Bad Testing Doomed NASA's Hypersonic X-43A

RobertB-DC writes "Space.com got hold of NASA's yet-to-be-released report on the June 2001 failure of the air-breathing X-43A hypersonic research vehicle, and it doesn't look good for 'Faster, Better, Cheaper'. The report refuses to single out any one contributing factor, but it cites ground testing 'inaccuracies' and 'misinterpretation' of wind tunnel data -- in particular, failure to retest the vehicle after additional heat protection was added. As noted in the original Slashdot article, the craft went out of control when the fins broke off just seconds into flight."

Comments

KOTHF.

[Grendel Drago]

You know, stuff like this really inspires me. I'm in the middle of reading Kings of the High Frontier, which was first published in the mid-nineties. A major plot point is a wealthy industrialist offering a half-billion dollar prize similar to the X-Prize. Even a few years ago, I never thought we'd be seeing so many groups trying for their own cheap launch. It should have been done years ago.

Some people complain that the X-Prize doesn't really get anywhere---that tossing yourself a hundred kilometers above sea level is a far cry from low earth orbit. This is true. Maybe the X-Prize will be the first in a series of cash prizes to spur even more invention. First single-stage to orbit, first real space station, first craft assembled in space... I don't know what the next milestones will be, but we'll get there faster if there's cash money incentive.

Oh, and would wetsuits work as space suits? There's no way the heat would really bleed off, and if you could lead-line them for heat shielding...

The quote from KOTHF is "Space suits for NASA cost a million bucks a shot and are about as comfortable as wearing pork barrels. I found this research report from the nineteen-sixties by a team that ought to have won the contract bid, except that their suits only cost a thousand dollars each and could be done by any seamstress. NASA probably figured that would have looked cheap, so for three decades astronauts have been lugging around thirty layers of cloth and a refrigerator when they could have been dressed in Spandex tights." [...] "The difference between down here and up there is only one measly atmosphere of pressure. Our skin is strong enough to withstand that gradient. It has quite a bit of tensile strength. The only problem is that it stretches too well. That means we swell up, which drops the pressure in our bloodstream, so our blood outgasses and vapor-locks our hearts. With just this second skin to keep our body volume constant, we don't expand. So we don't boil." (From ch. 11.)

Can anyone with a background in anything relating to that confirm or deny?

--grendel drago

Re:KOTHF.

[einstein]

I always thought one of the reasons for the bulky suits was radiation shielding, which I imagine would be harder to deal with from a wetsuit.

Re:KOTHF.

[physicsnerd]

No, you can't use a wetsuit in place of a spacesuit. One of the larger problems with using a wet suit is that it is not vacuum tight. The human body cannot survive inside of a vacumm, so the entire suit has to be pressurized. This rules out a wet suit. There are many more problems with heating and cooling. It turns out to be a very complex problem to make a spacesuit, that's why the things are so expensive.

Physicsnerd

Re:KOTHF.

[SWTP_OS9]

Hum..

There was a book about a revolt on Mars I cant remember but the P suits were basically a mesh that boster the tensel strength of your skin with helment and boots. Called Fire somthing. Main caracter was a youne lad called Person.

Actualy it not cold that the problem but removing the heat of 96.7 degree of a human. There were some studies about cooling that said they need about 100mph wind to cool the body. Dosent Nascar drivers use a cooling suit?

PS: How about Monster truck on the Moon! ^_^

Re:KOTHF.

[eallison]

Air pressure is just a force - albeit a well distributed force. There's nothing magical about air touching your skin. It just balances the forces on the inside. Basically, using a spandex wetsuit, you're replacing the force of air with the force of elastic (or some fraction - space suits are only at a fraction of an atm as it is...). The problem, as stated above somewhere, is that you need to make sure the force gets well-distributed, and that you have a way to breathe (fishbowl on the head). So heating (shedding heat) is probably the main problem - maybe could be solved with some sort of micro-channel embedded in the spandex connected to a radiator of some sort. Then you have to deal with radiation... as someone else said, there are definitely engineering problems, but the basic idea is not ridiculous. BTW, easier on Mars, because you don't have to deal with radiation and particle impacts - and you have a little bit of air pressure (.5psi?) to help.

Re: light spacesuits

[mikeee]

Not an expert, but have read on this elsewhere:

Wetsuits (probably reinforced with kevlar or something, why not) would probably be fine; actually, filling any small internal gaps with water would be a good trick to insure a perfect fit (any gaps in the suit and you get Giant Space Hickeys, and we don't want that!). You'ld need a fishbowl helmet, of course.

Heat might be tricky. Space is cold, but there's no air, so shedding heat is surprisingly hard. I'm not sure if overheating or freezing would be the main problem for humans in moderately insulated suits.

Re: light spacesuits

[Dstrct0]

"I'm not sure if overheating or freezing would be the main problem..."

That's what I wasn't too sure about as well. The whole basis of a wetsuit is that it is a semi-permeable membrane that fills with water when it gets wet. The water trapped in the suit then gets heated up to body temperature by your body, so you stay nice and comfy.

But going into space with one... it's pretty cold out there, and I don't know if your body would be able to keep the water warm.

Another thought on wetsuits: the colder the water is that you are planning on going into, the thicker your suit needs to be. My wetsuit that I wear sailing is a whole lot thinner than what I wear SCUBA diving. I wonder how bulky the suit would have to be for going into space?

Maybe a dry-suit might be more suited to the task, but I don't know a lot about dry-suits, so I can't really comment.

Re: light spacesuits

[zenofjazz]

Actually, the temperature regulating method your body already uses would work effectively with a wet suit, as it's permeable to water, so it would wick sweat away from your skin, allowing for cooling. And yes, kevlar as a reinforcing material, over "soft tissue areas" - think abdomen, below ribs, would be a good thing.. though, a single sheet of kevlar would not be as functional as several "ribs" or bands of kevalar (to allow flexibility, etc.)

Space suits are complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

Space suits are for more than just keeping humans from swelling up. For one thing, they need to protect against impacts. Wetsuits weren't meant to protect against microscopic pieces of metal hitting you at 20,000mph. Likewise, they can't insulate you from the hundreds of degrees it'll heat up to when the sun shines directly on you. And what happens when half of you is in the -100 degree shadow and the other half is directly shined upon at +300 degrees?

Wetsuits.

[Grendel Drago]

Well, the point of using a wetsuit is just that it's form-fitting and so keeps the body's volume constant.

Technically, space is very cold, but it's also very empty. There's really nothing out there to absorb the heat from the body, so your biggest problem (as someone else has already pointed out) is getting rid of both the body heat you generate and the heat you get from being in the sun. (Of course, if you're going to be in the sun, you're going to need either a personal magnetic field or some sort of armor for the radiation.)

Of course, if you're walking on the moon, you need some sort of insulation. "The Forever War" talked about the problems with dissipating heat from a space suit.

--grendel drago

"Very complex problem".

[Grendel Drago]

Are you sure you read my original comment? The point is that the human body can survive in a vacuum, if its volume is held constant. You'd still need a fishbowl for your head (as someone else pointed out) and ways of dealing with both radiation and heat, but stop and think about what you said:

What exactly is the problem with people being in a vacuum? Aside from ears popping and lungs deflating (this is why we have the fishbowl), the skin expands, depressurizing the blood and causing it to boil, and this is what's fatal. If the blood can't depressurize, what would be fatal about a vacuum?

I know that "the human body cannot survive inside of a vacuum" is something of an article of faith, and we've gotten accustomed to the idea, but I don't see what exactly is so hostile about one that can't be overcome with a fishbowl and wetsuit. Is there a real reason other than "it's a very complex problem"?

--grendel drago

Re:"Very complex problem".

[physicsnerd]

It's not that the skin expands, but that there is no air pressure on the surface of your skin. With out that pressure your blood will boil. I'll respond more later when I have more time. physicsnerd

Re:"Very complex problem".

[Ambush]

However I think the real problem with a 'form fitting' suit, wet or not, would be when breathing out.

Consider for a moment, when you breath in you expand your chest and abdomen to compensate for the volume of air in your lungs. Conversely your chest and abdomen contract when breathing out.

It seems to me that you would end up breathing in very fast, and labour to breath out. You'd end up exhausted just from breathing. Either that or I'm missing something fundamental here.

Radiation shielding.

[Grendel Drago]

Mmm, true. That, the micrometorite problem and heat dissipation are rather tricky. It should be possible to line the suit with lead, I'd think. It'd be like wearing one of those aprons they put over your genitals when you get an x-ray, but covering the whole body. Still not nearly as bulky as the traditional space suit, and doesn't require pressurizing the whole body.

--grendel drago

Water as insulation.

[Grendel Drago]

Wouldn't the water all boil off, making you very, very cold? (Evaporation is, after all, a cooling process.)

Then again, a tank of water to be evaporated might be an effective method of dissipating the heat you generate. Doesn't seem very reliable or sustainable, though.

--grendel drago

Re:Water as insulation.

[Dstrct0]

What about having some kind of condenser (condensor?) built in? Then as the water evaporates, it just gets recycled as fresh insulating water. That could also be used to take care of shedding excess heat, like what we were talking about earlier.

But now we're getting back to a bulky suit, which sorta defeats the purpose...

Also, what about adding lead traces to the water so that it serves as a small level of additional radiation protection too?

Heat.

[Grendel Drago]

Do you really need bulky armor-plate, or are there gels that can absorb small-mass, high-energy impact like that?

The thermal problem has nothing to do with cold---if it's four kelvin in a vacuum, how's the heat going to leave your body?---and everything to do with heat, both body heat (remember, it has nowhere to go) and solar. So the temperature gradient isn't really an issue---there's no way half of the body is going to be at -100---but heat dissipation is.

These are engineering problems, and while I can't think of any out-of-hand solutions to them, I'll bet that other people have given it some thought. How do NASA space suits deal with these things?

--grendel drago

Re:Heat.

[amembleton]

You will loose body heat through radiation. Conduction cannot occur because of the vacuum, radiation does occor. How do you think we receive heat energy from the sun?

Re: light spacesuits

[Anonymous Coward]

These suits were built and tested in 1972. They were orders of magnitude easier to work in than the Apollo moon suits.

They cost about $1000 each. Compare with $500,000 for the NASA version, and you'll see one of the reasons they weren't too popular.

Do a google for "space activity Suit" for more details.
RJG.

Condensation.

[Grendel Drago]

Ah, but you forget that condensation is a warming process, and you're right back where you started. Only by permanently (or at least until the excursion is over) evaporating the water would this work. And given how precious water is in space, I don't think disposing of it would be a terribly good idea in the first place. No, the water-cooling idea is probably a no-go.

As for lead traces---is it the presence of lead or the presence of a big chunky mass that makes it into a good radiation shield?

--grendel drago

Emissivity etc.

[Grendel Drago]

Radiation accounts for a very small amount of heat transfer. I'm trying to find quantification for that, but Google isn't being helpful. Even if this weren't the case, it'd be trivial to line the the suit with inward-facing shiny reflective (reflecting IR is the important part) stuff, the kind you get on newer rolls of house insulation. Only without the bubble wrap.

--grendel drago

Re:Emissivity etc.

[Alizarin Erythrosin]

What's wrong with bubble wrap? At least it would give you something to do floating in space... besides whatever work you had to do that is.

Space Activity Suits.

[Grendel Drago]

Thanks!

The device (Google HTML cache of a whitepaper in DOC format) was in fact designed and tested, but NASA junked it. Bastards.

And yes, heat is boiled off by evaporating water, both in the NASA suit and the SAS. Seems wasteful, but apparently it works.

Thanks again---I'm amazed that this was actually invented.

--grendel drago

Re: light spacesuits

[BarryHaworth]

Wetsuits .... Heat might be tricky. Space is cold, but there's no air, so shedding heat is surprisingly hard. I'm not sure if overheating or freezing would be the main problem for humans in moderately insulated suits.

I haven't seen any technical literature on this, but it has featured in a few SF stories (such as Pournelle's Exiles to Glory), and I read some non-technical stuff about the idea in Savage's The Millenium Project. The basic design is something like a thick body stocking to provide enough extra reinforcement to the skin - enough to hold in the pressure. You keep cool by sweating, you keep warm by putting some warm clothing on. You wear a fishbowl helmet, and breathe pure oxygen at about five PSI (which incidentally is pretty well what astronauts do anyway).

I understand that NASA did some successful tests on these back in the seventies. I don't understand why they never put them into use.

Radiation Shielding

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read one of the last scientific americans (I'm not sure, but think about two-three months back) they had an article about a newly developed radiation suit - using various organic salts embedded in the textile, you can get (for the same price as lead) just as good radiation protection with what appears to be a thick cloth.
It is definently not as bulky as lead, and I believe it also allows water to evaporate from your body. So you could have a suit composed of an elastic material and this.

Re:Radiation Shielding

[Christopher Thomas]

they had an article about a newly developed radiation suit - using various organic salts embedded in the textile, you can get (for the same price as lead) just as good radiation protection with what appears to be a thick cloth. It is definently not as bulky as lead, and I believe it also allows water to evaporate from your body.

It's as bulky (and as heavy) as lead (more bulky, in fact, as there's less lead per unit volume). It's just a lot more flexible, which makes it far more practical to wear.

Voila, Technical Literature.

[Grendel Drago]

Lo and behold, technical literature. I can't believe no one ended up hearing about this. For a price-factor difference of five hundred, I can't see a reason that NASA wouldn't have gone with the skinsuit. Other than pork-barrel bureaucracy, that is...

--grendel drago

Re:Voila, Technical Literature.

