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Nattering Nabobs Of NASA Negativity
code_rage writes "IEEE Spectrum Magazine has an article by James Oberg which enumerates some of the problems which have cropped up and will crop up during assembly of Space Station Alpha (or whatever it is called this week).
The article lists many software problems, including safety related issues. Also a problem which was news to me: the U.S.-supplied Solar Arrays operate at a high voltage, which would place astronauts at risk of a potentially deadly plasma discharge during EVA. The workarounds include some Catch-22's."
Sheesh, I wish for a return to the old days, when things would just blow up.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
Have you ever had one of those days where you just feel bad? Well, thanks to our new, innovative technology that has been in the works for years, you can now toss those feelings out the door! Thanks to our Unique Random Plasma Discharge System (URPDS), your mind can now float outside your head, and make all your worries disappear! Just grab a straw, sit back, and inhale. After thousands of years in existance, you'd think we could actually make something work.
What, me worry?
Don't practice your alliteration on me!
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
wow, how would you like to have your fate determined by a math equation which could result in "deadly plasma discharge?" don't mess up your metrics this time, NASA....
Oh... wait - we're talkin' 'bout that ion stuff...
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
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You are a fucking moron.
let me guess, he wrote this article for his secret race of giant robots with which he plans to take over the world? (starting with the ISS).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
...chuckle...
I see no reason to panic based on what was in that article.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
We are catching up to science fiction, and I for one am glad to see it. Now bring me my flying car.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
I'd be more than willing to go into space, but i have two conditions.
1. I would never have to hear or see any mention of microsoft, or bill gates and their shitty products
2. I require my space ship and future home on another planet or space station to be made entirely out of lego's.
that is all. other than that you have yourself a guine pig.
(i'm negotiable with the legos, but firm on #1!)
I am the BOOGER, Koo Koo Kachoo!!!
Why should this be a surprise that there might be electrical problems? Haven't we learned from Star Trek that future space craft, when under any kind of stress, immediately give off massive sparks through the consoles?
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Private Essayist
Yup, it certainly is nice to have that reliable Mir technology to depend on in case the new stuff has problems.
by the way, how does one pronounce "Zvezda"?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Holy Christ! They make it sound like the whole thing is about to fall apart! I really do hope that the (astro|cosmo)nauts are getting danger pay for this!
Maybe they should use Alpha as the location for the next "Survivor" show. The person who can live the longest without getting electrocuted, explosively decompressed, or killed by buggy software (Dr. Chandra taught me a song today, would you like to hear it?) wins $1,000,000 and gets to come home. I don't think I'd even apply for a place in that show.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Alas, poor HAL-9000! I knew him, Arthur.
Well, at least it won't run Windows.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
I blame this squarely on West Palm Beach voters, Microsoft, the RIAA, and the MPAA. They seem to be the cause of all evil, around here at least.
... NASA should use several poorly-trained astronaut teams, instead of one well-trained team. This way, they could afford to lose one or more astronaut teams, but the mission could still continue because of the hot spares available.
A similar concept is used with the clustering features of Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter, as multiple, relatively cheap servers behave as one unit.
Thank you.
-- Patrick Bateman, Esq.
With the success of unmanned space devices, I am having a lot of problems with the ISS. I am all for humankind reaching for the stars, etc. etc., but this is a giant program to keep Russian Aerospace engineers employed. "The Russian-built, U.S.-financed FGB (Funktsioniy-Gruzovoy Blok in Russian, or Functional Cargo Block), code-named Zarya, was launched in November 1998" The Russian engineers have it tough, I know of one space program that was threatened by engineers leaving to be cabbies because they hadn't been paid in months, but risking lives over a space station that will provide us with not much more that warm fuzzies seems wrong.
