Slashdot Mirror
Failure Is Always an Option
Logic Bomb writes "The New York Times has a short but elegant op-ed regarding the different perspectives of engineers and managers and the role that plays in accidents like the space shuttle Columbia disaster. It's the sort of article you'll nod all the way through, then print and leave anonymously on your supervisor's desk. Any tech managers in the Slashdot crowd might have some interesting comments on how the right balance is struck." Henry Petroski has written several good books on engineering and failure.
In the case of my last software project, engineers who worried about bugs that the software may have suffered during design were ineffective in getting it properly inspected before launch.
"No boss, I have no idea where that article printed out 15 times and strewn across your office came from........ It looks like a good article though."
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
I guess failure is indeed an ooption.
By Homer Hickam
When I go to the Cape and watch the Shuttle being launched, I still get a lump in my throat watching it soar. Even though I no longer work for NASA, its thunder affirms my dreams for spaceflight. Still, when I put emotion aside, I can't ignore my engineering training. That training and my knowledge as a 20-year veteran of the space agency (and also a Vietnam vet) has led me to conclude that the Space Shuttle is NASA's Vietnam. A generation of engineers and managers have exhausted themselves trying to make it work and they just can't. Why not? Because the Shuttle's engineering design, just as Vietnam's political design, is inherently flawed.
Much has been made of the report produced by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB). I've read newspaper articles that called it "scathing." Hardly. Its tepid recommendations probably had Shuttle managers who made poor decisions dancing with relief. It gave them a pass by proclaiming "culture" made them do it.
I don't believe there's a NASA culture. There is, however, a Shuttle cult. It is practiced like a religion by space policy makers who simply cannot imagine an American space agency without the Shuttle. Well, I can, and it's a space agency which can actually fly people and cargoes into orbit without everybody involved being terrified of imminent destruction every time there's lift-off. With some reservations, written in the politest language, the CAIB recommended to keep Shuttles flying but with more inspections, more bureaucracy (an outside safety agency), and more money. But piling on more inspections, people and dollars won't make the Shuttle safer. Neither will the safety sensitivity training that will probably be dumped on top of the overworked, disillusioned NASA engineers. My God, they've already dedicated their very souls to keep the Shuttle flying safely! The truth is, no amount of arm-waving about "culture" can fix a flawed design.
Take a look at the Shuttle stack and what do you see? A fragile spaceplane sitting on the back of a huge propellant tank between two massive solid rocket boosters. The Shuttle has to sit right in the middle of all the turmoil of launch because we once believed it would be cheaper to bring back those engines and rebuild them than to build new ones. That has not proved to be the case -- far from it -- but it has left us with a crew sitting in the most vulnerable position possible in terms of design. Simply put, had that spaceplane been on top of the stack, the destruction of Challenger and Columbia wouldn't have occurred. The CAIB ignored this flawed design and that makes their conclusions suspect: no amount of inspections or condemning another NASA generation to worry over this thing will solve it.
So let's get practical. We can't just shut the thing down. We need the Shuttle to finish the space station and also to keep the Russians and Chinese from dominating space. I'm not willing to see that occur while we dither. Human spaceflight is important to this country. But the Shuttle is as safe as you're going to get with what's in place today. Let's put some tough engineers in charge, fly it 10 more times over the next four years with hand-picked crews to finish the space station and meet our international obligations. Then close the program and replace it with expendable launchers and a shiny new spaceplane. And, this time, put it on top.
Was it Thomas Edison that said, "I haven't failed. I just found 10,000 ways that didn't work."?
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
A: Failure Is Always an Option
Q: Alex, why do open source programmers keep trying to compete with MS?
NASA is in for a lot of trouble still.
The report basically said that NASA needed to change as does the government's current perception. The changes needed was that basically saftey needed to be job #1
Yet, the commision decided to place the report on MS even after having taken a huge hit in the net.
routghly what that said was the the committee itself was kind of worthless. If they are not capable of decent logic,
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Now that money may be in the form of lower gas mileage in a car, or in the form of hundreds of unmanned test flights before putting a human in, or obscene safety margins.
But to pretend that anything is ever perfectly safe is to ignore the fundamental economic issue that at some point you have to stop putting money into safety concerns and just fly the damn thing.
Failure is an option when your name is Monte Carlo.
We're here to give you an OS, not a religion.
Failure is always an option
On a project the size of the space shuttle thousands of safety concerns will be brought up. Not everyone of them can be fully investigated. They have to pick and choose based on what is most urgent. Yes, there will be accidents, but otherwise the shuttle would never get off the ground. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, and you can say they should have investigated further all you want, but the fact is that there were many other concerns that seemed just as urgent, and some that seemed even moreso.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
NASA is in for a lot of trouble still.
The report basically said that NASA needed to change as does the government's current perception. The changes needed was that basically saftey needed to be job #1
Yet, the commision decided to place the report on MS even after having taken a huge hit in the net.
routghly what that said was the the committee itself was kind of worthless. If they are not capable of decent logic, then how can they expect NASA with a long tradition of being a political creature (for the 20-30 years) to change.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The shuttle is an example of a boondoggle. It became pork because the orginal purpose of a fast and cheap ship was changed to a massive space truck that could take everything and do everything. The managers should of said stop when it was no longer a reusable ship, but just a reusable frame. It reminds me of the Bradely problems, where design changes killed it and its purpose. Multitasking should only be done once a project is done. After all, a jack of all trades is a master of none.
I'd say more, but my guild is raiding.
Failure Is Always an Option
By HENRY PETROSKI
URHAM, N.C. -- Scientists seek to understand what is, the aerospace pioneer Theodore von Karman is supposed to have said, while engineers seek to create what never was. The space shuttle was designed, at least in part, to broaden our knowledge of the universe. To scientists the vehicle was a tool; to engineers it was their creation.
With the release of the report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, there is a new focus on the "culture" of NASA. Engineers have played a prominent but not a controlling role in that culture, both in the design of the shuttle and in the planning of its missions. When the report speaks of NASA's "broken safety culture," the particular failure it cites is "a consistent lack of concern" that Columbia may have been damaged by debris at takeoff. But perhaps NASA can be better understood by examining the culture that arises from the inevitable -- and healthy -- tension among scientists, managers and engineers.
A common misconception about how things such as space shuttles come to be is that engineers simply apply the theories and equations of science. But this cannot be done until the new thing-to-be is conceived in the engineer's mind's eye. Rather than following from science, engineered things lead it. The steam engine was developed before thermodynamics, and flying machines before aerodynamics. The sciences were invented to explain the accomplishments -- and to analyze their shortcomings.
The design of any device, machine or system is fraught with failure. Indeed, the way engineers achieve success in their designs is by imagining how they might fail. If gases escaping from a booster rocket can lower efficiency or cause damage, then O-ring seals are added. If the friction of re-entry can melt a spacecraft, then a heat shield is devised.
Much of design is thus defensive engineering: containing, shielding and fending off anticipated problems on the drawing board and computer screen so that they cannot bring down the design when it flies. Obviously, total success can only come if every possible mode of failure is identified and defended against.
Engineering is also very much about numbers. O-rings must be sized; the thickness of heat shields specified; the weight of insulation calculated. Often, the numbers work at cross purposes, as when increasing shield material decreases available payload. Engineering design is ultimately the art of compromise.
What results from the design process is a thing that has unique characteristics. It can withstand the conditions for which it was designed as long as it maintains its integrity. There is usually some leeway allowed, for engineers know that operating conditions cannot be predicted with absolute certainty. Until it fails, how far beyond design conditions a system can be pushed is never fully known.
But engineers do know that nothing is perfect, including themselves. As careful and extensive as their calculations might be, engineers know that they can err -- and that things can behave differently out of the laboratory. On the space shuttles, O-rings got scorched, heat tiles fell off, foam insulation broke free. To engineers, these unexpected events were incontrovertible evidence that they did not fully understand the machine.
Engineers do not feel comfortable with things they do not understand. It is at this point that they begin to act more like scientists. In the case of the scorched O-rings, the engineers studied burn patterns. They looked for a correlation between damage and temperature, and they warned about launching when the temperature was outside the bounds of their experience and scientific study.