[EvilTwinSkippy]

So exactly where were they supposed to store the extra water? Water is heavy. At present most modern spacecraft don't even store it. They generate drinking water (in small amounts) as a byproduct of power generation.

Perhaps in the future, but I don't think the concept is ready for prime time.

faster, better, cheaper...

[10 Speed]

The X-43A MIB report underscores the fact that the Hyper-X launch vehicle contract was developed under the faster, better, cheaper philosophy

the rules clearly state that you may only choose 2 of the above!!

Re:faster, better, cheaper...

[TWX]

Obviously you never heard someone from Fry's Electronics delivering their salespitch on an E-Machine...

When one attempts to get good, cheap, and fast all in one package, the first is the one that suffers the most...

Re:faster, better, cheaper...

[golgotha007]

the Mars Pathfinder mission (with the Sojourner landing probe) was one of the first missions to have the faster, cheaper, better label.

this mission was considered to be a huge success, so everyone was like, 'hey, this new model we've just adopted works, and what's more, it saves us a lot of money! let's build everything to be faster, cheaper and better!'

unfortunetely, as we all know, when you start removing quality out of a project, the chances of that project succeeding become less and less.

Re:faster, better, cheaper...

[GileadGreene]

the rules clearly state that you may only choose 2 of the above!!

Yeah, yeah. Everyone keeps saying that. But the truth of your statement depends entirely on how you define "better". In the "Faster, Better, Cheaper" philosophy "better" doesn't mean that an individual mission is any less likely to fail. Under FBC "better" means that the overall ROI across a large number of missions is higher. The words "faster" and "cheaper" apply to individual missions. The word "better" applies to the program as a whole. It's a shame that NASA never adequately managed to explain this to the public :-(

Note that the above does not necessarily imply that NASA always implements FBC well - there are many in NASA that don't understand what the "better" part means either. The result is a bunch of projects that attempt to achieve the same or better performance, but on a radisally compressed schedule and budget. Needless to say, this is a recipe for disaster. As you stated, success for that kind of project is "against the rules".

Re:faster, better, cheaper...

[DNS-and-BIND]

So, if NASA spent more money, they would have greater success?

Nah. That's wack, man. NASA doesn't need to spend any more fucking money. They spend enough. What they need is to reduce the manager staffing by 50%.

Re:faster, better, cheaper...

[Christopher Thomas]

unfortunetely, as we all know, when you start removing quality out of a project, the chances of that project succeeding become less and less.

The idea (for space probes at least) is that being able to launch more probes for the same amount of money makes up for the increased failure rate.

Well obviously..

[Exiler]

they didn't train enough!

Yeah right.

[The Old Burke]

he report refuses to single out any one contributing factor, but it cites ground testing 'inaccuracies' and 'misinterpretation' of wind tunnel data -- in particular, failure to retest the vehicle after additional heat protection was added.

Sounds like a classic NASA math failure to me.

Re:Yeah right.

[CrowScape]

Although the article seems to indicate that this was incompetence on the part of Orbital Sciences Corporation, and that NASA oversight would have corrected the flawed testing process.

Re:Yeah right.

[bill_mcgonigle]

Sounds like a classic NASA math failure to me.

Interestingly enough, most people I talk to think NASA was using English measurements, since Americans are so backwards and NASA is 'so incompetent'. Actually, NASA was using metric, and their contractor was using English. Of course, then I've been told that English is pretty much the standard in aerospace, so NASA doesn't get off the hook entirely, even if they were trying to be progressive.

Re:Yeah right.

[pmz]

Proud patriot and republican voter.

The Republican and Democratic parties are much too rich and powerful, now, to care deeply about the integrity of the U.S., its constitution, and the individual liberties of its citizens. They are more concerned about self-perpetuation and wide-ranging power over their constituencies.

Re:Yeah right.

[ThaReetLad]

Whaddya mean English vs Metric? We English now officially use metric for everything except beer, milk and road signs

Why can't we work through failure??

[Captain_Loser]

Why is it that nasa has the philosophy of faster better cheaper? Although it has had some success the philosophy leads to more failure. Its obvious that the public seems to want more space based research, trips to mars, etc. So why does nasa feel that it needs to drop a project at any hint of failure?

Re:Why can't we work through failure??

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of fear of an accident. That's the main reason they don't want to go to Mars, etc. It would be a complete embarassment if a mission to Mars, or something of the sort, messed up. NASA would never recover. Shuttle disasters are just like car crashes - they aren't really out of the ordinary (that is, the missions), so they don't draw much attention to when they crash, compared to what would happen if it was a Mars mission, etc, so they aren't really comparable.

Re:Why can't we work through failure??

[Captain_Loser]

But isn't making mistakes part of the game. I just think this faster cheaper crap is causing trouble. If we could maybe not be as concerned (still concerned but not completely) concerned about costs. All projects base everything on costs, this won't change, this is how the world works. But maybe we should scale down having 80 different projects and focus the limited funds on one goal.

Re:Why can't we work through failure??

[Anonymous Coward]

Making mistakes isn't part of the game when in a bureaucratic organization.

Re:Why can't we work through failure??

[EvilOpie]

As far as I understand, the faster better cheaper philosophy came from back when NASA was working on several research probes that were to be launched into space, but were having problems with implimenting their plans under the old philosophy.

See, at the time NASA had the "everything and the kitchen sink" philosophy where they would work on building a probe and put every instrument they could think of on it. Problem is that it would take a very long time to build, and it would cost a ton of money. Plus, if they ever lost one, then all that work was down the drain. So they came up with their "faster, better, cheaper" philosophy where instead of launching huge space probes with tons of equipment on them, they started to build smaller ones with less equipment on them. When they did that, they saved costs in what it took to build one, plus they cut down on the build time. And in the event of a failure, they weren't out quite as much on a probe as they were before.

So as far as I know, that's where the faster better cheaper philosophy came from. But like it was noted before... "Pick any two". I mean, you've got to have some give somewhere in there.

Re:Why can't we work through failure??

[kfg]

The engineers who formulated and put the faster, better, cheaper model to work expected, indeed predicted, a much higher failure rate than had been the norm.

These people weren't stupid or something and knew just as well as any person with something on the ball, such as yourself, that a high failure rate was inherent in the model.

Doing it fast and cheap is relatively better in the long run on the throwing enough speghetti against the wall process. A lot of it falls off, but some of it sticks, and speghetti is dirt cheap so the stuff that falls on the floor doesn't matter.

However, as the other poster notes, NASA is a government beaurcracy, and run by beaureacrats, not the engineers.

Beaureaucrats punish failure and assign blame. The more failure you can point at and the more blame you assess the more you justify your job.

The other thing they do is develop massive control programs, requiring that they have personal control over a large budget and many subordinates, to "prevent" failure.

It's the violence inherent in the system.

You can't tell these people when they come knocking on your door and asking why your sattelite blew up, "Dude, we built twenty of 'em on the cheap, we'll just send up another."

That just makes them confiscate everything you've got and slash your budget, which they then add to theirs.

You haven't fallen into the trap of believing that NASA is about engineering, science and the gathering of data, have you?

Silly boy.

KFG

Re:Why can't we work through failure??

[Anonymous Coward]

The "faster - better - cheaper" mantra has it's roots in one man: Dan Goldin. Craptastic administrator. I'm glad he's gone.

Re:Why can't we work through failure??

[Moofie]

I disagree.

The Apollo 1 fire was as traumatic as an accident could be, yet the program pulled itself up by its bootstraps and proceeded to hit their milestone.

I certainly wouldn't argue that NASA, as it is curently chartered, would survive a Mars mission disaster, but frankly I don't think they'll ever have a chance to do so. NASA is impotent.

Re:Why can't we work through failure??

[ruprechtjones]

But isn't making mistakes part of the game.

Yes, it is. You and I know that, but NASA is in a real tough spot right now. One or two major mistakes (especially fatal mistakes), and congress looks to re-vamp the whole system (good in my opinion). If it plays it safe for the next ten years, things look good on their record, and congress backs off and thinks that everything is fine.

What would you do if you had a gun at your head and were told that any further mistakes would lead to that trigger getting pulled?

They're in self-preservation mode, exploration and progress be damned. I hate this kind of shit, let's get rid of the bloated government agency and put together a reward-based fund for private enterprise. At least we'll see innovation without (much) bureaucracy that way.

Re:Why can't we work through failure??

[ruprechtjones]

The Apollo 1 fire was as traumatic as an accident could be, yet the program pulled itself up by its bootstraps and proceeded to hit their milestone.

But remember this was in a different time. The cold war was a motivating factor for the Apollo program, so more risk was acceptable. Nowadays that kind of failure would be a 1.5-2 year setback, at least.

I agree, NASA is impotent. What can be done to further our space program either without them, or without this 100% reliance on them? Something has to be done, dammit, I at least want to visit LEO before I die.

Re:Why can't we work through failure??

[GileadGreene]

Wish I could mod the parent higher than a 5 somehow. You have hit the nail precisely on the head. I get sick of hearing everyone regurgitate the "pick any two" line. "Faster, Better, Cheaper" as a design philosophy was always supposed to mean "do lots of small, low-cost missions quickly, accepting the fact that some will fail in return for the higher overall science return".

Too many people interpret the "better" part to mean that an individual mission will be "better". Not necessarily so (although an argument can be made that smaller, less complex missions can be as or more reliable than bigger mission). It all comes down to how you define "better". In FBC terms, "better" is improving the amount of science data you can get back. If you spend $600M on one big mission, and it fails, you've just lost $600M worth of science data. If you spend $600M on 3 smaller missions you may be able to generate more data than with one big mission (more flexibility with several observation platforms). More importantly, if you lose all 3 missions then you're no worse off than you would be with one big mission, but e.g. if you lose only 2/3 of your missions, you still get $200M worth of science.

FBC does work, when it is done right. Look at APL's NEAR mission, or Clementine, or Lunar Prospector, or SAMPEX, or HETE, or any of the UoSATs. It's not impossible, even for NASA. It's just that not all parts of NASA are good at it, or implement it correctly.

It doesn't sound like the X-43A was killed by FBC. It sounds like sloppy systems engineering to me (not retesting after a change like adding extra heat protection sounds very risky to me - although it's entirely possible that they did they risk analysis, and decided it was ok to proceed without the test - that's the chance you take). It wouldn't be the first time that's happened. Implementing FBC demands solid systems engineering. The problem is that many parts of NASA interpret "cheaper" to mean "cut all parts of the budget", and hack away at the systems engineering budget along with everything else. Not a good idea.

Re:Why can't we work through failure??

[Jafafa Hots]

absofuckinglutely right. someone gets it!!!

Re:Why can't we work through failure??

[isomeme]

I was on a tour at JPL where our guide was discussing this shift. Apparently, the internal slang for the old mega-missions was "Battlestar class", as in "Cassini was the last Battlestar class mission". I thought that was a vivid way to put it.

Re:Why can't we work through failure??

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, NASA is impotent. What can be done to further our space
program either without them, or without this 100% reliance on them?
Something has to be done, dammit, I at least want to visit LEO before
I die.
>
>
And we're supposed to actually care about what you want because?

Re:Why can't we work through failure??

[Anonymous Coward]

Its obvious that the public seems to want more space based research, trips to mars, etc.

No it isn't. You kids don't seem to realize that most people simply do not care about this sort of thing. Although space travel seems really neat-o to you star trek watching children, it's basically a big waste of money.

When you get to 30+ or so, and realize that a 6 trillion dollar national debt is actually a large number that is either going to bankrupt the country which will, if you have any savings, destroy them or cause the country to go into economic isolation as the dollar fails, you'll realize there are more important things to worry about than what is "neat" and "sciencefictiony".

Going to the moon was the most spectacular thing that mankind has ever done, and it was done for all the wrong reasons.

I'm all for this sort of thing, when the country can afford it. When I spend more money than I take in, I consider that to be fiscally wreckless. When the country does it, and FORCES me to do it, I consider it criminal. I am not in debt, and have never been. When my country acts stupidily, and wastes money, all they do is spend more by borrowing more, from the Federal Reserve, which is a PRIVATE bank. Not a government bank, PRIVATE.

If you think it's dangerous that Bill Gates and Co. have a couple hundred billion to push around the country, think of how dangerous it is for a private institution to be "loaning" out 6 trillion dollars to the country.

Re:Why can't we work through failure??

[ruprechtjones]

Who on Slashdot responds to AC trolls? Log in and add to the discussion, then I will respond. Otherwise, your meager voice blows along with the breeze and is never heard...

Re:Why can't we work through failure??

[mikerich]

As far as I understand, the faster better cheaper philosophy came from back when NASA was working on several research probes that were to be launched into space, but were having problems with implimenting their plans under the old philosophy.

The loss of the $1 billion Mars Observer proved to be the final straw for NASA's bosses. They had already seen both Galileo and Ulysses delayed by the loss of Challenger, the birth pains of Cassini had been massive and they were finding it harder and harder to explain to the people who held the pursestrings why spacecraft were costing so much.

But like it was noted before... "Pick any two". I mean, you've got to have some give somewhere in there.

Pretty much the whole history of engineering will tell you that, but no one ever listens. The people of Tacoma WA got a nice new bridge in early 1940. Originally costed at $11 million, the project was sent back for redesign to reduce costs. By using a radical new lightweight design incorporating all the latest technologies, the World's third longest bridge was completed in just over a year for just $6.4 million.

It looked beautiful, but six months later it fell down.