Grinning, ducking, and running like hell. . . .
actually, you're talking about entropy, which is governed by the second law of thermodynamics. trillions of trillions of years from now, the free energy of the universe will be decreased severely. yeah 5.12! (for any MIT people out there)
Ya know, allthough it would be dangerous, it would sure look pretty cool with arcs traveling across the space station. Sorta like something just that time traveled from the future! *grin*
which would place astronauts at risk of a potentially deadly plasma discharge during EVA.
this is always a risk. the van allen belts for example will kill you. the altitudes for satellite and especially human missions is chosen based on this. coronal discharge affects the shape of the terrestrial plasma/magnetosphere/etc. this is why we watch solar activity so closely. i don't know if any humans have actually been killed by this but many satellites have been.
For chips to perform in space, they have to be able to perform under much more extreme conditions than those which are found in a comfortable, enormous multi-fan gargantuan heat-sinked p4 case. To this end, the silicon technology, I'm guessing the voltage swings of transistors and base voltages, etc, must be re-designed. This takes time, not only for design, but to get permission from the chip's manufacturer (Intel) to do this. For instance, a prof of mine is working at Sandia Labs on a pentium, a six year old chip, to perform in space.
Mike
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
he stole that from william safire, whom i used to think cool until he started writing about dr. wen ho lee.
Taken from somewhere on the net:
"Always avoid annoying alliteration"
This sounds like the same set of pressures for meeting external deadlines (the media, the public, Reagan) rather than making sure everything works. It's a little bit more difficult to "Service Pack" the space station than the public might think.
Kurdt
Kurdt
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
Yes, the solar arrays on the ISS are supposed to be around 160 volts, which is a lot higher than most satellites. They've designed around it, though. The ISS is connected to the solar array via a positive ground rather than a negative one, which should keep the station itself safe for astronauts. (They still should avoid the array if possible, though.) And the plasma contactor mentioned in the article is a pretty useful item that's worked on scientific satellites for years. With the PCU working, they shouldn't have many problems.
:) )
If the PCU goes out, though, plasma charging is a problem. You have the possibility of electrical arcs...which are equally dangerous to astronauts and to the electrical equipment on the station. The torques on the station change when the ground is disturbed, possibly changing its orbit or spin. Ion sputtering (erosion of the spacecraft hull) increases...although that's probably the least of your concerns. There may be periods in the orbit when the astronauts, if they work quickly, can get out and fix things safely. That'd be tough, though, as they hit the aurorae belts every orbit and the South Atlantic Anomaly at least once every seven. You don't want to be EVA over south america next to an ungrounded high voltage space station.
But the folks who build the ISS know what they're doing, and I think they'll have the plasma environment under control. Some of the other problems mentioned in that article I did not know about and do look like a worry, but I'm sure things aren't as dire as the article writer is predicting.
(Full disclosure: I work (subcontract) for NASA on a satellite program unrelated to the ISS. Whether that makes me knowledgeable or just biased is your decision.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Someone you trust is one of us.
is that noise is a major consideration of space station design. I saw something like that on Discovery Channel once and they put a mic in on of the noisier modules in Mir and it sounded like a small NOC with too much equipment in it.
:-)
They said that the tolerable noise level in any module (according to NASA spec) was somewhere around 30 dB but a lot of the modules being made by other countries (notably Russia) exceeded those specs by as much a 40dB. Compund that with the fact that the sound has nowhere to go but in.
In space no one can hear your server crash!
"Me Ted"
BOSTON SUCKS!
OTOH, I think that five of our presidents have been assasinated. Shows that politics is even more dangerous than science.
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BSD or BSOD, your choice...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Ah well, who's counting...
Anyone else remember this show?
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
The payload I've been working on--and from the best I can tell, most of the other payloads on UF-1, the first of the many Utilization Flights--was bumped from its flight. Technically, we weren't on schedule, but the schedule is unrealistic to begin with.
The manifest is full of lies, damned lies, and statistics, but that's no different than any other NASA program. It's the typical NASA FUD: make the schedules unreasonable, and when the contractors fail to meet specs, blame the contractors, slip the schedule, and ask Congress for more money.