If engineers are pessimists, managers are optimists about technology. Successful, albeit flawed missions indicated to them not a weak but a robust machine. When engineers and managers clashed over the 1986 Challenger launch, the managers pulled rank. In the case of Columbia, engineers who worried about damage that the
The problem is that people are afraid that if the shuttle stops flying space exploration will stop. Public support will wane and funcing will slow. I happen to disagree but there are many in the space program who do not.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
After you make such significant strides in space exploration in the late 60's and early 70's, then have your funding cut by almost every President since Nixon, you're bound to start taking short-cuts and missing things. Remember... space is still deadly. In my book, when you're dealing with something that could very easily kill you, you don't short-change yourself. The problem is that when you have no money to spend on things you need, and a time limit to do certain things, you don't have any other choice.
The problem NASA has right now is trying to convince the rest of the country that what they're trying to do is worth spending the money on. Why worry about what Saddam can do if we could all just move to Mars (for instance)? On the other hand, funding was cut because nothing significant was happening... but nothing significant was happening because funding was cut. It's a vicious cycle.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
Sounds like a poster I've seen somewhere. That article title should definitely be made into a Demotivational product.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
I have spent the last few days reading the entire CAIB report and I have to agree that Mr. Petroski is right on target with his observations.
Simply put, the problem was that the engineers concerned with the safe re-entry of the orbiter after the foam strike were put in the position of having to prove a negative. Management wouldn't pay attention to them until they could prove that the strike was *not* safe.
They couldn't prove or disprove the notion that the foam strike had caused critical damage until they got the images, but they couldn't get the images without first proving they needed them to assure the safety of the re-entry.
There had been a number of previous foam strikes, many of them involving this same piece of foam (the left bipod ramp), and all of those shuttles had landed okay, so management believed that this foam strike was similarly okay just because they had gotten away with it so far.
No science. No analysis. Just an assumption that if they had gotten away with ignoring this problem so far, they could continue to ignore it. The schedule was king, not safety.
Engineers know well that "getting away with it" is not evidence of reliability. Managers, at least in my experience, tend to be proportionately successful in their careers to the extent that they can spin "getting away with it" into a career advancement tool.
This is really why the orbiter was lost. This is really why the astronauts died.
Denial is deadly.
The best way to do is to be.
I have to admit up front that I am biased against NASA on primarily ethical grounds. To me, there's one basic valid purpose of government, and that's to defend the individual rights of its citizens. In the U.S., this is the principle upon which the Constitution and Bill of Rights is based, and the primary ligitimate activities of government, the police, courts, and defense, are inferrable from that.
Everything has an opportunity cost. The money spent on NASA could otherwise be spent elsewhere, such as aiding the homeless or better road infrastructure, and preferably on something the person earning the money (the taxpayer) himself chose.
Sure, it's nice to be able to explore space and determine facts about physics and cosmology, and test theories against empirical information, but I think at some point the costs associated with expanding the realm of science to more obscure areas, in the shorter term, are too high. And, yes, I know the argument that expanding basic science can lead to invention that benefits the individual, but personally I'd put more faith in the ability of industry to use the money making targeted investments while hiring scientists, than effective production from NASA. At some point I think we have to say the money can be better spent than knowing more about the behavior of some unreachable binary star. Eventually, that information will likely come anyway, as a function of better theoretical models. Why do we need it now, assuming it isn't primarily to give a Ph.D. something to play with?
NASA exists in an enviroment that offers none of the efficiency advantages of modern industry.
- No effective competition
- No way to inexpensively prototype or proof-of-concept things and test them in the intended deployment environment
- Few efficiencies of scale from being able to buy parts widely used and commoditized
- Little economic justification for the expense, even in the instances where the mission is "successful"
- No realistic, market-driven benchmarks for the performance of the managers or engineers
In the end, I don't feel that NASA is an optimal way to spend money, and since it's at least in part my money, I should be able to make this decision. Perhaps some kind of opt-in "NASA" checkbox, like I've seen opt-in "environmental" checkboxes on tax forms. I'd be content with that.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
I thought that the arguments of engineers vs. managers was ALWAYS there?
I had always thought that it was a case where an engineer wants to do and the managers decide whether or not it was feasible or not, or whether it makes any sense to do it at all!
This is the same Homer Hickham about whom October Sky was made, I'm assuming?
It would be nice if more people listened to engineers instead of politicians when it came to science projects, wouldn't it?
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
Googlified
Individuals should not focus on failure during design. Failure should be minimized afterwards.
Focusing on failure during design makes me recall a commonly stated quote I learned in my CS program: Focus on doing your best. If you made a mistake, fix it.
3 out of 10 eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 44 vote.
-- http://www.fec.gov/pages/98demog/98demog.ht
If I anonymously placed this on my manager's desk, he would wander out and ask absently:
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
It was meant to be a reminder to prepare for bad scenarios and overcome them before they occured. Rather than just saying "that downside will not happen".
and to analyze their shortcomings.
Indeed, the way engineers achieve success in their designs is by imagining how they might fail
Spot on.
Where I work we have independent feasibilty reviews of each new product concept. Not only does a new product need to do well in the market, it has to be profitable enough, and not expose the company to disproprtionate risk for the reward.
The reviews are always done by a department not affiliated with the one creating the new product. This way the review can stay relatively objective regarding new sales.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
They are always on the cutting edge. Putting safety behind technological progress is necessary do achieve great things. Yes human life is not something to take lightly, but NASA has done a better job of protecting people than a few larger (cough military cough) government institutions. Historically NASA has taken great risk to accomplish new milestones in less time than most would think possible. That trend obviously continues today.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
I opened this at work, and the title bar reads:
"Failure is always an option - Microsoft Internet Explorer"
Gotta love it!
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
(blatantly stolen from fortune)
...it's a virtual certainty on any project I work on. When I unleash the skillz, I'm like code insulation hitting a reinforced carbon-carbon source control system. I make builds feel like a fiery reentry.
The google link, or at least the one that the "partner site" gets.
This is always the case it has been for a very a long time. The problem is not NASA's culture so much as the culture of the society around NASA.
The article Misses the big points. When the Challenger blew up blame was apportioned to the engineers that built it not the congressmen who insisted the engines be built in utah. When software is shipped before its ready, blame goes to the programmers that were working 90 hour weeks not the sales people that promised the customer whatever they wanted to hear. When a heartvalve fails blame goes to the inventors that made a device that saved lives, not the insurance companies that wouldnt pay for a proper solution.
Yes managers are willing to take risks, its rare they ever have to pay the price for failure.
I work for an auto supplier. In one of the prototype plants, there was a banner for one of the new car's engineering team.
"Failure is NOT and option."
It struck me as odd at the time. It just doesn't sound like motivation. It strikes me as a negative way of looking at things. There was no "We can succeed together!" or "Hard work will pay off in the end!" Nope. Failure is not an option.
Later I saw the perfect response in a magazine, and was disappointed that the banner was taken down before I could add it.
"Failure is not an option; it comes standard with every vehicle."
"...At the end of the day"..."when everyone goes home, you're stuck with yourself." RIP Layne Staley
Just because failures "can" exist (is this a surprise to anyone?) doesn't mean NASA gets a free pass on its systemic organizational problems.
What's really the root of the problem is that no one has provided any political leadership for the American spce program for 30 years -- since Nixon took office, in other words.
If Nixon had provided the right kind of leadership -- pointing to a destination and declaring "Go There!" -- we would have built a spacecraft and the supporting infrastructure to get the job done.
Instead, the nation's political leadership turned to the NASA bureaucracy and asked "Well, what next?" NASA, unsurprisingly, asked for a lot, didn't get it, and consequently saddled itself with the sorry combination of a lame spacecraft design and nowhere for that craft to go except low-Earth orbit.
It was, however, a guarantee that NASA's budget wouldn't flatline.
Folks, the problem of getting people into and out of LEO was solved satisfactorily in the 1960's. So was the problem of getting tons of hardware to LEO. We did not -- and do not -- need the Shuttle to get either people or hardware to orbit safely, reliably, and cheaply.
The fact that the U.S., 40 years later, can't get people or hardware to LEO is a testament to the failure of both NASA and every president after Kennedy to have a clue about where to go next.