You can't cost-cut your way out of engineering problems.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Billy Joe Hickock, Nasa Aerospace Engineer

[dook43]

Damn it, Bobby Ted! That JB Weld was supposed to hold them goldang fins on tight....lemme check that thar tube. You dumb ass! It says that it holds in temperatures up to 200 degrees F not 2000! Get that antenna out of your ass!

Just leave it to the x-prize guys...

[Perdition]

I personally don't see this governmental fiddling with space lasting much longer, seeing how commercial interests and private (albeit wealthy) citizens are starting to push the cold, dark envelope of space travel. If I could make an outlandish prediction, I'd guess that by 2020, we'll have a ship or two with no real flag-bearing duties on the Moon. I personally hope we find a complete replacement for manned vehicles altogether, but exploration has demands for the flexible, so humans will probably still be risked as a result.

Remember, you don't fly in a "Wright" airplane, it's a Boeing... let commercial interests take over where purist experimentation leaves off.

Re:Just leave it to the x-prize guys...

[Timesprout]

You seem to be overlooking the fact that the X-Prize guys have not really achieved anything substantial at this point in time, and by substantial I mean compared to NASA'a achievements. The 2020 prediction looks pretty optimistic to me given the cost of space exploration with no short to medium term ROI its difficult to see the private sector putting the money up. More likely is that in 2100 private investors will be demanding NASA share their technology so they can jump on the bandwagon.

Also in the current climate I cant see any way the US government would allow independent development of technology which could ultimately be used to destroy at a stroke the technology advantage the US currently enjoys.

Re:Just leave it to the x-prize guys...

[RealUlli]

You seem to be overlooking the fact that the X-Prize guys have not really achieved anything substantial at this point in time, and by substantial I mean compared to NASA'a achievements.

For how long has the X-Prize been around? For how long has the NASA been around? How much had the NASA achieved when they were around as long as the X-Prize has been right now?

I think, the X-Prize contestants did achieve quite a lot in a fairly short time...

Cheers, Ulli

Re:Just leave it to the x-prize guys...

[RapaNui]

Well, if you compare the state of the X-prize developments with the beginnings of the US Space program, the X-prize guys don't have unlimited funding and resources like NASA did in the early days.
(And during the Apollo era).
I realize that the technology in the form of materials, machining, structure, etc. etc. etc. has advanced considerably in those times, but there are still certain problems that can only be solved properly (within a certain timeframe) by throwing large amounts of money around.

Another hurdle in the way of private space ventures (at least those launched from the continental US) is the amount of red tape one has to go through to be able to launch.
I remember some years ago reading about (I don't remember the company name, but I think the vehicle was called the 'Conestoga'??) a company trying to get permits for their launch vehicle, and the fact that the whole procedure was geared to make it as difficult as possible for non-government (NASA / military) operators to get anywhere. I'll try find some references.

Re:Just leave it to the x-prize guys...

[RestiffBard]

you also seem to be overlooking that the X-prize contest has only been in full swing for a short time. Their funds are limited. their teams are small.

NASA has a nation behind it, unlimited funding and has been doing it for decades.

give it a little time. Space engineering is not computer engineering.

Re:First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed! And give some consideration to this hypothesis as well:

Geopolitics [1945-1989] can be construed as the age-old quest for protein, played out by actors able to marshall the full resources of the modern industrial state in pursuit of their goals.

Testing

[Bigfishbowl]

You know, I'm not sure that the whole slashdot crowd understands how hard it is to test these sort of things. I mean my university has been doing subcontracting for NASA and I have to say, these people there are really smart. I'm not talking business major to business major, I mean EE to Ph.D EE - these guys are dumb so please don't refer to them as such. Imagine though, any huge project, no matter how well constructed, basically comes down to a single person decieding or desidgning something (the so called single point failure). Do you think you could be that person?

Re:Testing

[Loudog]

At the risk of feeding the flames:

I worked as a contractor to NASA for a year on various network projects. My father was a "rocket scientist" for the Atlas and Mercury programs, so I have some knowledge of what excellence in space programs should look like.

What I saw was very scary. The politics were intense and the science was very spotty. It was not a good experience. It was proof that a Ph.D doesn't mean that you can think.

Much of the folks that worked on my project (with up to 10 years of NASA experience) think that NASA is full of idiots. And -- for but the occational flash of true genius I saw -- I'd have to agree with them. We certainly wouldn't be able to accomplish the equivalent of a "moon shot" with today's NASA. Sad. They used to have the right "one person", they don't anymore.

I certainly don't use the phrase "takes a rocket scientist to..." because I've seen NASA in action. Ouch.

YMMV.

Everyone needs a cause: Stamp out phase jitter!

Re:Testing

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on now, don't pretend that they don't have any kind of review process. Any organization that produces extremely complex products on a recurring basis has a "chain of command" where you report any problems. Of course, if you're in charge of inspecting a rotor just before launch and you say "fuck it I don't care" you can personally be responsible for loss of life or equipment, but that doesn't apply here. If you are being an idiot and holding your head down to avoid pointing out problems, there is someone (or should be) who calls your bs.

Re:Testing

[Anonymous Coward]

do you really think having a Ph.D means that a person is very smart or capable of making the right decisions ? I'm sure this can be construed as flamebait, but unless the person has done something interesting in Ph.D and come out with some good publications, it doesn't mean much. there are some "good" universities where a person can get a Ph.D without as much as publishing a single paper. Please don't confuse having a Ph.D. with ability.

Re:Testing

[Anonymous Coward]

... Please don't confuse having a Ph.D. with ability.

In much the same way as we shouldn't confuse running a multimillion dollar business (such as Enron) as having ability

Re:Testing

[Moofie]

For what it's worth, I believe that the people, and the technology, are there.

It's the politics and the bureaucracy that are destroying them. Unfortunate.

Re:Testing

[Mr Foot]

I don't know about NASA. But I agree with your .sig. Right know I'm using my University's linear accelerator and one of the resonators won't stay in phase lock. Damn that jitter!

Re:Testing

[GileadGreene]

Unfortunately, I have to second the opinion of one of the other people that replied to this post: NASA is riddled with incompetents. Sure, they were great during the Apollo program, and sure, there are still a few sharp people there. But there are also alot of people who are just dead weight.

A large part of the reason for the rampant incompetence is that NASA is a government agency, and as such it must pay its employees on the GS pay scale. Which sucks. I have seen them attempt to hire people at slightly more than half the salary that same person could pull in industry. Needless to say, those people go into industry instead. The best of the NASA centers, in terms of employee competence, seems to be JPL. But they're not really a normal NASA center: JPL employees work for Caltech, not NASA. As a result they get pay that is comparable to industry, and JPL gets employees that know what they're doing.

NASA: Are they slacking?

[jbottero]

There have been consistent stories in the press about a certain slack in attention to detail at NASA of late. And, as an Air Force guy, I wonder how they could design a wing leading edge that can't take a hit from some hard foam, we get bird-strike all the time! Even a C-17 can take a 30 pound goose at 400 knots...

Re:NASA: Are they slacking?

[Anonymous Coward]

The X-43A is an Airforce undertaking, if you look at the dates given this happend rougly in 2001. This is prior (if you were unclear) to the shuttle disaster, but following the mars fhqwgad. You should also understand that we are talking about vehicles that can travel out of space, thus comparing them to your conventional aircrafts/fights is just plain idiocracy.

Re:NASA: Are they slacking?

[CrowScape]

But the wing's structure could take the hit from a piece of hard foam. The problem was the heat tiles are so increadibly fragile that they broke apart, at which point, the leading edge of the wing could no longer survive going Mach 25 in an atmosphere. If you can find a stronger substance that has the same heat properties as the tiles on the shuttle, that's one thing, otherwise, can a C-17's wings handle Mach 25 in an atmosphere?

Re:NASA: Are they slacking?

[Grishnakh]

The ablative heat shielding the old space capsules used to handle Mach 25, and they weren't incredibly fragile.

Re:NASA: Are they slacking?

[Izago909]

I was under the impression that their heat shield was made of some epoxy or resin that had a limited use since it burned away to dissipate heat.

Re:NASA: Are they slacking?

[CrowScape]

True, but I said "same heat properties" as the tiles, and since the ablative shielding boils off at those temps while the tiles don't, they must have different properties there.

Now you can argue that ablative is better, but that wasn't really the point of the shuttle. It was to have something that was cheap and reusable. Granted, NASA failed MISERABLY in this regard, but with that aim you can't really expect the skin to perform like a C-17's.

Re:NASA: Are they slacking?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Now you can argue that ablative is better, but that wasn't really the point of the shuttle. It was to have something that was cheap and reusable. Granted, NASA failed MISERABLY in this regard, but with that aim you can't really expect the skin to perform like a C-17's.

Well, unfortunately the shuttle DOES have to content with birds, foam, bolts, and other debris. The designers of the shuttle just stuck their head in the sand about it.

I'm reminded of working on the Solar Race car team back in college. They would spend a bundle on these reinforced bike tires to decrease the rolling friction of the car, and ignored the fact that we lost more time to tire blowouts (as well as the energy required to start the car moving again) than was saved by not using a properly rated motorcycle tire.

Of course these were the same folks who built a $100,000 composite chassis that weighed 10 pounds to save weight on a car that also had to hold 180 pounds of driver, 300 pounds of batteries, 100 pounds of solar cells...

Re:NASA: Are they slacking?

[Firethorn]

So you have to replace the shield after each mission, so what? The shuttle has to be largely rebuilt anyways after each flight with the tiles inspected/replaced during the process (they loose a bunch each flight). The people pushing for a return to ballistic re-entries (I'm one of them), is that putting stuff into space is so expensive and stressfull that trying to build/use reusable parts is a waste of weight and money (and weight=lots of money). If you have reusable parts, they should be light/sturdy/expensive enough to justify the 'expense' of any extra weight needed to bring them back. The shuttle is not.

Re:NASA: Are they slacking?

[Izago909]

The tiles themselves are not the problem, nor their reuse. If it's cheaper to pull them all and inspect them than it would be to replace the whole thing without question, then go ahead. The Columbia accident wouldn't have been prevented even if the entire underside were virgin tiles. The sheer forces involved slipped the foam between the weak spot, the vertical seams in the tiles. The tiles themselves were a major breakthrough in thermal design. By now everyone has seen the video clip of the person holding a glowing hot chunk of it right out of the furnace. Not to mention, per volume, the modern heat tiles are much lighter than the heat shields of the mercury and Apollo eras. The material itself is not the problem; it is their design and application. The only other such remarkable substance was something I saw years ago. I think the inventor called it starlight or styralight. He demonstrated it capabilities by smearing some over half and egg and then holding a propane torch on it for a few minutes. Afterwards he cracked it open on the unprotected side and removed the perfectly raw contents. NASA, of course, picked up interest in it, but I haven't heard anything since. Maybe when the full potential of the ISS is realized, people will realize that it can be possible to repair damage in space. Would it have been too difficult to dock with the ISS, and then return the crew with the Soyuz capsule? The semi-abandoned shuttle would still be operational, so maneuvering thrusters would have been able to make any necessary corrections. The thing cost a fortune, and did not need to risk reentry. The crew could have found other was back. Mothball the thing and stick it in orbit until people decide to try and fix it. If nobody wants to risk it, leave it in the vacuum of space for our grandchildren to restore and stick in the Smithsonian or National Aeronautical Space Museum. Despite everyone's bitching about it, it was a major and relatively long lived, milestone in manned space flight.

Re:NASA: Are they slacking?

[Firethorn]

Heh, I got to hold a piece. I agree the stuff is neat. I just think that going to the idea of minimizing the weight we try to put up (to the point of going with a lighter ballistic re-entry capsule), would be better than the shuttle. If the tiles work better/cheaper than the albative, then by all means use them.

Re:NASA: Are they slacking?

[jbottero]

This is not so. The foam hit the leading edge. The leading edge, TILE FREE, failed.

Re:NASA: Are they slacking?

[jbottero]

You are missing my point, and no, I'm not unlear.

My point is that it is NOT just a space plane. It travals through regular air space as well. And so, should be designed to take the possibilities of impact that occure at lower altitudes. Please pull your head out of your ass.

well, at least

[the_2nd_coming]

at least we can hold out hope for the future scram jet testing and development.

Damn insightful

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine though, any huge project, no matter how well constructed, basically comes down to a single person decieding or desidgning something (the so called single point failure). Do you think you could be that person?

Damn straight and well said.

Nasa died 1969

[Crashmarik]

Nasa as a forward looking organization died in 69. Ever since then its been a zombie a shadow of its former self. Its been almost continuous decline in the post apollo era. Take a look at the programs that followed.

Skylab vs ISS Alpha
Direct easy and done safely v.s. Pointless

X-15 vs X29, X43 and the other spaceplane projects

The only significant manned space vehicle since the apollo program is the shuttle. While it is one thing for hero's to lose their lives in the conquest of a new frontier, its another to lose life because a congressional district in utah needed make work or nasa's beuracracy wouldn't listen to outsiders.

If there is any hope of man in space, it will come from private entrepeneurs and perhaps other countries.

Re:Nasa died 1969

[m00nun1t]

Agree completely. But look at what happened in the 60's - they had the President in public state "We will put a man on the moon by the end of this decade". They had a *clearly* defined goal to work towards, and were resourced to do it.

What are they working on now? Do they have such a strong, defined, focused goal? Such strong executive leadership? No wonder they are floundering.

Re:Nasa died 1969

[TroyFoley]

I'd like to think that our society would be interested in seeing space explored by science purely for the bettecment of mankind... and then I remember that Columbus was funded by people seeking a profit. And a big one at that.

