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

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.

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

[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.

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: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.

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

[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

Ugh!

[LadyAshnod]

Wham, what a waste? I think the

• Cheaper

is one helluva factor for it! *shrugs*

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: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: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

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: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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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: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: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.

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.

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.