Think what we might have accomplished if we'd never built the Shuttle, but, instead, put the money into building more Saturns and more Apollos, more Titans and more Geminis, and expanded SkyLab rather than scuttling it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Sadly, many higher-ups see the solution in CMM, or other quality programs that produce reams of paper, but those same top-level managers ignore the economics of trying to develop too much, in too little time, with too little money. I manage the development of custom software projects for a Fortune 100 company, and at the end of the day, the sales dweeb sells whatever he has to to make his commission, and the engineering group is left with impossible constraints. CMM would probably work well if the entire company bought into it, but I've not seen that yet.
Likewise, NASA sees us (the public) crying about cost overruns and the return on our investment. Ultimately, that comes back down to the line-level managers at NASA, where no matter what the good intentions, the pressures of $$$ and time will always apply.
We need to decide if space travel is worth the cost (done properly, and left to engineering minds to decide what "properly" means), or worth the risks of doing it at lower cost. Like my company, NASA has squeaked by on luck for quite some time.
In my experience, the luck ALWAYS runs out.
Tim
I saw Hickam had written something, but hadn't been able to read it (WSJ subscription required blah blah). He's right, though I think the CAIB report is a little harsher than he suggests - right up front it critizes the process that led to the creation of the shuttle. On the other hand, the recommendations in the report are really rather mild...
Energy: time to change the picture.
Both accidents have occurred during winter time here in FL ;-)
Both accidents related to cold weather and ice formations.
You don't need one billion dollars to report on that.
Unless of course, you 'need' that billion dollars for yourself
Case the latter, astrounats lives seem to worth nothing.
Sure my son will be an astrounat, yeah right...
NO MORE LAUNCHS DURING WINTER !!!
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Someone read the article, I see.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
If your name is McBride, it's probably TUX :)
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
"keep the Russians and Chinese from dominating space"
this guy obviously did too much drugs in Vietnam
...I only write business applications and websites and stuff like that. At least when my creation fails, no one dies. These NASA guys...they have it rough.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Appointment to the TEA will be a political process controlled by management. The so called engineers will be nothing but management lackeys and the same problems will occur. The real engineers still won't have a voice.
- AndrewN
It's worth thinking about what would have happened if the damaged Shuttle had been images by USAF ground cameras, and it became clear that re-entry was going to be a disaster. The shuttle and crew would have been stuck in orbit, with worldwide publicity, while NASA tried to come up with a fix. They probably wouldn't have succeeded. On-orbit rescue using Atlantis has been discussed as marginally possible, and on-orbit patching has been suggested, but most likely, they wouldn't have worked.
Think of the PR fallout. Seven astronauts stuck in orbit for most of a month, with constant TV coverage, followed by their deaths on worldwide TV. That would have been career-ending for most of NASA's top management. Letting them crash saved the jobs of top people at NASA.
Worst case, a rushed launch of Atlantis could have resulted in losing two shuttles. That would have ended the Shuttle program.
Henry Petroski wrote
>If engineers are pessimists, managers are optimists about technology.
Is this the difference between programmers and engineers?
Fred Brooks, in The Mythical Man-Month (go read it!) argues that programmers are optimists. We work with pure thought-stuff, so of course it should work the way we think it will. Bzzt. But that optimism drives projects. Who'd start a big project knowing how many stomach-churning bugs, random external changes, stupid feature requests, irrelevant but deadly external bugs, dependencies and just plain stapler misfires would come up? How many projects, open or closed source, would have started if the actual development timeline had been known in advance?
And sometimes shit just happens... I think it's ok to make a mistake once, learn from it, and never make it again.
On the other hand, if lifes are at stake, it's better not to screw up, although it's not a perfect world, so it's inevitably bound to happen.
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
...it comes bundled in with the OS
This reminds me of a decent book I read about a year ago, called To Engineer is Human . It discusses the role engineering failures play in our many engineering successes.
Interesting read, though the author tends to drone on and on a bit. He makes some great points, though, not the lest of which is that (gasp!) engineers are not perfect, and thus, failures will happen. And guess what--most of the time, we learn from those failures!
--- Standard disclaimer applies.
The most effective engineers that have the finanical incentive to walk if they are not heard by management.
..based on Previous hard earned exp in the startup flameouts..
If as a software developer you do not have enough financial resources to walk..then you shoul dnot take that project..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
...to spell-check.
"The Columbia Accident Investigation Board has recommended that NASA establish an independent Technical Engineering Authority. This would put responsibility for technical matters where it rightly belongs -- with the engineers who, because they know how the space shuttle was designed, also know best how it can fail."
After reading this, my immediate thought was, "Goodie, who going to be appointed to manage this new technical authority? A seasoned NASA manager, right?
Our best hope is that NASA is wise enough to make this Authority a panel of rotated, working engineers!
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Google link so you dont have to subscribe: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/29/opinion/29PETR.h tml?ex=1062734400&en=75c0dd6ec27f1277&ei=5062&part ner=GOOGLE
Hickam is on track, but I'm not sure we need spacecraft with wings. Wings are only useful on airplanes. By definition, spacecraft are not airplanes. NASA has thrown away too much money pursuing winged spacecraft for their own sake, rather than dealing with the issue of getting people to and from space. They might as well try to make a submarine that can fly. Probably do-able, but: why?
Let's decide that we will do two things:
1) Any human space travel beyond LEO will start from LEO in spacecraft built in LEO and that return to LEO. If we do that, we will never need to spend money trying to build airplane-spacecraft hybrids.
2) Let's use big expendable boosters to get hardware to LEO, and smaller expendable boosters to get people to LEO. Put the people in modern versions of the Apollo or Gemini craft (the so-called "Big" Gemini was an appropos solution)>
And, let's also decide that the main reason to build a space station in LEO is to serve as a construction yard and a gas station for trips elsewhere. Let's put aside the quaint notion that the reason we need to be in space is to "do science".
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
We can finish the space station with rockets and space craft from both Russia and European Space agency...
The future of space exploration and discovery is no longer national but international..its time NASA wake up..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
It's a sober and informed discussion of engineering safety (mostly but not entirely computer related) that's been going on for almost twenty years.
Try entering "shuttle" in the search form. I did just now and found the brief, grim announcement of the Challenger explosion.
If you prefer to curl up with a dead tree by the fire, read moderator Peter Neumann's Computer Related Risks. It is also available in Japanese translation.
Now, few of us are likely to ever risk our lives flying in space shuttles. Maybe some of us might write the code or design the machinery the astronauts will trust with their lives. But all of us depend on computers every day for our livelihood, and many of us depend on them for our lives more than you would feel comfortable with if you understand the implications of it.
Fly on an airplane lately? Anything a little more modern than a DC-3? Do you know what fly by wire means? Ever write code with a stack overflow or heap corruption? What do you suppose that means for the embedded systems that run today's commercial aircraft?
Does your car have antilock brakes?
Read RISKS. It will make you a better programmer. Because it will put the fear of God into you.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
You and the YFI Guy should put up a history of all your vomits. The best we can get are the last 20 or so.
I would not say that a side mounted space plane is a design flaw, it's more like a "requirements" flaw, or perhaps a result of the compromises made to meet the requirements/budget. So in some sense the failures flow all the way back up to the policy makers. Not that they would ever dream of such consequences and would most likely change their minds given the results.
The STS system has flown over 100 flights and despite the failures has performed a number of immensly useful functions. That said, it has not reached the operational goals that were desired. It is time to realize that, learn what we can and move on to the next generation.
I agree that it should be operated for a while, but only to meet those needs that cannot be achieved otherwise. I believe we should look to a smaller/simpler and more reliable design for human transportation to low earth orbit. I'm not convinced that we even need a space plane per say unless it can be landed at more locations. Is it so difficult to do parachute landings in
the gulf or off KSC? That would seem to me to give greater safety margins and make the design simpler.
Reporter: So, Commander, after all you've just gone through, I have to ask you the same question a lot of people back home are asking about space these days. Is it worth it? Should we just pull back, forget the whole thing as a bad idea and take care of our own problems at home?
Commander Sinclair: No, we have to stay here. And there's a simple reason why. Ask 10 different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get 10 different answers. But there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years, or a thousand years, or a million years, eventually our sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morabuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes. And all of this.. all of this was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars.