The fins broke off?!

[Ignorant Aardvark]

Wow, I've heard of ghetto engineering ... but the fins just flat fell off a second into the flight?! C'mon, I expect much better of NASA. Hell, even I can manage to launch a rocket whose fins will stay fully attached until the parachute burns through and the entire assemblage smacks into the ground, sending fin particles everywhere. But that's MANY seconds after launch, not only a few.

Re:The fins broke off?!

[Anonymous Coward]

But I bet your rocket didn't even come close to the speeds of the X43A. Probably didn't even come close to 1x the speed of sound. And even if you weren't an engineer and simply lived in hurricane country, you would know that the wind forces on a surface grow quadratic with linear speed increase.

Additionally, I would not be surprised if at supersonic speeds, the air behavioural model is a lot more complicated than at 'ground speeds' or 'model rocket speeds'... I'm thinking of different wave propagation at supersonic speeds (weird turbulence), heat effects (!), and maybe even charging/discharging effects due to friction...

So, what ghetto engineering? If a race car hits the concrete barrier, you're also not accusing the driver of being drunk, but you assume the crash was a result of the high speed and a result of being on the limit of possibilities... The X43A was that too.

Re:The fins broke off?!

[nyseal]

But....did it reach those speeds in a matter of seconds? Probably not.

The end of NASA.

[Grendel Drago]

NASA has some damn smart people working there. NASA does really nice basic research. NASA sucks ass at applying it.

Look at the various inventions that fell out of the space program as little extras. Look at all the technology that was invented. That's what NASA does well.

Now look at the Shuttle, which didn't meet a single one of its design parameters---it's technically not even reusable, it's salvageable. Look at the criminally high cost of launching mass into LEO. Look at NASA's inability to really deliver on the applied end of things. That's what NASA can't do.

I suggest Kings of the High Frontier as required reading for anyone interested in learning how NASA has failed to deliver on its promise of space access due to its fetishization of research-heavy boondoggles. The book is fiction, but extensively researched. (The discussion on unpressurized spacesuits fell out of an off-the-cuff reference the author made.)

Leave it to the X-Prize competitors, and their successors. The Space Shuttle is at the very limit of complexity that's possible to construct, which is why NASA has been unable to replace it. (Did you know there are literally hundreds of "Criticality One" components in the shuttle, the failure of any one of which could cause the shuttle's destruction?)

Okay, this seems like a rant about the Shuttle. But it's really about NASA, and the way in which they do things. It's not an indictment against the people who work there; the scientists and engineers of NASA are without equal. Their efforts are being squandered. The future does not belong to NASA, and it hasn't since they cancelled Apollo.

--grendel drago

yeah

[twitter]

A pretty picture may be cheap, but it does not always prove correct. Oh well, the next one will be better.

A ridiculous concept from the start

[topher_k]

I worked for one of the companies involved in this program, although not directly on the program itself.

Let's see, we've got a scramjet test aircraft, which will be boosted to hypersonic speeds by a modified Pegasus rocket, which will be dropped from a B-52. So, besides developing the scramjet test aircraft, an interface system between the Pegasus and the X-43A needs to be designed and the whole system tested.

That didn't bother me too much. What really got me was what the point of the program was in the first place. The goal was to test the ability of a scramjet engine to propel an aircraft at hypersonic speeds. The Pegasus booster was supposed to accelerate the test aircraft to hypersonic speeds, then detach, at which point the scramjet would be started and the instrumentation would transmit 10 seconds of data. Besides the limited amount of data, if I recall correctly, the scramjet was not supposed to even maintain the aircraft's speed, which calls into question the value of the technology as a means of propulsion, in my opinion.

If I recall, the contract value was $33 million, and was significantly overrun. Your tax dollars at work (if you're American).

Re:A ridiculous concept from the start

[sllim]

To appreciate the test you have to have a basic understanding of what the scramjet does.

A scramjet seperates the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in the atmosphere and uses the hydrogen molecules as fuel for the engine.
In doing this you have an engine that can go significantly faster, an engine that uses up a fraction of the fuel load of traditional aircraft and an aircraft that expels significantly less harmful waste in the atmosphere then a traditional jet engine.

The downside is that the engine is not physicaly capable of working until it has attained an almost rediculous speed. Something like Mach 3. The damn thing won't even light before that.

So if you have a need for an aircraft that flies faster then mach 3 then this is a goal worth striving for.

NASA (as well as other organizations) have been able to 'light up' the engine in wind tunnel tests. But as of the time this test failed (I think the Australians got it to work a few months later) no one was able to even get an engine like this to lite up outside of the labortory.

What this test was designed to achieve was simply to see if they could get the engine to function at all. They wanted to see if they could get the engine to seperate the hydrogen from the oxygen and to light up the mixture with traditional jet fuel. If you can do that then you move onto the next step.

So this test had no need of anything more then 10 seconds of data.

Re:A ridiculous concept from the start

[Moofie]

See the technology development of the gas turbine engine for many useful parallels.

Scramjets are about the most absurdly complicated things you can imagine, from a fluid dynamics standpoint. Much more data is required to refine their operation. Such data comes from programs like this one.

Now, it may be that NASA and your firm are not being as frugal as they should be, but this is useful and important research, if you think that high-speed air breathing flight is important.

(Me, I say use ballistic rockets, but what do I know?)

Re:A ridiculous concept from the start

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Ask yourself: Why on earth (or in orbit therof) does NASA need an air-breathing engine capible of hypersonic speed?

Think about it. All of the savings in oxidizer are MORE than made up for in atmospheric drag. Why doesn't the concorde still fly? It burns WAY too much fuel to be profitable. If you want to get a rocket above the lower atmosphere use a sub-sonic jet. There are certainly enough off-the-shelf heavy lifters:

• B-52
• Boeing 747
• C-5 Galaxy

And those are just the american designs. The Russians have a few of their own.

Re:A ridiculous concept from the start

[tengwar]

Why doesn't the concorde still fly? It burns WAY too much fuel to be profitable.

There's a Concorde flight twice daily over my house. They stop flying in October, but that's because of the cost of upcoming refits and because Airbus will not maintain them in the future. They appear to be highly profitable at the moment.

Fuel costs just aren't an issue: do the maths. An average load for a transatlantic flight is probaly about 100 passengers, paying about £5000 each for a return journey, i.e £0.25M revenue for one journey. Fuel capacity is 96 tonnes, which would cost about £9000 to fill.

Re:A ridiculous concept from the start

[Anonymous Coward]

I corrected your misuses of the word "then" in three places below. I also pointed out your correct usages in two places. Have you ever seen the word "than" (with the letter 'a' as opposed to the letter 'e') in print before? The word 'than' is a comparative and the word 'then' is a temporal (dealing with time, i.e., sequence of events) and also can be used as a conditional. The second usage is one that Slashdot is intimately familiar with. I see this misuse of the word 'then' quite commonly among computer programmers but hardly anywhere else.

So we can say "Greater thAn" or we can say "If x thEn".

To appreciate the test you have to have a basic understanding of what the scramjet does.

A scramjet seperates the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in the atmosphere and uses the hydrogen molecules as fuel for the engine.
In doing this you have an engine that can go significantly faster, an engine that uses up a fraction of the fuel load of traditional aircraft and an aircraft that expels significantly less harmful waste in the atmosphere thAn a traditional jet engine.

The downside is that the engine is not physicaly capable of working until it has attained an almost rediculous speed. Something like Mach 3. The damn thing won't even light before that.

So if you have a need for an aircraft that flies faster thAn mach 3 thEn this is a goal worth striving for.

NASA (as well as other organizations) have been able to 'light up' the engine in wind tunnel tests. But as of the time this test failed (I think the Australians got it to work a few months later) no one was able to even get an engine like this to lite up outside of the labortory.

What this test was designed to achieve was simply to see if they could get the engine to function at all. They wanted to see if they could get the engine to seperate the hydrogen from the oxygen and to light up the mixture with traditional jet fuel. If you can do that thEn you move onto the next step.

So this test had no need of anything more thAn 10 seconds of data.

Re:A ridiculous concept from the start

[SmilingBoy]

A scramjet seperates the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in the atmosphere and uses the hydrogen molecules as fuel for the engine. In doing this you have an engine that can go significantly faster, an engine that uses up a fraction of the fuel load of traditional aircraft and an aircraft that expels significantly less harmful waste in the atmosphere then a traditional jet engine.

Are you sure? If yes, could you point me to a website where this is described, please?

I've read quite a bit on the scramjet and never did I see a description that it uses hydrogen molecules from the athmosphere. Does that mean it uses water vapor?

I thought that it takes its own fuel and uses oxygen from the atmosphere (as opposed to rockets, which have to take both the fuel and the oxygen with them).

What makes the scramjet special is that air inside the engine flows at supersonic speeds. Ramjets, while similar in principle, slow down the air so that it flows at a subsonic speed within the engine. However, this limits their speed to a maximum of around Mach 4 (5, 6?) Scramjets can go much, much faster (in theory).

Please correct me if I am wrong.

Re:A ridiculous concept from the start

[sllim]

I know that it does use its own fuel, and I am pretty certain it uses normal jet fuel.
You might be right that it is burning oxygen instead of hydrogen.

Was late when I wrote it.

As far as looking for a website,
Smileyboy, God made google just for you.
Go to town.

Re:A ridiculous concept from the start

[Avian visitor]

Can you please explain how can you get free energy by first separating water molecules and then recombining them? Ever heard of thermodynamics?

At least that is how I understand your post. There is no other source of hydrogen in the atmosphere except for water vapor.

And this got modded +5 informative??

Re:A ridiculous concept from the start

[Idarubicin]

To appreciate the test you have to have a basic understanding of what the scramjet does.

I agree completely. So why do you then tell us the following? You have been misled, my friend.

A scramjet seperates the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in the atmosphere and uses the hydrogen molecules as fuel for the engine. In doing this you have an engine that can go significantly faster, an engine that uses up a fraction of the fuel load of traditional aircraft and an aircraft that expels significantly less harmful waste in the atmosphere then a traditional jet engine.

Quick primer on scramjets, from the top:

In a typical jet engine (see here, for example) air enters through an intake at the front, and passes through several fan stages to compress (and heat) the incoming air. Squirt fuel into this hot air, and the rapid combustion generates exhaust at high temperature and pressure. This high pressure exhaust propels the jet (and drives a turbine which turns the fans in the compressor).

The downside of this design is that it is mechanically complex--those compression stages have large, finely-machined, rapidly-moving parts which are subject to wear, tear, and accidental failure; they also add a significant amount of weight to the engine.

Enter the ramjet. (See also cutaway figure.) Instead of using fans to compress incoming air, a ramjet uses a specially shaped inlet. Air enters the jet inlet at high speed, and then is forced through a narrow aperture. The result is compression without fans. Unfortunately, the ramjet will only work when the jet is travelling at significant speed--there isn't going to be any air coming into the engine if the aircraft isn't moving.

A scramjet is a supersonic combustion ramjet. In a plain vanilla ramjet, the incoming air is slowed while it is compressed to the point where it is travelling slower than sound. Combustion takes place in air that is still moving quite quickly, but not supersonically. Although easier to manage from an engineering standpoint, requiring subsonic combustion places an upper limit on the speed of a conventional ramjet.

The scramjet functions in a similar manner--incoming air is compressed and heated through a properly shaped inlet, then fuel is injected, and the combustion products propel the jet. The defining difference is that combustion takes place in a supersonic airflow; in practice, this dictates certain changes to the basic ramjet design. Again, the scramjet requires significant airspeed before it can be started.

Quite correctly, you note that the fuel for these beasts is often hydrogen, though in principle nearly any air-combustible liquid or gas could be used. The fuel must be supplied, however--a scramjet cannot extract hydrogen from ambient water vapour. The hydrogen scramjet is inherently no cleaner burning than any other air-breathing hydrogen engine. Given its high operating temperature, I would be quite surprised if it didn't generate significant nitrogen oxides in operation.

Re:A ridiculous concept from the start

[Moofie]

Fuel is cheap. Maintenance costs the world, and the Concorde is the most expensive-to-operate airliner in the world. So far as I know, it has NEVER shown a profit, so I take your contention with a large grain of salt.

I'd love to see a citation if you happen to have one. I'd like to be proven wrong! I think it's a great aircraft.

Re:A ridiculous concept from the start

[Moofie]

I'm going to have to see if I can figure out what the fuel savings for a rocket look like vs. launch altitude. I might be able to make Excel do my homework for me.

Apparently, Burt Rutan thinks it's a great idea, and he's way smarter than I am. I've just never understood, from a potential energy perspective, how getting a measly 70,000 feet up is going to save you a lot of gas.

My off-the-cuff conclusion is that for a sub-orbital shot, the savings are large, but for an orbital insertion, not so much, simply because for an orbital insertion you need huge huge huge amounts of kinetic energy. (and mv^2 is a bitch)

Re:A ridiculous concept from the start

[ikkus]

I would like to respectfully disagree with your pessimism about both management and technology of this project. First a few basics. As has been noted by others, a scramjet refers to supersonic combustion ramjet engine. The air is compressed by the inlet to a ratio suitible for combustion. The air is then mixed with fuel (in the case of the X-43A: hydrogen) and then thrust is generated by the expansion of the gas as it exits the engine. The key to this is that at all times the gas flow remains supersonic so that higher speeds are possible. The technology is valid and other tests have shown that it is within reach. An australian university recently completed flight testing HyShot, which managed to demonstrate supersonic combustion. Also Pratt & Whitney recently completed wind tunnel testing on a hydrocarbon fueled, flight weight scramjet engine. Both of these projects showed significant positive thrust. On the management side I would like to say that I have a more positive view of this project than most people. Although NASA clearly has its problems, I believe that it is undertaking this in the correct way. The way I understand this is that NASA is orchestrating the project on a high level and running the flight tests, but contracting the engineering work out to companies like Microcraft(X-43A), and the RBC^3 consortium. This encourages competition, while melding the results to speed advancements. This sort of Government facilitated interaction between companies has worked very well for us in the past. See the development of proximity fuses for AAA and radar.

