonishing.

So nowadays, programs are fixed cost. The original idea was to force the contractor to agree to a fixed payment for the program, and that price would have to include any profit that the contractor hoped to make. That lead to problems not with overbidding, as one might think, but to "no bids" and failed contracts due to cost overruns. So it was tweaked and the current policy is a fixed price contract, plus performance awards based on the programmatic, technical, and financial performance of the contractor. The cost of performing the work is agreed upon, and then NASA establishes another amount as a "carrot" to induce the contractor to perform well. If NASA doesn't like the contract performance, they can withhold part (or all) of the carrot.

It works pretty well for NASA, so far, so they haven't changed it in the past 6 years or so... but on the contractor end, it leads to two things: underbidding on contracts to insure some profit, and overworking the engineers to maintain performance.

The underbidding almost always comes in the labor category. In the task estimation process of the proposal, one "chunks" the project into small tasks like "design dunselhickey firmware," "design dunselhickey electronics," "design dunselhickey mechanical and packaging," "integrate and test dunselhickey," where the dunselhickey is an attitude control subsystem, or a sensor instrument, or something. (And I'm ignoring the contractor/subcontractor/vendor hierarchy to keep this somewhat short.) For even the simpler systems like Deep Space 2, these task estimates are huge efforts, and whole forests are sacrificed to them. Anyway, the point is that the contractor management knows ahead of time how much they want to quote for cost, so if the estimators (the engineers) don't come up with a small enough number, the managers (accountants, lawyers, and engineers with 30-year-old training) take a chainsaw to the estimate to trim it down to their target cost. When it comes time to perform the contract, the engineers find that there's not anywhere near enough money budgeted to perform the labor that needs to be done.

Which leads to the next problem: overworked engineers. The contractor who wins the project faces a dilemma as work begins to fall behind schedule. Contingency was never a part of the budget, so any delays or technical problems, even in the early phases, directly impact the bottom line/delivery date. And in almost every contract, there are several areas where the budgeted money to perform the work is grossly inadequate. In order to avoid cost overruns and keep their performance award, management puts more and more demand on the engineers to take shortcuts and work overtime. Unpaid overtime, of course. Which leads to fatigue and the resulting errors and oversights, as tesserae described. And of course, they're always the engineers' fault. (As I like to say, "parts are derated; engineers are berated.")

Faster, Better, Cheaper has only made this problem worse. There's less money budgeted for any given doowidget, but more performance demands. The leadership is out of touch with the technical demands of the performance requirements, and promise more for less. The technology only does what we tell it to do; if we take shortcuts in design and testing, we don't know what we're telling it to do. Engineers want to do things right, and know they can do things right the first time, but the available time (e.g. money) has been shrinking steadily.

But at times like this, when I'm feeling most cynical, I can still take solace in the fact that I'm not working in a competitive commercial environment (like application software) where the situation is even worse. When I see that Win2000 shipped with 64,000 "issues," I know exactly what's going on... the politics and jargon may be a bit different, but it's still management's fault for promising more than they can deliver.

MTV's the "Real World-Mission to Mars"

[yuriwho]

At this rate an entertainment company will be the first to get a manned mission to Mars. The mission will be paid for by a 24 hour, cable/satelite channel that broadcasts the entire mission complete with space sex (pay per view for that tho) after the audience has developed close personal relationships with each of the characters on the mission (a bunch of photogenic 20 something astronauts) we will all get to watch them crash into Mars..live..in the greatest rating event ever. Given the extreme financial success of this mission, the sequel show will be launched immediately, this one lands and then everyone starves to death in a gripping drama lasting months with a strange plot reminiscent of Lord of the Flies.

At least we would have landed humans on Mars.

I can see it coming

[tesserae]

The thing that annoys me the most about the loss of the last two missions -- and the thing that is probably not going to be blamed for the losses, in the end -- is that the hardware was actually pretty much up to the job; it's just the handling of the hardware by the humans involved that cost us those missions, and possibly this whole exploration campaign.

The Climate Orbiter was lost because two people (one NASA, one from the contractor) were handling the entire trajectory; they were completely overworked (to the point failing to implement the backup planning which was already on the timeline, and which by itself might have saved the mission), with no one to even do basic sanity checks on their work -- and they missed not only the critical units conversion, but also the fact that their trajectory corrections weren't having the desired results. A college kid on a work-study internship, working ten hours a week, could have saved the mission. But it was faster-better- cheaper , so they didn't hire the kid...

The Polar Lander appears to have been lost over communications failure between two test groups: when the lander legs were dropped, they apparently rebounded and triggered a ground-contact sensor in each leg; this set a bit in the computer, so that it "thought" the vehicle had already touched the ground, and it killed the engine as soon as it took control. The rebound happened regularly during testing, but the group testing the leg deployment didn't look at the bit's value at the end of the test (after all, it wasn't on the ground yet, so it wasn't their job...); and the group testing the final powered descent didn't bother to look at the contents of the register before they started the test -- they just reset the bit, so they'd have a clean test. All it required was some warm body to look at the test sequence as a whole, but no one had the time. Again, that single college kid might have saved the mission... but NASA was too cheap.

What concerns me is this: they're going to spend their time and money worrying over the hardware issues:

...Dr Pilcher said, that in the light of recent events, the timetable was wildly optimistic: "The jury is out on whether we have the technological capability."

rather than pay attention to managing what they've already developed. It's a bit like the aftermath of Challenger, where they went nuts on the hardware instead of looking at the fundamental problem, which was the prostitution of the program for political reasons. The outcome of that is that we now have a NASA which is completely paranoid about public opinion and afraid of its own shadow when it comes to safety, but which still won't look at the whole picture, and still twitches to the political beat.

It just really pisses me off! Pathfinder worked beautifully (despite a scary airbag system, which was what I figured would fail), and probably did so because of the long hours and very hard work everyone did; I know I did my share of 14-18 hour days on the little piece of it I had. It was so successful that NASA said, "Wow! That was really cheap! Let's see how much more we can cut out of the budget..."

So here we are: decent, low-cost hardware, and crappy, low-budget management. But guess which one is going to get the tarbrush?

---

Theres stuff we need to do before Mars...

[WolfWithoutAClause]

The problem with mars is that theres no obvious way to make money.

I think we should first mine Eros (that's a near earth asteroid.) Estimates indicate that it has 20 TRILLION dollars of ore on it- its 3% metal! It has everything, gold, plutonium, platinum...

There's nothing wrong with money. Money makes the satellites go around, and the sort of capabilities that you need to mine Eros will help get to mars- and probably pay for it.

And besides we need need to be able to stop the next dinosaur killer asteroid... living on Mars won't help much with that. Chucking around lumps of asteroid will.