From "Infection", first season of Babylon 5
Given the (no pun intended) astronomical expenses involved in putting forward such a program:
1. only the largest, most deep pocketed companies would be able to even consider this, which drops the beneficial effects of competition down. Who would have the resources to single-source this? GE, maybe, for one. I'm sure some European and maybe Asian companies. Not too many, though.
2. The return-on-investment would have to be through the roof. What incentive do you offer the GE's of the world to write a check for this? Exclusive rights to mine the moon? Don't think the rest of the world political community would sign off on that.
3. Given the quarter-to-quarter mindset of most corporations, how do you sell a research program costing hundreds of millions of dollars and taking multiple years to return anything. Pharma is the only industry I can think of with similar return horizons and I don't think typical drug dev. costs would even show up as rounding error compared to a typical space exploration mission
Tough, tough sell you're talking about here, sending it over to private industry. The gov. may be one of the few institutions able/willing to live with the cost and return horizon. Not very efficient, but certainly more patient and deep-pocketed than the private sector--at least for the type of basic research you're talking about.
Tesla can play a good version of Signs, and Getting Better, but to my knowledge, never invented anything that'll change mankind forever.
Are you kidding?
Tesla invented alternating current while strumming a guitar. The shape and resonance of a Tesla coil were inspired by holding a guitar near a stack of amplifiers!
Tesla was cool.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I work in the Automotive sector and most of the sytems and procedures we use to judge and prioritize risk come directly or indirectly from NASA. It's wierd to think that the Agency which developed the DFMEA (Design Failure Mode Effects Analysis) is now getting slammed for having a poor safety culture.
-Pinkoir
I have yet to hear any plan of action that could have given the Columbia astronauts any significant chance of survival even if they had perfect knowledge of the damage done by the foam.
The shuttle had limited fuel so could only stay up there so long, and couldn't reach the ISS. No other shuttle was prepped for launch, and that takes a LONG time. Flying some re-entry pattern designed to minimize heat on the damaged side would have only have improved their changes slightly. They didn't have the material or capability to fix the shuttle themselves. So what would have been done??
Yeah but...
Challenger blew up when management ignored the facts about the srb o-rings in cold weather. The srbs leaked and burned thru the external tank. I can't see how having the bird on top would have helped.
Columbia was doomed because they ignored the warning signs of past missions. They knew that foam had damaged the orbiter on previous missions. It's too bad that 7 people had to die, and we had to lose an orbiter to wake them up.
IMO, the design is not the cause of these failures. It might be fair to say "it's always grounded because the design sucks and they can never get an all systems go", but the designers don't make the launch decisions.
It's not just that. But also convincing people that space is worth pursuing to begin with. I remember when this accident first happened. It was all over the newsgroups "What has pursuing space given us, that's worth the trouble?" The converstaion after that was listing all the things that the space program has done for the earth-bound. e.g.semiconductors, medicine. NASA needs to convince people of the above.
Which part of "Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company" didn't you understand? Or did you get permission to reproduce their content?
I think you're just being a karma whore - there's no way the New York Times is going to be slashdotted. If you don't like their registered users policy, don't read their articles. Move on. You don't have a right to violate their copyright though.
I've been involved in engineering literally all my life. My dad was an engineer and as a small child I remember going to work with my dad and being in awe of all the stuff he had to 'play' with. I never wanted to be anything else! Unfortunately, in the scheme of things we are the workers, the ones who toil withput credit. The managers take all of that. In the 1980's as a contract engineer I built a Boston FM radio station from scratch (WFNX), yet they didn't even see fit to invite me to its sign on party! When I asked why, I was told: "You were paid well for your work, isn't that enough?". They actually believed they paid me too much to make their property worth many millions morethan it was before. Needless to say from that time forward, I did only precicely what they paid me to do (and what they asked me to do), nothing more. Part of the problem is we ALLOW ourselves to be treated in this way! The plumber, electrician or auto mechanic don't. Why do we? I think one answer is UNION. They realize there is respect and safety in numbers. Are we too good, too elite to do the same?
Our management bought a bunch of copies of a book and put it on our (engineers) desks.
The book?
"The inmates are running the asylum"
A book which basically says that engineers don't know squat about schedules and "real world" concerns and need to be managed.
I'm not working on software that's of a life and death nature, but still...
You know, we hear this argument over and over again. The government is less efficient innately because it does not compete the same way the private sector does. While off topic, I think refuting this argument on two levels will help keep the problem focused that NASA f-- up. Not, government is innately f--- up.
1. The government DOES compete and in a lot of way competes better than the private sector. Governments compete against the governments of other nations.
2. Most large businesses are risk averse and do not actually compete. The real thing that most businesses today do is sit on either real estate of intellectual property or real estate of land, both government protected monopolies, and milk them for all that it is worth. Most large firms do not actually innovate, and most large firms immediately close up shop for overseas as soon as someone "competes" with them.
If you ask me, the fact that NASA was able to fly the shuttle at all, as f--- as it is, is remarkable when you consider that for the same amount of money the private sector has given us such wonders as Ethyol (cancer drug that didn't work introduced anyway to pump up stock prices), The Power of Now (Enron's scheme...), the ill advised Daimler Chrysler merger, the destruction of American shipbuilding and steel, the movement of software overseas.
Really, if the private sector were so great, how come American companies are losing market share in everything across the board. If you ask me, the people that run these companies are all a bunch of dopes.
The future of this country is in small business and big government.
This is my sig.
Yes, it's the same Homer Hickam.
-h-
Bingo!
The shuttle may be a maintenance nightmare, but engineering did not kill Challenger or Columbia, poor risk management did.
wouldn't you have to have it translated into a dilbert cartoon first?
NASA isn't getting criticized because it doesn't have perfect safety, it's getting nailed because it has TWICE ignored clear evidence of significant problems and failed to perform even cursory investigations until after the loss of an orbiter and crew.
There was clear evidence of problems with the O-rings before the Challenger was lost. NASA had somebody produce some really cryptic plots, but nobody bothered to really investigate whether the cooler weather on some of these launches might have an influence. It takes a real genius to reduce this to dipping an o-ring into a glass of ice water, but any competent investigator should have been able to reduce the data to plots of damage vs. various independent variables such as temperature at launch or overnight lows.
With Columbia, the arrogance of management is far more stunning. It KNEW that the insulation had flaked off, it KNEW that the insulation had caused surface damage in the past, and it KNEW that some areas on the leading edge of the wing are much more vulnerable to damage than others because of access points. It could have test fired foam at wing mockups at any time, just to have hard proof instead of just hunches that the foam could never cause significant damage to an orbiter... yet it did nothing.
This testing is expensive, of course, but it's really not that much when compared to the cost of a normal launch (isn't that approaching a billion dollars per launch now?), or the various costs associated with the loss of an orbiter and crew. It's akin to failing to spend $10 to check something on your car even though you knew that a mistake would mean that the car would erupt into a fireball and kill everyone inside if you're wrong.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Pundits have claimed that the parallel launch configuration of the orbiter and external tank are a design flaw. Hog wash. The size of the orbiter precludes an inline configuration. If you want to fly "spam in a can" on top of a larger rockets then welcome back to 1960!
Now that a major risk of known to be debris strike, to avert it why not have the shuttle ascend right side up? The shuttle currently flies upside down for two (lousy) historical reasons: to simplify the manuver for RTLS abort, and a for line of sight radio link with the ground and antennae on the nose of the orbiter. There are no groundstations down range anymore. RTLS will not be made any more insanely risky than it already is by having the orbiter stack roll 180 degrees to an RTLS attitude. The shuttle already rolls to heads up after 5 minutes of flight in order to acquire the TDRS satellite for tracking and communications. Doing so in flight through the lower atmosphere should have added benefits. Tank debris will tend to fall away from the orbiter instead of into it. The lift provided by the orbiter wings should improve performance.
an ill wind that blows no good
At this point the X-Prize gives me more hope than NASA.
I knew one nice lady (a rarity in both respects) whose entire job consisted of going from meeting to meeting carrying a stack of paper at least a foot high. And this was a project that was about 1000 times smaller than the shuttle project.
Safety may cost money, but recklessness doesn't necessarily save you money.