Re:A ridiculous concept from the start

[tengwar]

Fuel is cheap. Maintenance costs the world, and the Concorde is the most expensive-to-operate airliner in the world.

Parent was referring to fuel costs as reason for axing Concorde. Maintenance is ususually expensive

So far as I know, it has NEVER shown a profit, so I take your contention with a large grain of salt. I'd love to see a citation if you happen to have one. I'd like to be proven wrong! I think it's a great aircraft.

There are a few third parties references to BAsaying that the service had been profitable (e.g. here and here), but I can't find an authoritative reference for you. Old copies of the company annual report stated this, but I can only find the current report online.

In any case, "profit" here means in the accounting sense of making a profit during one year, not lifetime profit including development costs. Frankly, I don't care: we could afford it and it was worth doing.

Re:A ridiculous concept from the start

[topher_k]

At the start of the project (which is, unfortunately, where I got most of my information) the intended fuel was sylene. I remember the design team being concerned about this because of difficulties posed by the corrosive properites of the fuel.

The concept of a scramjet is, despite what I wrote earlier, really elegant. The launch vehicle possibilities for a design incorporating a scramjet as a mid-to-high level boost stage are intriguing. Viewing things from the inside on the X-43 program, however, leads me to believe that the Frankenstein's monster of a testbed they created was due mainly to political, rather than engineering, considerations. I'm fairly certain that it isn't entirely coincidental that the prime contractor (Microcraft) and one subcontractor were located in VP Gore's home state.

Re:A ridiculous concept from the start

[EvilTwinSkippy]

What makes the math work is:

• that the atmosphere is a hell of a lot thinner at 70,000 feet.
• Rocket motors are REALLY innefficient at low speed.
• Air travels differently around a craft traveling at supersonic speed. If you can start the craft off at nearly the speed of sound you can optimize the design better by ignoring the sub-sonic properties.

If you look at a graph showing mass, velocity, and altitude of the Saturn V, you see that half the fuel in the first stage got the vehicle up to 3000 feet at 500m/s. Granted, you are replacing that mass with more mass in aircraft (not to mention the aircraft's fuel). At least the aircraft doesn't need to carry oxidizer, which is pretty heavy.

Getting back to the spacecraft, the less weight spent getting it of the ground means more weight for payload, fuel, etc.

Re:A ridiculous concept from the start

[Moofie]

That is excellent data. Thanks for the link. : )

Now, re: the aerodynamics, your big drag issues happen as you go from .9 to 1.2 Mach, and none of the mothership scenarios I've seen talk about a supersonic launch (which would be pretty dangerous anyhow), so I'm not sure I am totally convinced that air flow issues are going to be a great issue.

Certainly, you're right, that the mass ratio of the rocket improves if you can decrease the distance traveled, but you still (at least for orbital flight) have to get going silly fast, and there's really no way around it.

Anyhow, I appreciate the data. I'm going to go play with it for a while.

NASA killing any Shuttle competitor

[SysKoll]

Captain Loser, you have to remember that NASA is a bureaucratic organization. The purpose of a bureaucratic organization is to extract money from the taxpayers to hire more bureaucrats.

It's the reason why NASA deceived Congress and underestimated the cost and reliability of the Shuttle. Not a concious conspiracy, just your regular bureaucratic tendency.

Nowadays, the Shuttle is keeping tens of thousands of plushy jobs at NASA. Many of them aren't paper pushers, there are really good engineers working on this program. However, the real top dogs are the bureaucrats. And they know that the Shuttle should be replaced by something that does not require an army to operate, but they'd be out of a job.

Each time the crazy engineers rock the boat and create a potential cheaper competitor for the Shuttle, it magically gets killed. Look at the X-33. Look at the DC-X: This demonstrator was taking off and landing on its jet, vertically. It was perfectly working when it was given to NASA, and somehow, NASA killed it on its first NASA flight. And somehow, the budget to build a new DC-X was consumed by, why, the Shuttle of course. So this perfectly good project was dropped.

See how it works? Tons of examples can be found in the history of the various X-projects that got mysteriously mismanaged and killed since the Shuttle program started.

NASA outlived its utility and became the worst enemy of cheap space access.

You want space access? You want to get to Mars before the Chinese? Keep the JPL and the researchers, get rid of the rest of NASA.

-- SysKoll

Re:NASA killing any Shuttle competitor

[Captain_Loser]

Then bring on the private companies..

Re:NASA killing any Shuttle competitor

[Homology]

Then bring on the private companies..

It was a private company that made the part that failed in Challenger booster. Even more so, one of the engineers at that company warned the managment of possible failure under certain conditions, and was ignored. The rest is history.

Re:NASA killing any Shuttle competitor

[Grishnakh]

There's no law keeping private companies from building spacecraft.

But private companies aren't going to do that, because it takes too much money, and won't realize a profit within a year. There was a time when companies would make long-term investments in a program, knowing it'd be many years before they'd earn it back, but those days are long gone. Now, if you can't make a quick buck at it, there's no reason to do it.

Re:NASA killing any Shuttle competitor

[cubicledrone]

Now, if you can't make a quick buck at it, there's no reason to do it.


Thus the abject fuckitude of just about everything worthwhile in society.

Plus 5

Re:NASA killing any Shuttle competitor

[Izago909]

In all fairness, most of the shuttle and many other NASA projects are built by private contractors. If I recall, with the contractors and Challenger, NASA officials were made aware of the risks in advance and decided to go ahead. That was a human error, plain and simple. It's not like anyone got off free either, the one person it came down to probably spent the longest time kicking his own ass over it. Being human, we will mess up. I don't care too deeply, or I would try to compare the amount of money they spend, to the number of accidents, with those of other engineering projects. The only difference is, when dealing with the stresses and environments of space travel, the tolerance for faults is much lower than terrestrial projects. The majority of people are also indifferent to space travel these days. Unless it's capable of making headlines, no one really notices.

Re:NASA killing any Shuttle competitor

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Last time I checked NASA used about 6-7 billions for manned space flights each year. I wondere how much was the budget for X-43A? 1-2% of that amount?

Re:NASA killing any Shuttle competitor

[cmacb]

The fact that a private company was involved does not alter the accuracy of what SysKoll said. What a company will do when it is acting as a contractor to the government, or as a sub sub sub contractor to another company bares no resemblance to how it would handle a situation for an internally developed product.

The contracting company has to develop what looks like a one-on-one defense when dealing with its government counterparts. Each government person is trying to do their best, impress their own management etc, and in so doing has a small army of contractor individuals at their disposal.

While there are rules in place to keep mid-level managers within the government from abusing their influence over contractors, I've never seen these safeguards applied without the whistle blowing company losing business in the process. Contractor personnel who can't tolerate taking orders from their underlings in the government either leave in frustration or transform themselves into sycophants who hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil.

Thats why when things go wrong and there is an investigation they barely have to scratch the surface before getting a flood of revelations. Knowing something is wrong with the way things are being done is one thing. Being the person to bring this up in a meeting with your government contacts can be career suicide.

Re:NASA killing any Shuttle competitor

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Yeah!

I want to rude into space on the lowest bid or better, on onr of Dick Cheney's buddies!

Re:NASA killing any Shuttle competitor

[Anonymous Coward]

Bull shit. Today's standard of technology at JPL is appalling if not disasterous. Remember about a couple of Mars explorers, IR satellite WIRE, and "oopsie" 20G shakedown on HESSI satellite?

I never understand why JPL can even be involved on LISA program as a lead. That's like a disaster waiting to happen.

Man, am I a troll today.

Re:NASA killing any Shuttle competitor

[Bawko]

Moderators....
Please mod this guy up to +10 Insiteful - this is the BEST post I have read on slashdot all month...
Just a humble request from a user with bad karma who knows a great post when he sees one....
Best regards!

Re:NASA killing any Shuttle competitor

[ch-chuck]

NASA is a bureaucratic organization.

We used to have a saying at the contractor I once worked for: "The bureaucracy is expanding to fulfill the needs of an ever expanding bureaucracy".

While applying for a 'homeland security' job recently the same errie feeling came back: "Hey, we got tons of money! Let's all shuffle papers and look busy and we can ride this gravy train thru to a fat retirement!"

Re:NASA killing any Shuttle competitor

[GooberToo]

Normally I'm not in a hurry to jump onto the conspiracy bandwagon, but with stuff like this, "determined to be an unconnected helium pressurant line that supplied hydraulic pressure to extend the landing strut", it's a no brainer to think something funny is going on.

Come on, truckers can connect their pressure lines. So can mechanics. They want us to believe that Nasa engineers and mechanics, on a one of a kind vehicle, can't do the same. Shesh! How odd is it that there isn't a check item AND a switch detecting if there is proper pressure to the landing gear. Heck, planes from the 1940's had these and Nasa can't afford a $20-dollar switch for something that's vital? This stinks to high heaven.

Give the parent a mega-boost of +20 insightful.

Re:NASA killing any Shuttle competitor

[f97tosc]

There was a time when companies would make long-term investments in a program, knowing it'd be many years before they'd earn it back, but those days are long gone

Counter-examples: X-Box, CPU devlopment, pharmacy research, movie production.

The reason that private companies won't build a space shuttle is that they haven't been contracted to do so. Of course they could try to build one anyway and sell it afterwards but that is extremely risky (as opposed to just delayed payments).

Tor

Re:NASA killing any Shuttle competitor

[Centurion509]

Captain Loser, you have to remember that NASA is a bureaucratic organization. The purpose of a bureaucratic organization is to extract money from the taxpayers to hire more bureaucrats... And they know that the Shuttle should be replaced by something that does not require an army to operate, but they'd be out of a job.

SysKoll, do you actually know any NASA bureaucrats? Well, my father is one of them. And ever since the Columbia accident he's been working 70-hour workweeks (with no overtime pay, I think). And every day he talks to me about all the discussions at work he's having about how to phase out the shuttle. And all of the other "bureaucrats" he works with are hard-working, honest folks who are neither conspirators nor thieves of taxpayer money.

I'm sorry if this seems a little harsh, but I am really FED UP with people who bash NASA just to bash NASA.

P.S. In response to your "Each time the crazy engineers rock the boat and create a potential cheaper competitor for the Shuttle, it magically gets killed" I would point out that none of NASA's X-vehicles were competitors for the shuttle. They were technology demonstrators. I agree that NASA mismanaged them, but if they had flown, we would be no closer to a shuttle replacement.

P.P.S. An by the way, there is hope for the future of private space flight, which I think is our only hope for CATS. It's called the X-Prize (www.xprize.org); I think you would enjoy learning about it.

Re:NASA killing any Shuttle competitor

[Yanray]

Actually, faulting NASA over the Chinese military over being a bureaucratic organization is rather silly. The Chinese have as much or more bureaucratic nonsense then the US government mostly due to lower level coruption and extensive regulation regarding the exchange and communication of information.

Think before typing.

Re:NASA killing any Shuttle competitor

[SysKoll]

Thanks for answering. Nobody would contest that the Chinese are quite a staggering bureaucracy. However, their goal is reportedly to send a manned mission to Mars. China isn't a low-tech country anymore so it shouldn't be scoffed at. Therefore, if NASA still wants to tackle such high-prestige missions, it better start planning now. Read every word before you post and don't assume.

Re:NASA killing any Shuttle competitor

[Anonymous Coward]

> I am really FED UP with people who bash NASA just to bash NASA.

And I'm really fed up with NASA. It doesn't matter how many good people work there. What matters is that whenever I get my hopes up for cheaper access to space, the hopes die. And NASA is always directly or indirectly responsible for the death. For instance, NASA creates an investment climate whereby private industry can't get funding.

The problem isn't your father. It isn't any one person. But the problem is consistent and long-lived, and it's time to fix the problem, by getting NASA out of the manned vehicle business.

>there is hope for the future of private space flight, which I think is our only hope for CATS. It's called the X-Prize

There isn't anywhere near enough money in the X-Prize pot. But there would be if we took the Space Shuttle budget and the Space Station budget, and just put that cash behind a whole series of X-Prizes.Which is definitely what I recommend.

Ugh!

[LadyAshnod]

Wham, what a waste? I think the

• Cheaper

is one helluva factor for it! *shrugs*

Re:Ugh!

[iosmart]

hmm, so by this we'd have to agree that cheap ideas like linux shouldn't even be bothered with - we should skip them all and go to the big expensive stuff.

Re:Ugh!

[LadyAshnod]

Open Source Rules, it does not mean that it is cheaper in money, then it is a cheap OS. For me, it is a great OS because the work dedicated on it, is more worth that Bill Gates crappy Exxpee.

However, in NASA, they might have gone with the cheaper options but undermining quality.Chances are, there are a lot of factors overlook, not just the cheaper options. It is okay with slice bread on sale, but not multi million dollar investments.

Just my thought!

Computation Fluid Dynamics not accurate?

[truthhurts1]

Current CFD software maybe just don't cut it at those speeds or not enough CPU power.

don't give up.

