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NASA Releases Report on Mars Exploration Program
latcarf writes, "The lead article on NASA today is about the report on the Mars exploration program - a program that hasn't gotten much exploring done recently. It concludes that the loss of the Mars Polar Lander is most likely due to premature engine shutdown and that the cure to such problems is less "faster and cheaper" and more time spent testing systems at greater cost. The article about this report on CNN includes an interview with Tom Young, formerly with NASA, who relates problems with tests on the Polar Lander."
No, I think it's a bit more complicated than that. I understand your reasoning, however, because we have all been hyped into believing that this dot com revolution is causing a brain drain in other industries. Quite frankly, I don't buy it.
One of the problems with NASA is it doesn't have a particular mandate. We don't have a race with the USSR anymore and NASA has lost focus. Mars, because of the cost involved, doesn't have the sexiness that putting a man on the moon did. I think NASA, and the US gov't need to devote more money to NASA. Hell, I think NASA needs to become more of a world organization. We need to get the whole world involved in this endeavour. I'd rather see money spent on NASA than the United Nations.
Bullshit. Don't accuse someone of knowingly delivering a defective component if you can't back it up with evidence.
Obviously the problem is that NASA and its contractors make mistakes. Well, we will just have to fire them all and replace them with magic robots who never make errors and will work unlimited hours for free.
I work for a NASA contractor and have seen the effects of faster and cheaper up close. It's like Stalin's purges, every month more people disappear, never to be seen again. I haven't seen a new hire in years. My boss is retiring this week and his position will disappear with him. Time to print out another org chart.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
You are mixing up the improvement of the lives of some people with improvement of the human race. Despite appearences, the two are only superficially related.
Pumping money into food for starving people will not alleviate the problems that made them starve in the first place. As the saying goes, if you give a man a fish he'll eat for a day. But if you teach him to fish, he'll eat for life. Which leads to education. This is certainly a good goal, but again the solution is not what one would expect. Throwing money at a problem has never created a solution, not in the entire history of our race. Throwing money at education will not create better schools or better teachers. Perhaps they need more money, but this is not all they need. They also need wild and crazy reforms. Being a recent graduate from an American high school, I can say that the US school system is breaking at the seams, and it's not because it doesn't have enough cash lying around.
Other countries may be different in this regard. Perhaps their systems are fairly decent, but just don't have sufficient money to run them. For the cost of one Mars Polar Lander each year, you could pay for roughly sixteen thousand teachers at ten thousand dollars a year. Not a lot in this country, but in the countries that need it most that salary is incredibly luxuriant.
I think that scientists understand that the best thing they can do is to further the human race. However, they also understand that the greatest scientific discoveries in history were made by people not expecting to make the greatest scientific discoveries in history.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
It seems that when NASA ran missions that cost hundreds of times as much, the media griped about the high cost and our tax dollars and so on. When NASA cut costs drastically, a few missions fail. Now, the press is griping about the money down the drain and your tax dollars and so on. No win situation... So many people love to point out the problems that no one saw the counterpoint until it was tried out.
I think NASA is basically saying that they are going back to the way things used to be. It was more expensive, but it was also more cost effective. I think NASA is less concerned with public opinion now, and more with science. It's for the better. I hope it lasts.
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
--Forager
student of animation and the fine arts
Most of those are not NASA missions. Except for the Space Shuttle, satellite launch services are purchased from private companies such as Boeing or Lockheed-Martin. NASA does not design or build the launch vehicle. Almost all of the Titan launches are done for the USAF, NRO and NSA., not NASA. NASA has enough to deal with without being blamed for other people's launch failures.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
NASA has the complete reports on the Mars Polar lander incident and on recommendations for the Mars exploration program in general. They also have a press release (though the server seems to be down).
The basic summary is that "better, faster, cheaper" can work, but some management and structural changes have to be made in order to ensure the success of the Mars program.
\whine{Don't you hate it when you submit a story hours earlier, with better links, but it is rejected. }
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
There was a full-scale test of the suspect software before flight, but some sensors were incorrectly wired, Young said. After the wiring was corrected, the test was not repeated.
Insert "D'oh!" here. (Or perhaps the sound of one hundred thousand people saying "whop.")
Seriously, has NASA's budget and time window really shrunk so far that they can't afford to utilize basic tenets of software testing and design? If so, Congress really needs to rethink the constand slicing and dicing of NASA's fundage. I've seen projects that were released without adequate testing (which I later had to support...grrrr....), but the consequences there were an increase in work time and client frustration, not the loss of over $100 million of spacecraft.