Neither of the shuttle accidents were caused by design flaws or by skimping on safety equipment. They were caused by arrogant managers ignoring engineers who said "it isn't safe to operate the vehicle this way." (whether that be launching in cold weather known to cause seal problems or landing after an impact to the heat shield)
There's a difference between designing a perfectly safe vehicle and operating a normal vehicle safely.
To extend your car analogy, what NASA managers have done twice now is similar to driving a bus with balding tires at high speed in the rain because they were too pressured by schedule to drive under safe conditions and too embarrassed to ask someone to look at the tires for them. It has nothing to do with safety equipment or safety testing and everything to do with overconfidence.
The difference is that, if someone drives a bus like that and hydroplanes into a tree, killing all their passengers, they get arrested. NASA just gets to hire more bureaucrats.
consider highlift systems and the construction of a beanstalk...rockets are old ineffecient tech...lets move out of the 60's and into the 21st century!
"It would be nice if more people listened to engineers instead of politicians when it came to science projects, wouldn't it?"
Elect engineers then.
Here are two articles (part 1 and part 2) about the history of flying submarines. Great stuff. It's in Russian, so you will need to use the fish or just check out the photos.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
A successful rescue could have been a real boost to the space program and if not we could always get Ron Howard to make a film about it that would be.
A serious attempt at a rescue would have certainly got people more involved emotionally with the space program.
Most tantalizing to me though is the notion that perhaps if Americans had been seriously looking to the skies and thinking about rescuing people aboard the shuttle, we might have actually managed to avoid entangling ourselves in Iraq. (OK, unlikely for soooo many reasons.)
Hickam is spot-on, until he gets to "And, this time, put it on top."
A winged vehicle at "the top of the stack" is aerodynamically unstable. The Air Force put a lot of energy into solving this problem during the DynaSoar program, but never really sorted it out. (DynaSoar was to put a vaguely shuttle-looking spacecraft on top of a Titan launch vehicle.) This instabilty issue was one of the things (along with the end of the AF Manned Orbiting Laboratory Program) that let to the demise of DynaSoar.
As others have said, if you add a checkbox for NASA, you have to turn a lot of other items into checkboxes, too. That expands the tax form into a democratic government budget.
I have a funny feeling that at the end of the day, when you average in everybody's checkboxes, we'd end up about where we are, now. I suspect that there would be a few glaring differences, and some more subtle changes, but for the most part it would be moot.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
When engineers and managers clashed over the 1986 Challenger launch, the managers pulled rank.
What a dark, yet utterly true statement. Do the NASA and contracting company managers sleep well today knowing that in 1986 their decisions cost lives?
Edward Tufte, author of some amazing books on information display, wrote in Envisioning Information on the Challenger disaster. Looking at the materials prepared by engineers, he saw that they had correctly correlated temperature with O-ring failure. Yet their materials, hastily prepared during the 11th hour, failed to convince managers to abort the launch. Tufte shows a design of a simple graph that shows temperature on the abscissa and burn-through on the ordinate, and any manager could draw a line through the points and extrapolate out to the bitter cold Florida day that cost the shuttle.
Having my own share of bad managers, I have to wonder, would it have made any difference?
That's the major flaw with government underwriting a space program. You have to get public support for it. Let private enterprise underwrite it, and all you need is commercial interest. That's a MUCH easier beast to summon.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
What's the difference between two small governments versus two giant corporations? Some of our largest firms are effectively governments in and of themselves. They, through contractual terms, patent portfolios, mineral rights, etc, have effective monopolies in their own right, so, what's the different between a company having a monopoly versus the government?
Free enterprise means no intellectual property rights. In fact, free enterprise might mean no property rights at all!
This is my sig.
Its elegant.
Our space program needs a big KISS logo.
Lost in space
Aug 27th 2003
From The Economist Global Agenda
"Those investigating the fate of Columbia say they know the causes of the accident. This will be no comfort to those wanting to improve human access to space
AUGUST 26th saw the publication of a report that could become a milestone in the history of human space flight. After seven months of deliberation, and having read more than 30,000 documents, conducted 200 formal interviews and dispatched 25,000 people to search for debris, the board investigating the loss of the space shuttle Columbia revealed the reasons for the accident, and its recommendations for preventing another one.
The main findings of the report were well trailed. Since the "Oh my God!" moment when tests blew a large hole into a sample of a shuttle's wing, few observers have doubted that the accident was caused by a piece of insulating foam. Shortly after take-off this foam became detached, struck Columbia's left wing, and breached the craft's heat shielding. The friction of re-entry then melted the wing.
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board presented its report to NASA and Congress. The Space Frontier Foundation reports on space exploration and aims for human inhabitation of space. The race is on for the X Prize.
At first sight, one of the more troubling aspects of the report is that it seems that a rescue mission involving another shuttle, Atlantis, might have been feasible had the damage caused by the foam been recognised as dangerous. The mission's managers, though, failed to recognise that danger, and so the question of mounting a rescue was never raised. Scott Hubbard, a board member and director of NASA's Ames Research Centre, says the best estimate of the actual damage is that the hole in the wing was 25cm (ten inches) across, plus or minus 50%. That could probably have been detected by pointing the camera of a military satellite at Columbia, if anyone had thought to do so. All told, there were at least eight missed opportunities for discovering the damage, according to the board. But at every juncture the programme's structure, processes and managers resisted new information.
That sounds damning. Yet those who smugly ask, "why were safety warnings ignored?" might care to pick through malfunction reports from the previous 112 shuttle flights to see the benefits that hindsight brings. In them, they would find mention of half-a-dozen crucial pieces of hardware that have repeatedly faltered or failed, and have defied attempts at repair.
As an experimental vehicle, the shuttle is a collection of accidents waiting to happen. There is no obvious reason why it was foam debris that eventually caused a fatal accident, rather than any of these other problems. So it is not enough, says Harold Gehman, a retired admiral who acted as the board's chairman, to identify the widget that failed, fire the people closest to it, then fix the widget. For it is not merely the widget and its managers that are to blame. Instead, there is a need to look at NASA's whole culture and organisation. That observation, too, is no surprise. But having it in black and white may, at last, cause something to be done.
The plan that fell to Earth
According to John Logsdon, another member of the board, and also director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington, DC, NASA's organisational problems include a 40% budget cut over the past decade; the assumption that the shuttle was an operational (rather than an experimental) vehicle; uncertainty over the future of the programme; pressures to finish construction of the international space station (the servicing of which is the shuttle programme's current excuse for continuing); and the absence of a robust safety programme.
The heart of the problem, though, is that the shuttle is a bad design, full of compromises, too risky, hopelessly optimistic and trying to be too many things to too many people. In order to gain approval for its construction, promises were
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I think that the author was really off the mark.
First, the engineer/scientist comparison is incomplete. There is a third category, the inventor. He can often be one of the two, often he is all three.
The engineer leverages science to build useful creations. The scientist researchers the way the universe works, he often cares nothing for invention, only knowledge.
The inventor really doesn't CARE about science OR engineering. He just wants something that works and is happy when it does. If it fails, he will invent something better. He'll use science and engineering if it furthers his goals.
The beueracrat is of course the forth factor that tries to get engineers, scientists and inventors to serve some other goal. Sometimes the public well-being, sometimes his own. Most often he serves his bosses well being in pursuit of his own which may or may not correspond to the well being of an organization (like the public interest).
Part of serving your bosses best interest is not making him look bad. When you ground your project, your project looks bad irregardless of whether it's the right thing to do. It causes the schedule to slip, and somewhere up the line the big boss is staking his reputation on it. Thats how you get to be the big boss, making promises and coming through.
The truth is that failure is a part of success. Risk is a fundamental part of achievement and risk will ALWAYS produce failures at some point.
I am disspointed at the nature of Columbia's failure. However, in such a game as space travel, risk is an incredible factor. Despite an incredible effort to systematically mitigate risk, you will have failures.
Whether it's from the managements perspective or the engineers, failure will inevitably occur. The prime risk for the managers is that NOTHING would get done if they did EVERYTHING the engineers wanted to. The perfect system isn't created, it evolves. And evolution NEEDS failure to point out mistakes.
In this case, the managers were wrong. Their stonewalling and mindless dedication to schedule produced the death of a crew and the loss of a multi-billion dollar vehicle. In some other case, it could be an engineer who used the wrong unit system or an engineer that pendantically freeted over an issue that ultimately wasn't that important.