Why not use old X plane to study hypersonic speeds

[truthhurts1]

Old and reliable rocket/NO2 black X plane. Bring it out of retirement.

Re: 30 LBS goose

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have to thaw the goose first?

faster better cheaper?

[ArchieBunker]

What you mean linux clusters? Google finds it cheaper to replace an entire node instead of taking the time to troubleshoot. Its a throw away society now. Everyone wants things fast and cheap, unfortunately quality doesn't fit with those options.

Mir

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember the Mir? What an amazing success for mankind. It just kept right on working. Even whenever there was anykind of problem that was repaired in space, the American media talked about how it was an aging station and about the "cash-strapped Russian space agency". What comes around goes around I guess. The cash-strapped American space agency now has no manned space flight capability. Russia is the only country on Earth with that ability. The shuttle fleet is too old and if they ever attempt to fly those again they can expect similar results as their last attempt.

Re:Mir

[Anonymous Coward]

remeber what they did to SkyLab. "We don;t need this outdated space station. We're going to build something bigger and better." Yep the beauracrats definitely wanted it down and then they godd ask congress for lots more money for a replacement. I think this moment defined when NASA went down hill, or at least started to rot from the inside. And for all effective purposes it worked from their point of view.

Re:Another Bloody Techincal Story

[CrowScape]

What about astrology, the most rediculious of the sciences!

Astrology ain't a science bub, no more than palm reading. Next you'll be telling me John Edwards is a scientist.

But knowitall engineers use trensastors with inferious sound quality just to save a few bucks

And musicians will actually buy them! And a good hunk of the population will love to listen to them. There are three stations on XM radio pretty much devoted to sound coming from transitors. Moby's pretty big but where would he be without the transitor? Now, you may not like him but, as you said, you cannot apply objective reasoning to something that is intrinsicly subjective.

It is a lot of work, but the upshot is improved grammer and spelling skills that are lacking in the technical.

You deserve a +2 Funny for this remark in a post that has some of the worst spelling I have ever seen. I think you should demand your money back if you're being serious.

Re:Hill-arious

[LadyAshnod]

Man, its good to laugh out loud at 1 am when everyone is sleeping in the house.

Thanks!

Re:Oh No!

[shaggie]

errrrrr. shouldn't it be Yoda instead of Yota?

Re:Oh No!

[LadyAshnod]

I think it was intentionally written Yota instead of Yoda. aka Mickey version.

Re:Huh?

[iosmart]

a six-pack? how in the hell does someone get so drunk they pass out from a six-pack?? i been drinkin the wrong beer then!! anyhow, i think we've drifted far far away from the topic...

Huh to you too

[gotr00t]

Firstly, what does Linux have to do with an experimental aircraft?

Secondly, not all "Linux people" are loners who never get laid.

Re:Huh to you too

[eddy]

"Secondly, not all "Linux people" are loners who never get laid."

True. Most of us are, but not all, I'll grant you that.

Re:Huh to you too

[msfento]

Well, they both have an 'x'....

This is getting ridiculous.

[fruity1983]

Something has to be done about NASA. They are clearly far too inadequate to do their job properly.

They ignored their engineers in '86. Astronauts died.

They cant convert units, expensive Mars rovers are lost.

They didnt follow proper safety procedures this year, astronauts died.

They lose prototype planes because they decide not to test added elements. They lose this, and that, and lose billions of dollars doing it.

I dunno about all you other readers, but it seems to me that NASA needs some *serious* restructuring.

This better, faster, cheaper thing has turned out to be broken, slow, and expensive. It's bad enough we lose prototype planes worth billions to their errors, let alone the 14 astronauts sacrificed in the name of saving costs to keep a complex bureaucracy well paid.

Fuck NASA. We need something new.

Re:This is getting ridiculous.

[glwtta]

Well as far as sweeping, unfounded generalizations go, that's pretty well done. Have you considered that they put people in space? Like, in ships that escape earth's gravitation going several dozen times the speed of sound? With two significant accidents in 20-odd years. Seriously, if you can only come up with 4 examples since '86, I'd love to see someone with a better track record.

And I don't really see how you lose anything here, prototype or not; you'd have to contribute something to this before you can lose it (and sorry, tax money doesn't count - it stops being your money when the government takes it, and it's not like you have any real say over where it goes - that's kinda the point)

Re:This is getting ridiculous.

[golgotha007]

wow, where do you get your 'facts'?

They ignored their engineers in '86. Astronauts died.
NASA was unaware of the booster issues with the freezing weather. the ones that didn't listen were the top brass at the contracted company that didn't listen to their own engineers.

They cant convert units, expensive Mars rovers are lost.
you mean the Mars Climate Oribter that was lost due to one team using miles and the other using kilmometers? um, that was the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, not NASA.

14 astronauts sacrificed ??

wow, you are seriously deluded.

Re:This is getting ridiculous.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you considered that they put people in space?

Given that we've been putting people in low-earth orbit for forty years, I can't say I'm overly impressed that they're still doing it now. If they were putting people on Mars, I'd be impressed. Right now they can't even put people on the Moon, and we did that in 1969.

Your second paragraph was spoken like a true serf.

Re:This is getting ridiculous.

[Cyno]

Maybe the engineers could do their job better if they didn't have to worry about getting laid off, the wars our administration will be fighting for the next 4 years, Nasa's management breathing down their backs, trying to push the blame onto someone else, etc.

All these problems link to capitalism. But nobody will admit it, will they?

I will say it once again. Create the proper environment for people to work in and they will do a good job. That environment has nothing to do with money and a lot to do with the rhetoric and media they are submerged in as well as the corporate office structure. Nasa, I suspect, is extremely rigid. Perhaps a casual, relaxed work environment will help people think better about the critical issues that kill us every day.

Re:This is getting ridiculous.

[joebeone]

I have an article coming out in the November 2003 issue of Space Policy (elsevier) that addresses NASA's restructuring... send me an email if you want to see it when it gets published (I'm under embargo until then... especially considering the CAIB report will come out two months earlier).

Re:This is getting ridiculous.

[fruity1983]

NASA was unaware of the booster issues with the freezing weather. the ones that didn't listen were the top brass at the contracted company that didn't listen to their own engineers

No, the ones that didn't listen to the NASA engineers were NASA officials in charge of giving the go ahead for the launch.

See this page.

Quote from page:

On January 27, 1986, the day before the flight of STS 51-L, the Florida overnight low temperature was predicted to be about 18 Fahrenheit. Because Roger Boisjoly and the other engineers involved with the seal design believed that low temperatures increased the risk of seal failure, they strongly recommended against launching. Morton Thiokol management, mostly engineers, agreed with the recommendation and conveyed this message to NASA in a teleconference.

...

Although no one would ever admit political pressure, the decision to launch Challenger was made against the backdrop of many delays, as well as the highly publicized "Teacher in Space" program, and was scheduled for the morning of President Reagan's State of the Union address. It was in this atmosphere that Jerald Mason, Senior Vice-President of the Morton Thiokol Wasatch Operations made the now famous, "take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat," statement to Robert Lund, Vice President of Engineering, and Morton Thiokol reversed their decision and advised NASA to launch.

Yes, you are totally right. How dare I be so politically incorrect. I apologize.

you mean the Mars Climate Oribter that was lost due to one team using miles and the other using kilmometers? um, that was the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, not NASA.

JPL is a subsidiary of NASA.

wow, you are seriously deluded.

Ad hominem. Try using a real argument.

Re:This is getting ridiculous.

[nyseal]

I don't disagree with you, however we need to keep in mind that projects like the space shuttle (although outdated) are still just that: projects. They represent an on-going 'test station' for data and information which never really end. I, personally, would take that chance just to have the opportunity to be in space but I don't think they'd take me because of my current health status; too bad....I'd make an excellent guinea pig. Either way, people die in projects like these and the people who endeavor to reach these goals know the risks.

Re:This is getting ridiculous.

[fruity1983]

The thing is that all these things are preventable - and not just in hindsight.

Re:This is getting ridiculous.

[nyseal]

lol...The phrase: "Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it..." (not the actual quote I'm sure) just sprang to mind after reading your response. Preventable and hindsight SHOULD walk hand-in-hand but often don't; not in the context of technology, progress or even human nature. COULD this have been prevented? Probably; but it was not perceived as a life threatening issue after decades of launches. It is now. My point being that even after hundreds of launches, we just learned something new: the launch itself can be detrimental after successfully orbiting the planet. All in all, I don't disagree but I still stick to my original statement. This is still just an ongoing project in which we learn something new from each and every launch.

Not all is as it Seems

[Anonymous Coward]

Based upon my experience at Goddard, I will say that most of the people at NASA are honest, upstanding individuals intent on doing the best job they can.

Unfortunately, I don't think the management culture they inhabit works the same way. Yes, there are honest people in management. Too often, though, they must fight against pressures forcing dishonesty and abuse.

Some people are quitting the field because of dishonesty and abuse. Donna Shirley, the woman who led the team that designed and built the successful Mars rover of 1997, has quit, citing the "lack of honesty and openness" in the field.

When I was at Goddard, some high level managers in my company were caught defrauding the government out of millions of dollars. As a part of being allowed to continue doing business with the government, the company signed an agreement that forced all employees to receive annual "ethics" training. The training was a joke, emphasizing things like not using government e-mail for personal use. Teaching employees how to recognize major corruption on the part of mid and high level executives? Why, we "worker bees" need not worry our pretty little heads about that sort of thing...

Personally, I think the kind of dishonesty reported in these articles will persist until NASA embraces honesty, openness and democracy in its culture.

Re:Not all is as it Seems

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to call some lab at Goddard as a "retirement" home. Some management guys (used to be engineers and what not) just came in early morning, drank coffee, and then went home around 5pm. Practically I know nothing being accomplished by these guys, other than draining the resources.

I know some of these guys accomplished a lot in 70s and 80s. But come'on! Among their generations, there ARE a few old guys who still work very actively in the field (and more importantly -- train -- the younger guys like me). NASA management should face the reality and cut off these inactive GSes, or else there ain't gonna be much done in that place.

Yeah I am one of the guys who fed up w/ the system and left for greener pasture. But I may be forced back there though...(hence the AC)...

Re: YOUR NAME FITS...

[Simkin1]

Frankly... you are just too stupid to respond too... read my other comments and maybe you'll get a clue.

Call on the Kiwis!

[Gurezaemon]

NASA should call on (and pay lots of money to) the inimitable Bruce Simpson.

Re:Huh?

[Gurezaemon]

Because most of the world (i.e. outside the US) has beer that actually has significant alcohol in it. In the region of 5-13%.

Re:Why not use old X plane to study hypersonic spe

[Moofie]

Because getting an airplane to fly at hypersonic speeds is not absurdly difficult.

Figuring out how to light a fire that stays lit in a high-speed air flow...THAT is hard. Zippos are not windproof at 4000 mph.

The purpose of this vehicle was to test hypersonic COMBUSTION, not hypersonic flight.

Spaceballs

[Anonymous Coward]

Colonel Sandurz: Prepare ship for light speed.
Dark Helmet: No, no, no, light speed is too slow.
Colonel Sandurz: Light speed, too slow?
Dark Helmet: Yes, we're gonna have to go right to ludicrous speed.

Re:Spaceballs

[SpacePunk]

Of course, those engines are powered by Slashdot postings!

Knock it off people... its really angering....

[Simkin1]

First off... this is my own opinion only, and does not reflect the attitude or thoughts of my employer.... with that said:
I'm not sure whether to be pleased that someone actually took the time to locate a report that's been out for almost three months, or irritated that they (space.com) are completely misleading the public as to the cause and who's to blame for the defect (or that somehow they're privy to information that's available to everyone) which resulted in NASA having to terminate the Launch and Research Vehicle (X43A). On top of that, it's rediculous to post it to a forum like this. Reality check folks... This is a proven technology (hypersonic ram/scramjet engines) which has a large application base, and WILL provide faster, cheaper and cleaner access to space. I appreciate (not really) the folks that seem to get off on putting down NASA's achievments, or summing the work NASA does up to the moon landing (...and depending on who you listen to apparently we made that up too... -- that's sarcasm in case you didn't pick up on it.) If anyone of you has a moment to actually read the MIB report... and more over has the intellectual capacity to understand it (Lord knows no one's displayed that capability here, or at space.com), then you should understand where blame should be placed. The main portion of NASA's work was with the X-43A VEHICLE, and the subcontractor ORBITAL was supposed to provide a delivery system which would get NASA's RESEARCH VEHICLE to the test range. For those of you who can't quite put it all together, ...come on... you can do it... put 1 and 1 together... NASA straps their research vehicle to the nose of Orbitals delivery system -- the launch vehicle... OH, is the light dawning yet?... what does the report indicate is the problem? was it the hypersonic vehicle that failed?? NO MORONS, it DOESN'T say that... the VEHICLE never got to the test range!! NASA never got to TEST the friggin vehicle in the first place.

...but like always... you never hear about NASA's THOUSANDS of achievements... I'm willing to bet that most of you can't name a single thing that NASA has contributed to the US technological community...why is that? maybe it's because those achievements never get air time. Achievements aren't juicy enough for the media... Media gets more attention when it focus's on NASA's failures... When was the last time you heard a news organization extolling the virtues of NASA?
All this criticism of NASA as "incapable", or "no longer with it"... to you folks I say PISS OFF... you have no clue what you're talking about. The X-43 folks are anything but sloppy at the research they do; the managment is outstanding, and the technical expertise is the best in the world.
To folks that think that NASA is just a big bureaucracy; you're absolutely right. They are, just like any other organization that does bleeding edge research and provides outstanding technical work to the US government. Any organization that does the kind of experimental research that NASA does (look around, there aren't any) has to have a legitimate infrastructure in place to handle the costs and managment structure that large experiments have. There is NO way around this, and anyone who thinks there is, is a fool.