It makes one wish for the days of carte blanche, when the schedules were unreasonable, but you could at least throw enough money and brainpower at a situation to get the thing solved. People worked long hours, slept at their desks, had recreation at work, and took simple pleasure at their jobs being finally completed--then moved to another job.
You see, the geek culture today has a lot of roots in the geek culture of the '60s--but instead of Apollo and Saturn, we work on Linux and Gnome. Rather than the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union, which hid all their secrets behind an impenetrable Iron Curtain, we now fight the Evil Empire of Redmond, which hides all their secrets behind the impentrable Closed-Source Curtain.
All of which begs to ask: where's the deals with Life, and when does Tom Wolfe write a book on the open-source movement?
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-- Geof F. Morris
The big, fat gates in a 386SX are also nice and sturdy from an electrical perspective.
Seems like NASA has relaxed its software standards.
Scott Plumlee
You also have to factor in deaths from the Russian space program (Vladimir Komarov, Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev) and the countless animal deaths in the early days. Even when they were not directly involved in NASA's programs, it's not as though NASA didn't take heed of the mistakes learned by their deaths as well.
And modern Space exploration has only been going on for fifty years now. Presidents have been getting assasinated for the last couple hundred years. Since the space program started, only one president (JFK) has been assasinated, though their have been other attempts (Reagan, etc.) By your logic, space exploration remains ten times as fatal as the office of president.
-- Anne Marie
In one error discovered earlier this year, the corruption of two adjacent flags (bits in a status word) would command an air valve to open while locking out the "valve close" command; only a power cycle could reset the system and prevent all the air from leaking out.
What is the point of making things like this computerized with no manual workaround? That sounds poorly thought out. Surely a valve could be made so you could also close it by hand?? This reminds me of the models of BMW where you can't unlock the doors by hand, so if the power locks fail, you're locked in your own car (this actually happened to someone I know). Madness...
I thought it was: "Nine nude nymphs nibling on Nat's nails and nicotine"
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
Cool, you mean I've been using NASA jargon all this time?
Wah!
Eric
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Be who you are...and be it in style!
I have noticed that English natives speakers often have a hard time pronouncing the soft consonants that are abundant in Russian.
6 out of 10 Russian vovels cause the consonant in front of them sound soft, and there is also a "soft sign" that has the same effect on consonants.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Aforementioned "soft sign" is found in the cyrillic transcription of my sig where the apostrophe is ;-)
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is a "person of great wealth or prominence" from arabic derived through Urdu. This is how a provincial governer in the Mogul Empire in India was called.
BTW, there is a site www.m-w.com, Merriam-Webster Online.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
are u talking about the great country that just redefined the meaning of 'democratic process' in order to entertain us all through x-mas or about canada?
... but noise is one of the problems in pretty much every "habitat" made or built in the Soviet Union.
For example, commercial jetliners or houses had not had enough sound isolation.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Others are less upbeat. For example, even optimists admit the development of space station software has been difficult.
And it will continue to be so, across the entire software industry, until software developers force the chip manufacturers to provide hard MMU encapsulation for fine-grain objects like they do for processes now.
Programs are unreliable to a very significant extent because their internal objects all live in the same address space and can merrily tramp all over anything they like under fault conditions. And fault conditions always arise in any non-trivial program, yet recovery is impossible in the general case because there is no internal protection against fault propagation.
Today's software developers are still using a 30-year old hardware model. Is it any surprise that software is still as flakey as ever?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
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Find free books.
Could you enlighten me please? I alway thought that "ground" was a reference potential. By definition, and convention, this reference point is always treated as 0. So what is a positive ground and what is a negative ground?
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Applying your modification to this version would produce not only (IMNSHO) a more amusing
Things will go wrong, and people will die, but Jeeze peoples, we're still learning how to do this fancy "keeping people alive in space" shit. Things will go wrong, and bad things will happen, but we must learn to survive and thrive in the harsh environments outside of our biosphere.