The lesson is to seek balance. And of course, even when you have balance you will have failures. Unfortunatly, for NASA, their failures are always VERY unforgiving.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
"Egads, do you have any idea why we have Unions? They are groups to protect *highly-specialized* jobs. "
The history of unions shows that to be a lie. Unions exist to protect workers from corporate abuse. I know that's before your time but...
"Now engineers are nowhere near that highly specialized. If you design software for IBM and they fire you, what do you do? You go to one of the 1000s of other firms that employ software engineers. The Engineering market can self-balance itself. It's large enough that a group of coorporations can't get together and decide that electrical engineering should be a minimum wage job."
One word. Globalization!
In short corporations are going to do what's in their own best interest, not yours.
For a quick and dirty solution, how about an Apollo style capsule with a parasail on top, so its steerable (to a certain extent) but cheap. It could even use tiles, rather than an ablative heatshield, although a hard landing on those is probably not a good idea! (Ablative heatshield on the outside, tiles on the inside for emergencies? IANARS (rocket scientist!))
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
The purpose of management is not to make sure that the software has high quality, or even that it is shipped at any particular time.
The purpose of management is to extract money from customers.
Try it both ways. Go write some software on your own time and equipment and give it away under an open source license. Include a note in the software asking for donations. Then try working for a company with managers and writing software (heck, you might even find a company that will pay you to write GPL'd software, there are more and more such companies around).
The software will have a lot of similarities in both cases, but in the first case, you will not get much $, and in the second case, you will get $$$.
That's what managers do. They sure don't make your project better, but they arrange things so that you get $$$.
I'm sorry. Can you tell me what is so bad about the Chinese or Russians getting to xxx first? If they do it, then they earned it. Clearly, NASA is incapable. That said, I don't think China will succeed, though India has a chance, and Europe just might possibly.
But my point is that it probably would be better just to shut the thing down, until we get off our warhorse, and stop screwing each other financially, and our economy therefore recovers. Until that point, I don't foresee anything but disaster.
Oh, and... those engineers who put their souls on the line over a fatally flawed design? They were lousy engineers; either they realized it was flawed, and still chose to work a deadly project, or they didn't know it was flawed, but should have. That admittedly leaves plenty of others who were in unflawed fields, but the engineers too need to take their share of the blame. If you're an engineer, at some point, it isn't just a job. I'd compare it to doctors and the hippocratic oath, but these days, it seems that for them it's just a job, so I'll leave well enough alone.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
There comes a time in the life of every project when you have to shoot the engineers and put it into production.
If you want it 100 percent safe,
it will NEVER get done.
That is why astronauts are heros and
programmers are not.
But try as I might, I can't lay 100% of the blame on them: they see the budget for aero and space research being cut (more tax-cuts for the wealthy!!!) and they know they need to get public opinion behind them. That means the Shuttle must fly, and it must be a media spectacle.
The truth of the matter is:
- much of the "research" that is done on Shuttle flights could be done just as well by unmanned missions; and
- "reusable spacecraft" is an oxymoron at the current state of technology (even ignoring pork boondoggles like Morton Thiokol in Utah)
.
Time to ax the Shuttle program. Give NASA some real money. Move the little experiments to the various LEO launches on small vehicles. Use heavy lift rockets like Energiya and Ariane while NASA designs and contracts out a US design, perhaps an updated SaturnV or something. To hell with jingoistic crap like "giving up the space race to the Russians and Europeans" -- let's not cut off our noses to spite our faces.And let's not forget that space travel for humans is still very much an experimental thing. "There be dragons -- expect to die!" There still will be no dearth of volunteers for astronaut positions.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
One of the most important recommendations the report made, and which is provoking little comment, is that NASA needs to separate the shuttle's operational managment from the shuttle's safety management.
That is, the people who decide "This machine can/can't fly even if we do/don't fix that widget" ought not to be the same people who are responsible for flying the thing. This especially applies to approving safety waivers.
The model to follow is that of the U.S. military. Operations is in one command, R&D is in another, and the people who say a plane is safe to fly are not the people who get paid to fly it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
And how long will it be before "Eat at Joe's" is painted on the Moon?
Jesus saves and takes half damage.
And, yes, you're correct about the reams of paper. I once produced over 50 pages of report to go along with a 13 line code change.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
http://www.ceramics-ez.com/ceramics/0021570_004
Jeff Parsons
the script kiddie who got caught...
That's right. You get my big lump in your throat when my "shuttle" soars.
what the hell is this
NASA suffers from the following dilemma:
(1) It's political support comes largely from manned spaceflight
(2) There is no justifiable reason for manned spaceflight.
Robotic exploration is safer and cheaper. You don't have to worry about keeping hunks of meat alive in a very hazardous environment. Just the amount of sheilding required to keep astronauts alive on long flights boggles the mind. Robots don't care if a flight takes years, people do. The list goes on and on.
Because so much of NASA's political support comes from denying these fundamental facts, they will continue to put humans at risk for no reason at all and at considerable expense.
dtg
The truth is an offense, but not a sin.------R. N. Marley
and i'm only in the first few paragraphs...
The steam engine was developed before thermodynamics but it wasn't built before the equations of water->steam were figured out. It was built on science first. Joseph Black (a Scot) discovered the specifics of water's latent heat, in order to help Scotch whiskey makers conserve fuel and ice. He was an assistant to James Watt, and Watt used Black's numbers in order to fix the problems with Neukeman's water pump (being used in the tin mines off the Cornish coast), and in doing so, created the steam engine. And the whole issue of the pump was using the (scietifically proven through invention of the barometer) vaccuum pump in the first place.
Watt couldn't have done it without the science spcifically the heat chemistry of water and the discovery of the vaccuum. Science did lead engineering in this case.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Well, when the last three blow up the American manned space program will stop anyway.
A Saturn V could put 120 tons into LEO. That's as much as a year's worth of shuttle launches. They'd be cheaper *and* safer.
Of course, this would require NASA and Congress not turning the shuttle replacement into pork for the aerospace companies, so it ain't gonna happen.
You'd know about failure, wouldn't you Michael?
"Are you sure that severity is a '10'? If you mark it as '10', we'll might actually have to fix it"
So that is the fountain of youth, I wonder why it only works three quarters of the time.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
People die at work all the time, Thousands upon Thousands died in exploring earth, we've gotten off damned cheap for loss of life in space. Not to be calous or anything, but we should suck shit like this up, and keep going, we shouldn't even PAUSE in our exploration, we should look at what's going on, we should try and make things safe, but we shoudn't disgrace what these people died for by stoping.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
If it was an Apollo style capsule, it would have a parachute in it anyway for re-entry.
The Apollos were highly survivable. With the escape tower and no SRBs, there wasn't any point in the launch they couldn't have the capsule seperated and moving away from any booster explosion.
There are too many seemingly obvious solutions to the problems with space technology for me to believe that the current state of affairs is caused by anything but a combination of politics and a bunch of government contractors that don't want to obsolete themselves.... *sigh*
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
With Columbia, they wouldn't have had to worry about foam falling from the external tank if the external tank were beneath them.
With Challenger, having the orbiter on top wouldn't have saved them. The SRBs would have almost certainly destroyed the orbiter, since they couldn't be shut off. They'd have been able to survive if there were no SRBs.
Challenger - If the crew had been in a smaller craft on top, an explosion in a lower stage could have been escapable if the smaller craft could separate and land.
That sounds like a relatively small improvement in the odds. If two pounds of foam can make such a big hole, imagine what a chunk of metal shrapnel from an exploding rocket would do.
Columbia - If the craft that was to be used for re-entry had been on top, it would never have had the risk of freaking insulation (two pounds!? still drives me nuts) falling onto and damaging its heat shielding.
I agree with that, but ST-107 wouldn't have been at risk of flying foam if NASA had addressed the problem. They should have grounded it until they found a fix. The stuff isn't supposed to come off, and they ignored the fact that it does.
Disregarding the two catastrophes which were attributed to mismanagement, the system is 105 for 105.