To those of you who doubt that the X-43A vehicle will fly... PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT HAPPENS IN THE NEWS IN OCTOBER!

RTFM

[stewwy]

Remind's me of the allegedly true story going the rounds BAE systems in the UK developed a new test rig for testing plane windsceens , a chicken was fired at high velocity at the screen by a giant compressed air gun An american company involved in high speed train developement asked if they could use the design, three weeks later a frantic Email arrived at BAE saying the chicken went through the screen, through the bulkhead and embedded itself in the rear wall of the carriage, what should they do to improve their windsceen, the guy at BAE sent a one line email to them 'DEFOST THE CHICKEN' I tend to think its true as something similar happened to me, I was involved in developing rat poisons, new novel chemicals/drugs are often sent off for evaluation as anti-cancer drugs or in this case to combat strokes (it was an anti-coagulent) the center replied that it was not effective as all the rats died at their standard testing dose DOH RTFM

Re:RTFM

[tengwar]

It's a very old urban legend. As far as I can tell, the chickecn cannon was developed in the UK to test the De Havilland Comet.

Re:RTFM

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG. Thank you for posting this. I was literally rolling on the floor laughing. :D

Yeah, but how much are you willing to pay?

[WoTG]

Certainly I'd agree that Apollo was a better run and much more successful project, but didn't the moon race consume something in the neighbourhood of 10% of the US GDP at the time?

To attempt to put that in perspective, if you think that the war on Iraq was/is expensive, try multiplying it by 10* to get an idea of how much Apollo cost.

What could people really expect? Once the moon race was over, there really was no place for NASA spending to go but down. Less money = Less resource = Less cool stuff that you can pull off.

* Being Canadian, I have excused myself from looking up completely accurate figures. My back of an envelope calculations actually give me closer to 1000 times more expensive (relative to GDP), but that seems rather high... Someone who knows better please feel free to correct me.

Re:Yeah, but how much are you willing to pay?

[karstux]

Apollo wasn't as expensive as you might think. According to this NASA page, total funding for the Apollo program was less than 20 billion dollars (which would equal about 100 billion of today's dollars).

In contrast to that, last year's US GDP was about USD 10 trillion. It's just a matter of will - the state's administration doesn't really have an interest in space exploration.

Re:Yeah, but how much are you willing to pay?

[SmilingBoy]

You are way off.

The total cost of the Apollo program was $19.4b.

This is the total program cost starting from 1965 (or was it 1964?) to 1972. Let's assume that the year 1969 was the year with the highest spending, say one quarter of the total sum, ie $4.9b.

The nominal GDP of the USA in the year 1969 was 3928.7b.

Therefore, at its peak, Apollo consumed approximately 0.12% of the GDP of the US.

I think you might be referring to the nuclear program during and after that World War II. That was expensive! (I've got no numbers though)

Damn Anti-Americans

[Anonymous Coward]

Well if those darn commie-sympathizers at NASA weren't trying to convince us into switching into that berlin wall metric bullshit, maybe none of this would happen. Thank the lord for guiding John Ashcroft in his quest to root out evil.

The day I buy my gas in leeters is the day they pry my gun from my cold dead hands.

Heh! Modded-Down to -1, Flamebait!

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a surprise! Must be that patented script that Michael Sims' paid somebody to write (since, let's face it, he knows NOTHING about computers...) to find comments such as yours! :-)

Michael, you're slime. And not just regular slime. No, you're like the kind of slime which embarrasses the stuff which settles at the bottom of septic tanks. You give slime a bad name.

And anybody who is aware of his utterly despicable behavior in relation to the Censorware project yet continues to permit him to pollute /. with his inanities is as slimy as he is.

Oh, guess what? I bet this post will be modded-down too.

Re:Heh! Modded-Down to -1, Flamebait!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a sucker's bet!!!!!!

Much of the problem stems from the complexity of t

[fmaxwell]

As someone who has worked on satellite software development and testing, I can tell you that system complexity is one of the biggest enemies of the 'Faster, Better, Cheaper' philosophy. As the complexity of a spacecraft increases, so does the testing. If you put 10,000 telemetry points into the downlink, then you have to test all 10,000 of them in such a way as to assure that they are fully functional. The same holds true for mechanical complexity and system interaction. When a project is behind schedule and over budget, one of the first things looked at for chopping is the testing.

This is not news to software engineers, but it seems to be something that the general public fails to grasp. NASA needs to revert to the slower, more reliable, more expensive philosophy that brought so much success throughout the sixties and seventies. We need to accept that space exploration is complex and expensive and attempts to shortcut will just result in horrible failures and even the loss of life. Diverting a little money from Bush's "War Against Imaginary Weapons" to NASA would be a good start.

Re:Racism against whites

[Bitter Old Man]

Damn it, Leroy! That JB Weld wuz supposed ta hold dem muthafuckin fins on tight....lemme check dat mufuckin tube. You dum ass! It says dat it holds in temperatures up ta 200 degrees F not 2000! Get dat antenna out yo' ass! Bizzatch!

Re:Oh No!

[unixbugs]

all semblances to real people are purley coincedental.

Re:Oh No!

[unixbugs]

ok, so the dialogue was almost "offtopic", if you have brain density similar to that of petrified oak. whoever got pissed at it must not have understood the first half... geez. what are we up against here...

"never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers"

get over it.

[brianosaurus]

Has anyone noticed that NASA is cooler than you?

Seriously. They are doing new stuff that hasn't been done before. Cut them some slack.

Yeah, sure, the Shuttle fiasco has been an expensive endeavor, but I don't see a whole lot of other groups sending crazy experimental aricraft up to see what happens.

When you new things, it doesn't always work out. Did Jeremy McGrath totally nail his first backflip? Not bloody likely. Chances are it took him a few tries and a few scratches (and, perhaps, watching a few people break a few bones) before he got it right.

We'll never get anywhere if people nitpick every little thing NASA does. Look at the X-Prize. They have, what, $10,000 for any amatuer who launches himself into space? NASA did that 30 years ago an them some. Big friggin deal.

If John Carmack can launch an air-breathing hyperspace vehicle on his first attempt, and still be excited about winning $10,000 then i'll be impressed (ok... yeah, if ANYONE wins the X-Prize i'll be impressed, but i'm being dramatic, so give me a break).

If it carrys a BFG I'll be REALLY impressed ;)

Get off NASA's back. Yeah, give them sh*t if and when they royally screw up, but as long as they keep pushing the envelope, sit down and shut up.

(No offense to any of those, and their families, who were lost in the shuttle (and other) mishaps. The people who signed up knew that they were getting into a very exclusive an experimental (really!) mission. I know I wouldn't do it.)

Re:get over it.

[david614]

I believe the X Prize is $10 million...

Re:Much of the problem stems from the complexity o

[GileadGreene]

As someone who has worked on satellite software development and testing, I can tell you that system complexity is one of the biggest enemies of the 'Faster, Better, Cheaper' philosophy. As the complexity of a spacecraft increases, so does the testing.

No doubt. Which is why successful FBC missions tend to deliberately work to reduce complexity. That's how they make them fast and cheap. It's a foolish project manager (i.e. one that really doesn't "get" FBC) that tries to implement the "Faster" and "Cheaper" parts of FBC on a mission that is as complex is a non-FBC mission.

NASA needs to revert to the slower, more reliable, more expensive philosophy that brought so much success throughout the sixties and seventies. We need to accept that space exploration is complex and expensive and attempts to shortcut will just result in horrible failures and even the loss of life.

The last thing NASA should do is revert to its old philosophy. That philosophy is appropriate for some missions, but disaster for most: it costs way too much, and provides poor return on investment. FBC, if done right, can provide a much better ROI. Space exploration does not have to be complex and expensive. Look at NEAR, SAMPEX, HETE, Clementine, Lunar Prospector, the AMSATs, Orsted, Freja, Orbcomm, Mars Pathfinder, Beagle, MightySat, RADCAL, or MACSAT. FBC can be done, and done right.

Long term commercial projects...

[anonymous cupboard]

The problem with long term projects where the payoff is some way away is maintaining interest and trust from the investors. If I see something big being built, it is easy to keep the investors on board because they can see the 'pyramid' being built. To do this means a high level of disclosure. If you are a public company (i.e., with large numbers of investors) then anything that you disclose to investors will also be disclosed to your competitors.

A good example of how things can go wrong is Germany's ill-fated Cargolifter project. This was a project to build airshups for transporting up to 100 tonnes anywhere in the world with a minimum of infrastructure (the airship was its own crane). A brilliant idea, with concrete interest from disaster relief agencies, construction companies and the oil industry.

The project promised profits in five years, however in reality there was no way they could have done it in less than 10. There is airship knowhow in Germany still, but they decided to build in the former DDR and thus enjoy the tax reliefs for companies there. Regrettably they had few staff from the aerospace industry.

The management split the company into two with one part that was relatively poor doing the R&D and the production, the other part (Cargolifter Financial Services) was relatively rich, and frankly seemed to be playing interesting games in the financial markets and paying its staff very well. The money went and the project folded.

The thing is that airships are not rocket science. There was nothing really radical about the project and it looked good. The postscript was that it failed due to production difficulties, inadequate funding and some questionable financial behaviour by the management.

Lets talk Rocket Science. The technology is less well known, and potentially much more dangerous (requiring a lot of testing). The business model is unproven and with the amount of cash required, there is definitely a high risk project.

Re:Much of the problem stems from the complexity o

[fmaxwell]

The last thing NASA should do is revert to its old philosophy.

That philosophy put man on the moon. What progress have we made since then? Do we have a lunar colony? Do we have a large, fully-manned space station complete with rotation providing artificial gravity? Have we sent men to Mars? All that FBC has done is provide us with uninspiring baby steps taken with unmanned probes. It's caused an entire generation of kids to decide that being an astronaut isn't nearly as cool as flying a fighter jet.

That philosophy is appropriate for some missions, but disaster for most: it costs way too much, and provides poor return on investment.

We don't need a good return on investment -- we need more investment. NASA's annual budget is less than we are spending every two months occupying Iraq. In the mid-60's, NASA received about 5% of the total federal budget. Now it gets less than 1/2%. We need a President like Kennedy again -- one who values space exploration more than oil exploitation.

The problem is

[reboot246]

not just faster, better, cheaper. It's also dumber. Management is bloated and has no idea what they are doing. NASA has no real direction, no spirit left, and no long-term goals. Apparenty the best brains nowadays aren't going to NASA the way they did in the past.

Apollo 1.

[Grendel Drago]

Yeah, the public worked right through that one, largely because NASA insisted that the astronauts had died instant, heroic deaths that were unavoidable, not that they'd slowly suffocated from the smoke in a fire that would have been prevented if NASA had taken seriously the problems with pure-oxygen atmosphere. As it was, Grissom, Chaffee and White had to die for the atmosphere to be changed to something less dangerous (I'm not sure exactly what they use, but it's much closer to our atmosphere here).

--grendel drago

You said, Management Failure, I agree ....

[OldHawk777]

Donald Rumsfeld (always) and NASA management will want you to believe that NASA employees are all to blame for failures. We always find out later that the Government civilian worker-bees and pack-mules did all the right things, but management and office (government) politics in the government workplaces did all the wrong things ... too include point the finger at the group that many like to use as an excuse, but they (civilian worker-bees and pack-mules) make no decisions and can only seek permission. Incompetent decisions that sometimes are made by unaccredited university degreed (diploma mill) managers, Bosses, and politicians are the typical today.
Failures in business and government projects are due to piss poor performance by management and Bosses not the worker-bees and pack-mules employees. Ecology, business, and tax laws, pension and health benefits, ... don't cause bank/CU failures, business bankruptcies, criminal fraud and theft in business the majority of failures in our economy/business are due to piss poor performance by management and Bosses not the worker-bees and pack-mules employees.
2001/09/11 NSA, CIA, and FBI failures were not because of the field agents. Two Shuttle disasters, Hubble Telescope, X-43A, ... failures are due to failures in leadership and delusional denial by management. Credit Unions (CU), Global Crossings, World Com, Enron, ... failures, and Delta and other companies CEOs and staff steeling (lack of a better word) from worker-bees and pack-mules pension funds, reductions in pay, benefits, and health insurance to fund the CEOs' and staffs' ever increasing pay and benefits increases, and then put CEOs' and staffs' retirements in protected trust.
Politicians of the Capitalist Republic applaud CEOs' and staffs' performance in saving the economy by getting the worker-bees and pack-mules (US Citizens) to pay for the bad global economy. The President after 2001/09/11 called for all good US Citizens to spend our money and support the USA. The CEOs', staffs', and politicians (have a different agenda) are setting up more corporate and wealthy tax welfare programs for the oil and construction companies in Iraq and national parks, pharmaceutical companies in Africa, ....
US Citizens will pay in the future (our children, grandchildren, ...), financial responsibility is a thing of the past, and social security is always secure, because the government can maintain benefits for the wealthy today, and increase the social security retirement age until the right number of US Citizens die and never collect any benefits (old folks don't have many dependents). US, EU, and UN Citizens are becoming the whores of the wealthy fucked now, beaten later, and screwed to death.

OldHawk777

Reality is a self-induced hallucination.

Yea, I know, I did stray a little from topic, but I beg forgiveness from /. Readers and US Citizens. Try to get a politician, CEO, holy-man, or manager to admit they made a mistake, like in this X-43A case.