Remember: always mount a scratch monkey.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
Rather than scrapping the entire design (if NASA truly believes the leg deployment triggered a sensor that shut of the thrusters) why don't they revise the sensor design, retest the lander thoroughly and relaunch a new mission with the esisting design? How much would that cost. Does anyone know the percentage of total cost that goes into design/testing versus launch/deployment?
We have to get to Mars before my arteries clog.
no sig.
Now throw in the fact that the ISS has developed a huge political momentum, which means that its money is sacrosanct - ISS allocations actually increased last year - which meant that the chunk of money that was supposed to be skimmed from NASA's budget almost all came from the planetary and earth science budgets. Remember when there was going to be a rover on the Polar Lander? That's where it went. These projects were cut to the bone, leaving too few engineers working too much unpaid overtime to finish the lander.
So to the people out there complaining that NASA just wants to return to the "good old days" of multi-billion dollar missions, think again. The press release put out by NASA even says that they're going to continue with the "better, faster, cheaper" philosophy, but "properly applied" this time. Essentially, all they really want is the breathing room to hire a few extra engineers, to retain the most experienced workers (think "institutional experience"), and do tests over when need be.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Yes, there have been failures in the space program, yes, there are failures in all areas of life. After recently viewing the latest batch of Hubble photos ( which by the way were first I have seen since all that hubble failure talk a few years ago) I was completely amazed and astounded. Pointing the camera at one of the tiniest patches of completely black sky in our heavens, at maximum zoom ( they call it the fringes of the universe) We see literally hundreds of galaxies. All different shapes colors and sizes. Our lives are short and for the most part pointless, with the magnificent splender of an entire ,seemingly endless universe ( If any of us can possibly imagine that) and the wonder of where we fit in amongst the heavens in our tiny aquarium like planet, we strive to find meaning and order amongst chaos. It is our last hope as humans to gleen some small fraction of the puzzle ( if one exists) in our lifetimes. The rest we leave to those that follow. Is there life out there? A joke more than a question. Of course there is, no doubt, look at the photos.
I love it how CNN says that the two spacecraft cost a combined $320 million. Let's put that into perspective with numbers from the sister site, CNNFN:
Red Hat - market capitalization of $7,465 million
VA Linux - market cap of $2,905 million
Cobalt - market cap of $1,292 million
I could go on and on. Why isn't Nasa seen as a tech company instead of just another gubbermint agency? Maybe if we privatized it and put it on the Nasdaq, it would get more respect from the press - and some better mission success rates.
What's your damage, Heather?
I don't think it would be a good idea to privatize NASA. There are some advantages as (you noted and as noted before); better funding, better salaries to entice better workers...
The disadvantages to a private NASA are few but are very important. I would think that this private agency would be one motivated by profit and less by pursuit of knowledge. This would probably affect certain decisions made by project managers. While NASA does work under tight budget constraints, its goal in conducting exploration missions is the collection of data for public distribution. I can forsee a private company claiming ownership of, lets say...rock samples collected by a lander.
If NASA was privatized but still retained some government control, I think it would be better off. I think the government still should regulate who has rights to building massive rockets carrying tons of highly explosive materials. The government should also claim public ownership of any scientific discoveries made by these exploration missions. Heck, I'd hate to finally make it to the red planet someday just to see flags with the microsoft logo on them planted in the dust.
To say all government is evil and detrimental is silly
It's probably been implied many times already, but one of the reasons NASA projects continue to fail is that they are going with the budget mission idea where they can send lots of small/cheap/disposable missions instead of the expensive but more calculated(read: successfull missions)
Here's some stats on some of the recent NASA missions:
August 12, 1998: A Titan IVA rocket loses control because testing failed to catch frayed wires in the power supply.
August 27, 1998: Delta III Rocket loses control due to flaw in control system.
October 24, 1998: Successfull launch of Deep Space 1.
December 5, 1998: Submillimeter Wave Astronomy satellite successfully launched on a Pegasus-XL.
March 4, 1999: Wide-Field Infrared explorer loses coolant first day in orbit.
April 9, 1999: Titan IVB fails because of improperly placed electrical tape...
April 27, 1999: Payload shroud on Athena II fails to release. Ikonos satellite lost.
April 30, 1999: Titan IVB fails to reach proper orbit because of incorrect manual data entry.
The list goes on, this is from Popular Science (April 2000). I left some out because of lack of time but I woudl suggest reading the article.
I mean, they did hit the planet.
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