We don't have to obey all `laws' just because people with guns (or their employers) say something is `law'. Most people on this planet DO NOT AGREE with copywrong `laws', and we won't cooperate at gunpoint. If someone pulls a gun on me, I may `respect' copywrong `law', i.e. OBEY AT GUNPOINT. Given the chance, I might shoot in self defence, though.
"Fully one-quarter of the people who make it to the top of Everest die."
Actually 100% of people who make it to the top of Mt. Everest die, as do 100% of people who don't. What's your point?
God - do we have to have this argument AGAIN on slashdot?
The problem with private enterprise is that it expects rewards from its funding - rewards that generate $$$, not scientific knowledge or nationalistic pride, but cold hard cash. The problem with space is that there is as-of-yet, no viable way to make $$$ out there. Tourism is the only industry that's already made a start in space, but its first steps were shaky, it relied on a publically-funded infrastructure, and it has yet to progress any further. As for mining, there is nothing up there that we can't get down here for cheaper. Some might point to the He-3 resources on the moon, but these are not needed at all except for in undeveloped nuclear fusion technology.
I suppose there is one commercial industry that has been succesful in space: the sattelite communication/telecommunications industry. However, private interests are not going to progress beyond the sorts of sattelites we are currently flying, let alone go anywhere near manned flight on there own.
In conclusion, I would argue that private interest is not an "easier beast to summon." In fact, I would say that it is much more difficult to raise funds for space exploration through private means than it is to get public support. A space race with China would generate the neccesary support very quickly, and we might start seeing some projects come to fruition rather than being nearly completed only to be scrapped for going over-budget, and then being restarted a few years later to satiate the military-industrial complex. The only alternative that I can see having any success in space other than publically-funded programs is philanthropy. If some very rich people got together and started offering more prizes similar to the X-prize, we could see some actual development. It worked in aviation, the only thing holding it back for space is that the prizes need to be that much bigger to make it worthwhile.
In short, space exploration's only hope lies in publically funded programs or philanthropic rewards, not in the commercial exploitation of resources that don't exist.
where is the commercial interest going to come from? if it were going to come, wouldn't it have? am i wrong, or is the reason that the government is doing that no one else reallly wants to? (i _could_ be wrong mind you :)
Is it really that hard to make your link in the article go through Slashdot or Google so everyone doesn't have to register?
***
Radio Shack. You've got questions...we've got blank stares(TM).
You can't just leave us hanging!
Not gonna happen. The profits are too far off to get private enterprise to put much money into anything more ambitious than tossing the occasional comm. bird into orbit. We wouldn't even have viable jet airliners without all the government money put into jet research. You think that private enterprise is gonna take us to Mars?
Basically, it proves that NASA was aware of the problems generated by foam insulation particles flying off the main tank, but the agency dismissed them.
Interestingly, foam problems started when the foam was modified to comply with new EPA regulations without adequate testing.
I heard a lot of grumpy engineers complain that they when they work on a government project, they cannot change the color of a button without having to go through layers of red tape. So how come that the EPA can get NASA to pull such a major change without any control? Is that because administrations feel nothing wrong can come out of measures that increase their costs, hence their budgets?
I am afraid that NASA has outlasted its usefulness. It should be sized down and concentrate on science missions, while leaving commercial launches to commercial enterprises. The US public should clamor for it while it's still time.
Then again, there is nothing intrinsecally wrong with having a Chinese moonbase and an Indian space station.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Would be nice if they could launch a Saturn 5 but those engeers are dead or retired that designed, builted and launched it and all the data is gone!
The last set of shuttle "replacement" are going nowhere. For example after the Russan could not do their full side, the US took on more. One designed was a lifeboat and with that designed also canceled the 7 astronauts on the ISS is cut down to three or max that a Rusan capsule could take. And the those three are on constant call just to keep thing going! The last one was a mess with the tank and other designed problems.
The shuttle is a mouse designed by a group or basicaly an elephant. With NASA there is really no insentive to make getting a pound up to LEO or anywhere else up there cost less or could even figure out how. That is the difference between the airline industry and NASA on moving a pound of material from one place to another. Or another analogy is have mutiple cities but no connection between them but very expensive transport. They dont expand or gain bennifits. But get a cheep road system and thing expand quickly.
I hope the Xprize will ignite private and low cost ways to space. With a transport system that is expensive, buggy and costly, any problem is a major disaster. A airliner crash does not bring everything to a grinding halt with all airports shutting down. Actualt NASA need to look at the fundmentals and figure exactly what they need and should do. If getting out of launched business then so be it. If private can do it for less money but safer do it. The NASA of today is NOTHING like the NASA of old.
Is there a downside to either the Europeans and Chinese "beating" us in the space race (ie flying people around in space shuttles)? Seems to me if they "beat" us we get all the benefits of going up there, with none of the costs. Must be a pride thing.
It's true that management failures played a role in both accidents. But if the shuttle were a well-designed, well-thought-out vehicle, rather than the non-cost-effective maintenance nightmare that it apparently is, it wouldn't be such a juicy target for budget cuts.
The problem with space is that there is as-of-yet, no viable way to make $$$ out there.
What's wrong with Jerry Pournelle's proposal? Essentially a vastly expanded X-Prize, with a top prize equal to the cost of about 4 shuttle flights (or less, if you think NASA's estimates of the cost of a shuttle flight are optimistic).
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Check The Man Who Sold the Moon.
And, to firmly plant both feet on either side of the fence, check out The Artemis Project.
We'll get there. We need a D.D. Harriman, and exceptional circumstances, or simple, inevitable time, and someone (or some people) less well-placed than D.D. will get the human race there.
Yep, I'm a security expert who is an optimist - but only about things other than security.
Redundancy is good; triple redundancy is twice as good! - Me.
...when the space program is being run by pilots. And as long as the space program is training pilots to be astronauts there's going to be a push to keep wings on space ships. The bottom line from an engineering standpoint is that it costs more to boost wings into orbit than a "spam can" ballistic re-entry vehicle. The shuttle was a bad engineering design but politically sexy.
Interestingly, one of the justifications for the horribly inefficient glide-to-landing design was the necessity of sending out a Navy task force to collect a ballistic craft after splash down. But these days who needs a fighter CAP for recovery? A converted cargo ship would do the job. Couple cranes and helo deck.
Also funny was the supposed safety factor a winged spacecraft had in case of an aborted launch. Allegedly the shuttle could glide to a safe landing. Hahahahaha! The orbiter has a glide ratio a little better than a brick. In the event of a low-speed abort, your winged spacecraft is a dirt dart.
If we're going to move forward in space it's going to be in ballistic re-entry vehicles. I just can't find a way to make the cost numbers for wings really work.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I note that the glideslope for reentry is very steep. This enables planners to prevent a possible shortfall on approach. However, to enable the sharp glideslope many very sharp turns have to be undertaken. I feel that these sharp turns are dangerous because they encourage the failure of wing parts on that pointing into the turn. The consequence of a power shortage, hydraulic failure, or surface failure leading to heat intrusion, if occuring during one of these turns are higly likely to lead to a tumble. A fatal tumble for both crew and craft.
According to the CAIB report, if they had imaged early enough, they had a very real chance of being able to recover the astronauts. Even an attempted patch and land could have been attempted, the thing is that reentry with a holed RCC panel was 100% death - they were aware of this. They just didn't know enough to make a reasoned decision.
Sure a space walk would have been risky, but anything is better than certain death. The crew (especially the pilots) would have been trained to patiently go through every available option, working with the ground.
Sorry the ground wasn't there. Management had decided that it wasn't worth the engineer's time to research this.
See my journal, I write things there
We fail because, we regulate an industry with such restrictive laws that make innovation impossible for all but the well established businesses that pre-exist the regulations. Lockheed, Boeing, Rockedyne, General Dynamic, etc all fit the pre-existing regulations category. People like X-prize winners spend more time and money reading the rules, and jumping through hoops, and trying to find legal sources of Hydrogen peroxide, than they do trying to innovate. Thus, it is economically not feasible to innovate. You blow your budget at a .com burn rate just trying to read the rules and regs and filing forms and other beurocratic bullshit, while you still haven got permission to test fire your new idea. X-prize competitors valiantly try to improve the world of space launch, and the dragon they fight (federal regulation by FAA and the CFR's) is not the one they should be (defeating gravity so we can have cheaper launch costs). The government rules make regular parts and other normally off the shelf things expensive too! Just compare the cost of buying regular components vs various quality and reliability certified components that come off the same assembly line in the same run.