;)
Keep crackin those lame ass jokes about NASA crashing things into Mars and ignoring things like Galileo, which should have been dead a long time ago. Or what about the fact that we've got a close up view of a friggin near Earth asteroid. I won't even mention the Mars shit that worked... Oh well, maybe I will
Yes, they're throwing a buttload of money into things that might not be perfect, things will break and people might die... but we're exploring; we're going "boldly where no man has gone before."
It might not mean squat to you, but I remember where I was on July 4th of '97 (following the bouncing ball). I cried for Challenger, and I look at Eros in awe.
Now none of it directly affects me - it should all mean jack shit to me... But it's all "News for nerds, stuff that matters" to me.
It's all some pretty cool shit...
"Fear is the rootkit of democracy.." Blarkon
These guys @ Spectrum criticize NASA like they know more. I have a hard time trusting the opinion of any news agency which doesn't proof read thier own articles for the simplest errors.
"so the battery failures shouldn't be as much a surprise as they are. It's just that the people who are working the related issues within the space station are not thesame people who worked the issues on [Shuttle-Mir]."
The trouble with being a fan of Space:1999 is the sickening realisation that we aren't all wearing junpsuits,etc....
But on the other hand according to Start Trek we've already had the Third World War, so we should be thankful I suppose...
But, on the third hand, the Whovians can point to the Dalek invasion due next year...nasty!
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
If you have ever written custom code for anything you recognize that truth. The code for the space station is essentially 'alpha' code. How could they get it to the 'beta' stage? Where would they get any 'users' to test it? Can any of you write millions of lines of alpha code with no errors?
The reason that nobody can write alpha code error free is the same reason that nobody can go out and shoot '18' for a round of golf; the job is too difficult for anyone to accomplish. That is why software requires several versions to get it right.
The computing section of the space station is far more extensive than any previous space flight. It was done that way because of the advantages that computer control brings. Because of Yin and Yang there is always a down side to anything which has an upside. The down side is that computer controlling everything necessarily increases the complexity of the computer code. With that complexity comes increased error problems. Sorry, that is the way that reality works.
There is one more truth - NASA has never managed a software project this complex for space use. As a result the management process has problems also.
Here is a management truth: nobody ever has enough time to spend doing the job right in the first place, but somehow they always find enough time to do the job over when their work breaks. In other words there always is enough time to do the job right . Doing it wrong and trying to fix the screw ups with kluges later always takes longer. That ought to be software management 101 - but it is something which most managers never understand.
The only way to solve the complexity issues that computer control brings is to do away with the computer controllers. That costs a lot more money and weighs a lot more. Either live with the problems that computers bring or live with the problems that not having computers bring.
I have to agree with the NASA veteran on the preparedness issue: it costs far less to be prepared at the start than to find out later that you weren't prepared.
but this is a giant program to keep Russian Aerospace engineers employed.
The ISS has always (at least from a US budgetary point of view) been about keeping American aerospace engineers employed. This has been NASA's primary reason for existence for many years now... at least according to Congress.
If NASA was supposed to be about science and aero/astronomical research, maybe we'd have a budget for them instead of for relatively useless stuff like the ISS.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
"We'll also erect a giant statue in your image on the front lawn of our corporate headquarters*."
(*Giant statue offer void on the planet Earth)
Register it from the Space Station and have your lawyer send a letter demanding Qualcomm cough up the statue.
Tech Public Policy stuff
at least not for all of them... there is a thery though that we could have been to mars and back in the early 1980's if the space program thadn't given up on maned missions.
.. and watch your payload get destroyed by a software error. Thanks, No.
It's Linux, damnit! Pay no attention to renaming attempts by self-aggrandizing blowhards.
It is more properly spelt "nawab"
My other sig is also a