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

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!

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: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

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.