Thank you Dan Goldin

[Hao Wu]

Failed probes, failed missions, failed vehicles, and 7 more astronaughts to build a stupid monument and name conference rooms after.

But he sure did a good job changing NASA's letterhead. Glad that logo got fixed...

His next mission? President of Boston University. I can't wait till "Faster-Better-Cheaper" filters down to the BU School of Medicine.

Why do so many blame NASA...

[small_dick]

...when the article clearly states the subcontractor, Orbital Sciences Corporation, was deficient in a number of engineering and technical disciplines?

Re:Much of the problem stems from the complexity o

[GileadGreene]

That philosophy put man on the moon.

Actually, if you stop and think about you'll realize that the way NASA put men on the moon was very much in line with the FBC philosophy. Rather than investing a huge amount of money in something complex and "high-tech" like the X-20 DynaSoar and taking forever to develop the missions NASA operated on a fixed, very tight schedule (land and return before the decade is out), and opted for simple, rugged solutions. Sounds a lot like the mandated "3 years from 0 to launch" policy and deliberate selection of less complex solutions to me that APL used for NEAR and other FBC missions. Sure, the NASA lunar program to develop a lot of new technology, but the underlying philosophy very much FBC. FBC doesn't mean spending less money, and it doesn't mean doing a bad job. It means thinking about what you are doing, and trying to maximize the value for the money you are spending.

We don't need a good return on investment -- we need more investment. NASA's annual budget is less than we are spending every two months occupying Iraq. In the mid-60's, NASA received about 5% of the total federal budget. Now it gets less than 1/2%. We need a President like Kennedy again -- one who values space exploration more than oil exploitation.

Presidential politics have very little to do with it. While I agree that Kennedy was extremely inspiring, I think he was dealing with a very different environment than we face today. What we really need is for the federal government to get its nose out of space, and to back off on the various regulations that mke it hard for commercial interests to do anything in space. The American public (as a whole) apparently doesn't care about space. If they did, it would be a great campaign platform, and someone would use it as such. The "public" doesn't want to spend the money, they have no tolerance for failure, and all they are interested in is spectacular firsts. This attitude is not conducive to a healthy space program. When you add in the fact that NASA is now a bloated bureaucracy, riddled with incompetent engineers and managers, drowning in unwanted congressional pork, and essentially wedded by politics to a launch system that is clearly over-priced and broken, it's no surprise that our space program is a mess.

Cha-ching!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

More money out of our pockets! Yay!

Private launchers can't outbid subsidized Shuttle

[SysKoll]

The reason that private companies won't build a space shuttle is that they haven't been contracted to do so.

Actually, whenever NASA puts a private sattelite into orbit, it bills the customer a mere fraction of its actual launch cost, typically less than $200 million. The rest (another $300-$500 million depending on how you count) is paid by the taxpayer. Which is how NASA can afford to send a manned vessel to do the job of a cargo rocket.

If NASA stopped operating as a federal-subsidized competitor of the private space launch industry, a much bigger market would instantly open. But NASA needs the launches to justify its Shuttle programs...

Keep NASA for launching Mars probes and doing research, but don't allow it to compete against the private space launcher industry.

-- SysKoll

DC-x "accident"

[SysKoll]

This stinks to high heaven.

You bet it does. Many an engineer cried tears of rage when they saw the DC-X burn and not being replaced because hey, a new copy of DC-X would cost 10% of the cost of a Shuttle launch, NASA can't find that kind of money anywhere.

A few outraged people muttered accusations of sabotage, but somehow, an investigation was never started.

The lesson: A human system, especially a bureaucracy, will do whatever it takes to insure its survival and expension. The only way to avoid that is to build permanent controls, complete with terribly severe punishments, right into the system. But you have to accept the 30% oerhead and the occasional noise of the firing squad.

Democracy is not for squirmish people.

-- SysKoll

commercial deep space exploration

[tri44id]

The X-Prize isn't the only commercial space venture in town. Commercial injection of unmanned satellites into low or geosynchronous earth orbit is a thriving business. TransOrbital appears to be on track for a commercial lunar landing.

The so-called "scientific research" that is advertised as the reason for maintaining the space station is really a smokescreen for the true reason. "I want to go to Mars! Personally, not as a telepresence in a robot! Or at least send my children or grandchildren there." But no politician can justify this goal in a global environment with jihadists who intend to use our own technology to drive us back to the 11th century.

The X-prize is the next to the last step in getting NASA out of the routine LEO human transport business. The last steps will be the commercial human-to-orbit prize and the transformation of the FAA into the FASA, where it will regulate both atmospheric and space transportation. Then NASA will have no more excuses to hide the true reasons for maintaining the ISS, which are to solve the problem of long-duration human support for the two to four-year Mars journey. Everyone will be better off.

The private sector just won't fund pure science

[fmaxwell]

What we really need is for the federal government to get its nose out of space, and to back off on the various regulations that mke it hard for commercial interests to do anything in space.

Businesses want profits and the profits just aren't there for pure science research in space. Universities won't be funding space exploration -- it's often tough for them to find enough money in the budget for facilities maintenance. Boeing is not going to land a man on Mars in the hopes that they will be able to turn a profit from the mission. Lockheed is not going to fund the launch of a next-generation space telescope with the expectation of making money from the venture.

I just don't believe that it would further our knowledge, increase our enthusiasm, or make us proud to be Americans if some private firm launched Lance Bass (of 'N Sync), Dennis Tito, and other multi-millionaire space-tourist-wannabes into orbit.

The private sector will continue to fund and launch communications satellites -- and will do little else. Nothing else having to do with space has been shown to have any real promise of generating a positive cash flow.

The American public (as a whole) apparently doesn't care about space. If they did, it would be a great campaign platform, and someone would use it as such. The "public" doesn't want to spend the money, they have no tolerance for failure, and all they are interested in is spectacular firsts.

Most of the public doesn't care about physical fitness either, but that does not mean that the The Presidents Council on Physical Fitness and Sports should be eliminated. Sometimes it's important for leaders to lead, to set goals, and to energize the public to achieve those goals. That's what Kennedy did and that's what we need now. There is more to being a leader than creating budgets and priorities based on opinion polls and focus groups. A President's job is to look out for the good of the country, not pander to trailer park inbreds who think that astrology and astronomy are the same thing.

Re:The private sector just won't fund pure science

[GileadGreene]

Businesses want profits and the profits just aren't there for pure science research in space.

The profits aren't there because it costs so much to put things in space. It costs so much to put things in space because of NASA's stranglehold on space, and the massive amount of useless government red-tape involved in a launch.

Universities won't be funding space exploration -- it's often tough for them to find enough money in the budget for facilities maintenance.

Actually, many universities do run their own spacecraft programs. Admittedly, in some cases the funding comes through NASA, but the actual design, development, and operation of the spacecraft is handled by the university with minimal NASA oversight. This model works well. In fact, it's very similar to the way the early airmail companies (forerunners of the airline industry) were encouraged - the government didn't set up its own airmail system, it contracted with a bunch of private groups to do it.

Boeing is not going to land a man on Mars in the hopes that they will be able to turn a profit from the mission.

Probably not. However they'd undoubtedly be willing to take some money from e.g. the Mars Society to land some people on Mars. The question we need to ask is "why are we going to Mars". Much as I would like to see us land on Mars, if we don't have an answer, we won't be going. Most people don't think a Mars expedition is worthwhile. Those that do tend to get hooked up with the Mars Society, and put their money where their mouth is.

Lockheed is not going to fund the launch of a next-generation space telescope with the expectation of making money from the venture.

Again, that's probably true. But if they science is valuable then grants will be available to do it, and the telescope will get built. The government can value the science without having to be intimately involved in the actual production of the data.

I just don't believe that it would further our knowledge, increase our enthusiasm, or make us proud to be Americans if some private firm launched Lance Bass (of 'N Sync), Dennis Tito, and other multi-millionaire space-tourist-wannabes into orbit.

Actually, I'm fairly confident that it will further our knowledge (although gaining an understanding of the zero-gee tolerance, or lack thereof, of boy-band stars may not be what you had in mind ;-) And I can assure you that my enthusiam and pride in America was fired far more by seeing Dennis Tito, a former aerospace engineer who worked hard to achieve his dream, going into space than it does seeing a shuttle launch. Because if Tito can do it, then there's hope for the rest of us.

The private sector will continue to fund and launch communications satellites -- and will do little else. Nothing else having to do with space has been shown to have any real promise of generating a positive cash flow.

Right. Which might explain why Surrey Satellites in the UK has made so much money not launching commsats. Or why the Space Imaging guys are making money. Or why I heard on NPR the other day about Florida orange farmers using satellite surveillance to gauge the Brazilian orange crop. There are ways to make money in space. There will be more if the cost of launch came down. Which won't happen until the government butts out.

A President's job is to look out for the good of the country, not pander to trailer park inbreds who think that astrology and astronomy are the same thing.

That's a nice thought, but it is completely at odds with the way the system is set up at present. If that's your beef, then you have larger problems to deal with than just the fact that the government is screwing up space exploration.

Look, I'm in favor of space exploration. But I've been involved in the government end of the space industry for the past 3 years, and I've learned the hard way the that the number one problem with "government space" is the "government" part. Thankfully, there are other ways to get things done, and some orgaizations are using those ways.

Ablative heat shield

[Latent Heat]

They (NASA and collaborators) tried an ablative coating on one of the 3 X-15 test vehicles. The idea was like to strip and reapply between flights or do some other kind of refurbishment, and it was such a PITA that they gave up on it and went for tiles on the Shuttle.

Maybe the way to go is not to reapply ablative coatings but go for ablative coatings that have a certain number of cycles -- say for a lower temp top surface, the thing has a life of 20 flights and after that you through out the vehicle (NASA is retiring Shuttles after about 25 flights on average, but not in the way they had hoped). For a higher temp leading edge, that may be only good for about 4 flights after which you just replace the entire leading edge panel.

Re:Much of the problem stems from the complexity o

[nyseal]

Sure.....once again the problems are blamed on Bush. Sheesh, why not indict him for the Kennedy assasination as well? I'm sure there's a link there somwhere.

Hotol technology !

[RemoteRabbit]

Back in 1993 this project was being developed over here in the UK as the Hotol Project. I knew a guy who claimed his sister worked on the project as a Mathematician and she was responsible for proving (mathematicially ) that the tech can never ever work lol. A few years later I was amused to hear the entire project had been sold to the Americans. Well ok I laughed for about a week...........

X-43 Test Failure

[De_Gopher]

I haven't seen that particular report, but just to clarify what I know, the failure wasn't in the X-43 hypersonic vehicle but in the Pegasus launch booster, built by Orbital Sciences. Apparently the Pegasus was built to be launched at 40,000 feet, however in the first test it was launched at 20,000 feet. The increased air density and aerodynamic loading at this altitude caused a structural failure in a stabilising fin on the booster, not the X-43 craft itself, which remains unproven.

Re:Another Bloody Techincal Story

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a lot of work, but the upshot is improved grammer and spelling skills that are lacking in the technical.

You use the word 'grammer', yet you claim to have spelling skills. Ummmmmm.....

ya got a point, but, and i've got a big b... :o)

[LifesABeach]

the following points are not rants, but they're not trivial either. and sometimes it helps to hear, "hey king, you've left the castle without your clothes on?!":

1. management:

1a. the sr-71, (black bird), can go in 'excess' of mach 3, (actual top air speed is classified).

1b. it would be very hard to ignore the black bird hanging in the smithsonian. i believe it's enough said about re-usable test platforms available to nasa's phb's.

2. engineering:

2a. consider the 'experiment'. 10 seconds of test data and then 'puff!', I question the logic of that. as an engineer, I find it VERY expensive to rebuild EVERYTIME I need to test.

2b. with the prototype effectively destroyed, you have to re-build all over again. kind'a pricey, don't ya think?

3. responsibility:

3a. is orbital going to pay for the damages of its defective product? I don't think so.

3b. I'd be surprised. actually, I wish they would! I'd have more respect for orbital's the business ventures.

3c. or, because we know '3b' ain't gonna happen; 'memo to orbitals staff, build products that work, or orbital will find NEW staff that can.'

4. this forum:

4a. this is not a forum of aviation science for aviators, but of people that read about, and think about 'stuff that matters'. and nasa's 'projects' matter.

4b. there IS a collective questioning as to the results of nasa's decisions.

5. what's it going to take to get our collective butts into space?

5a. its more dangerous to drive my car then to fly.

5b. history has shown that the one's who hold others back, are the one's most incapable to push forward.

5c. its amazing to me, but the biggest barrier to getting into space is not gravity, but nasa its self.

p.s.

memo to nasa:

1. you canceled the space plane because the gas tank was defective?! what is up with that! you kill a project because a component is defective?!

2. get our collective butts into space, don't you think we would like to share in the glory of what makes liquids solid, and spider web formations? come on, we want-a play too! :o)

3. i'm reminded of what my father told me about spending his money for things i thought were important. i'm just starting to understand what he was driving at.

Re:For how long?

[Llurien]

I thought I might point out the following webpage: http://www.hobbyspace.com/Links/RLVNews.html
I recently discovered this page, and it is really up-to-date with all sorts of initiatives with reusable launch vehicles, including a lot of promising commercial ones.
The enthousiasts there also seem to have given up on NASA. I share their opinion that to do it "Faster, better, cheaper", you need to steer clear of the good old NASA. I am especially interested in the Burt Rutan initiative, and the SpaceX rocket, which should fly beginning next year.