Slashdot Mirror
Amateur Rocket Launch a Failure; NASA Debuts Shuttle-cam
Anonymous Coward writes "CNN has posted the story of the failure of the amateur rocket launch that was reported in a previous Slashdot story. 'The launch was spectacular and the rocket was performing as planned. However, the rocket experienced motor failure during the flight and the flight was terminated," said Eric Knight, co-leader of the CSXT mission.' NASA is planning to mount a camera on the external fuel tank and broadcast an October 2nd shuttle launch.
Just look at the original proposal and plans, and look what they've cut it back to. All it is a big jobs project. And the Space Shuttle technology is so old they are having to scrounge eBay for old computer parts.
I'm sorry, but it just makes me sick. And we actually think NASA some day will send someone to Mars. Yeah right. We need someone to come along and either replace NASA entirely, or at the very least scare them into cutting back the beaurocracy and actually performing again.
How "secret" can this location be if there's a picture of the place right at the beggining of the article?
Pretty much the same thing that would happen if an aged driver had a heart attack and crashed his car into a Department of Motor Vehicles service facility.
Or if a restaurant exploded because of a faulty natural gas valve.
Or if an airliner had a mechanical problem that caused it to crash into a suburban neighborhood.
Or if a cosmetic medical device caused unforseen side effects later on.
Liability insurance, my man. Liability insurance.
Guess who doesn't have to have it: NASA
Guess who doesn't have to pay if they fuck up: NASA
Guess who picks up the tab if they do: you and me
Edith Keeler Must Die
Argh!
And I say 2400 mph is the average speed, 3205 the claimed max speed.
"Rockets" are hard to get right. If they weren't, everyone would have ICBMs by now.
-Paul
Nasa employs some of the smartest and most experienced people in the world ...
That's the same bunch who screwed up metric --> english conversion and crashed a martian lander, right?
Boeing employs some of the smartest and most experienced people in the world....
Thats the same bunch who had a hydraulic system fail and a plane crashed right?
NASA has launched more missions than anybody else, and they have had more successful missions that any body else. They have also had more failures than anyone else, but thats thanks to a little thing called the law of averages.
Face it, NASA has been sending things in the sky for 40 straight years now. In all that time, they landed on the moon, helped fly four craft to the farthest reaches of the solar system, landed 3 successful missions on Mars, and have helped run two successful space stations.
All this, with only 7 astronauts lost. How many people do you spposed died in the first 40 years of aviation? How about the first 40 years of automobiles?
So don't give me any of this "NASA can't even even get metric conversion right" crap. For the last four decades, NASA has regularly pulled off shit that other countries only dream of.
Do you have Linux and a DotPal? Click here now!
> NASA has launched more missions than anybody else
NASA has launched more manned missions than anybody else, but the Russians have launched nearly TEN TIMES as many space mission.
This is when someone adds "Yeah they had to, because their electronics suck, so they need to replace their sats more often", but that doesn't change the point about launches.
John Carmack
Do you even know what the "unexcusable" mistake was?
The problem with Mars Polar Lander occured because Lockheed Martin send a file containing a table of information to NASA in which, basically, the units weren't labeled. (This is unfortunately actually not a rare practice among programmers, because handling units in computer codes is usually a pain in the ass.) Lockheed used imperial units, and someone at NASA assumed they were in metric.
The problem wasn't that someone at NASA was too dumb to convert between pounds and newtons. The problem was that someone at Lockheed didn't appropriately label units, and someone else made an incorrect assumption about what the units were.
The same thing could have happened if Lockheed had listed the forces in the file in milli-newtons, and the guy at NASA assumed in was in newtons. The use of Imperial unots was not the problem.
The miscalculation was by a very small amount. It couldn't be detected until the spacecraft was deep within Mar's gravity well. It was too late to correect for.
The deep reason for the problem, though, was severe underfunding. The project did not have enough people to do proper testing, and corners got cut. The level of testing is much better for the rovers flying to Mars next year.