Why people die is because we use the same spacevehicle for both man and non-man rated duties. There is no benefit to have the shuttle design we currently have. There is no gained benefit for using it the way we do. Cargo should be launched in a non-man rated section of the launch vehicle like we launched the Lunar Excursion Module for the Apollo missions. It (the cargo area, not the LEM itself) was not man rated, so space, weight, and other factors could be optimized. The LEM cargo area was ditched while the LEM was extracted for its duty. The shuttle is entirely man rated. A failure anywhere on the shuttle is a failure on a man rated system that puts the crew in jeopardy. The Apollo mission could have catastrophically lost the cargo area and successfully returned the crew since the man rated portion of the spacecraft was totally compartmentalized from the cargo. The mission would have failed and been aborted, but everyone would have lived. The concept of a reuseable space vehicle works only if the job can be completed more economically by reusing/recycleing the vehicle as opposed to a one time use item. Re-using a man rated space craft at any level of complexity has inherent risk, as you are hoping that you have not used up all of the service life of the by re-use craft. Service life is a VERY hard thing to estimate. Take your car to your mechanic and ask him what month of what year it will last you to. If he tells you a date, he is lying. Now, re-use of a low complexity space vehicle like an Apollo capsule will be easy due to the low complexity. Re-use of a large multipurpose, multilaunch, high complexity space vehicle is fundamentally risky.
Re-use of space vehicles and launch vehicles should be re-evaluated for all
I work at NASA for a subcontractor, and am posting anonymously so I don't get fired. I'm going to tell you exactly what's wrong with NASA. There are two things: Congress, and the problems cited in the CAIB report. First, Congress. Here's a specific example that is deliberately "blurred" to conceal my source.
In the 1990's, when starting the Space Station, a building was selected for a specific development function of the station. The building had been used for something very similar during the Apollo and Skylab eras, so it was just what was needed. But based on the plans that Congress had approved and committed money to, it wasn't big enough. So a 3 year, 25+ megabuck project was started to expand the building. By the time the building was expanded, Congress had screwed Station into the ground: The project had been porkbarrelled to get everyone's support into 1500 contracts in all 50 states and 11 foreign countries. This was before it became the "international" space station. One example: An airlock was split into two contracts in two states. The door itself was designed and built in one state, the frame in another. You can imagine how much that added to the cost with all the "teleconferencing" and travel back and forth.
In order to pay for the porkbarrel, Congress had to shrink the size of the station. Oh and that building? By the time the station finished shrinking, the requirement for the building had shrivelled also. The building's original shape and size was sufficient. But now the building was much bigger, and became a $25 million "cost overrun".
The cost goes up every time Congress "back pedals" on its commitments. And NASA gets the blame. The only reason the "international" space station works and the "National" one didn't is because it is much harder for Congress to weasel out of international treaties.
Management vs Engineers:
I won't go into this, because I know that I've been heard discussing the management problems in the hallways at work. The CAIB report barely scratched the surface, but accurately described what it did find. Engineers really have no say in engineering decisions - only limited political influence. The only way this can change is if those making the decisions are stripped of that authority, and those who are technically competent get the authority.
I'd be generous enough to allow those managers whose engineering credentials are outdated to go back to school in order to keep their jobs. But there are far too many managers, too high in the food chain, who have too little or no engineering experience at all. They gotta go. But are they gonna go? Well, who makes the decision to jettison the deadwood? Higher up deadwood, normally.
I expect little change. In a few years, we'll lose another bird.
The data is lost huh? Then build a Saturn VI!
here's my case:
1. Cryogenic turbo pump design and reliability has improved significantly since the early 70's
2. all the data we need is just lying around in space museums and outdoor rocket gardens. i think i saw something on the net that had an SV laying on it's side. not to mention recoverd apollo capsuls.
3 Materials technology both metalurgical and especially composite is well in advance of what they had available in the 60's. All we really neeed is the dimensions of this stuff
4. our sensors and digital control devices are much more accurate and faster reacting and can process more I/O.
5. the stages could be made reusable due to advances in materials technology giving us higher strength and lighter weight. with our miniscule electronics we could also have "smart" stages that could recover themselves to pre determined points on the globe.
6. the payload could increased because of he abovementioned wieght savings and improvements in the turbopump/engine design.
Thus we would have a Saturn VI instead of a Saturn V.
Political pressure from the White House? You decide.
If there was more money to be made from going into space, more people would be willing to take greater risks in order to do so. I can't help wondering if there will eventually be a "wagon train to the stars" (to crib from Gene Roddenberry) where ordinary men and women put their lives on the line in simple, inexpensive rockets in order to reap the rewards of space. What were the odds of an early settler heading across the US in one of those original wagon trains, bound for new lands and most importantly new money? Personally I'd probably strap into a rocket if the odds were 50%, just to get into space; and I know I'd do it if the odds were up around 70% without a second thought.
The only real hope I see for space is the X-Prize, which of course gets heavy coverage here. However I'd like to include a snippet from their factsheet which has particular relavence here: We can only hope that the space industry sees such a revolution take place. Although the The Dawn of the Space Age began October 4, 1957 with the launch of Sputnik I, the sun still hasn't moved that far from the horizon in all those years.
Jonah Hex
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
Mine reads:
Failure Is Always an Option - Mozilla Firebird
ohh man what a sidespliter h0h0h0
But there's also Abort and Retry!
Since the wings are only needed at the very end of the shuttle's flight, why not cut them off and use parachutes like for Gemini and Apollo? No more fragile ceramic tiles to be hit (or fewer, anyway), and the payload is increased by reducing the weight of the orbiter itself.
Chip H.
His intent is more clear if you read the whole essay, not just the version abridged for the NYTimes.
(I wish the slashdot editors would add a link to the full story into the summary!)
I'll exerpt Hickam's answer to those 2 questions:
That sounds like a relatively small improvement in the odds.
I'm also dubious about anything nearby the Challenger explosion surviving. However, there are some helpful factors.
If two pounds of foam can make such a big hole, imagine what a chunk of metal shrapnel from an exploding rocket would do.
But the damage from the foam only became dangerous in the high-stress environment of atmospheric re-entry. After a booster explosion, you'd only have to glide down from 3000m or so. You could do this with parachutes (either a large one for the whole craft, or even individual ejection-seats).
Other design improvements could've helped survivablity in that accident:
If the vehicle had been designed as a traditional nosecone capsule rather than a spaceplane, it's default tumbling behavior might've been to
If the boosters had used a stabler fuel than hydrogen, then the explosion would've been weaker, or might not even have happened at all. (The rockets could've been smaller if the military hadn't thought they'd need the shuttle to lift spy satellites. (They wouldn't have thought that if the Nixon administration hadn't passed down a mandate that all US satellites would be launched by shuttle (He wouldn't have done that if he didn't need a circle argument to justify Pentagon support for a shuttle (Nixon wouldn't have needed a shuttle at all if he hadn't been trying to be a greater President than JFK))))
Disregarding the two catastrophes which were attributed to mismanagement, the system is 105 for 105.
That's misattribution... or at least not hitting the root cause.
It's acceptable (for some purposes) to disregard the fatalities during the 1960s ELV (expendable launch vehicle) space research- they were due to design errors that were corrected. But you can't similarly discount the shuttle accidents from its safety record.
The reason "mismanagement" killed two shuttles is because the shuttle is a too complex design, especially since one stated goal of the shuttle program was "reduced launch cost". You can't repeat something complicated and do it correctly each time, while under constant pressure to reduce cost. But that pressure is unavoidable- partly because most shuttle missions are meaningless to begin with.
So if you want to call it mismanagement, it can only be due to the administrative decision to fly Space Shuttles at all.
For more info, read Hickam's full editorial, which the NYTimes abridged in their printing. Easterbrook's article is also excellent (written as it was before Challenger even lifted off). As were the slashdot threads from the 72 hours following the Columbia destruction.
Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA
University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226851753.
I hope Diane now writes the second edition in light of the current disaster.
nous
> those engeers are dead or retired that designed,
True.
> all the data is gone!
False.
Simply google for "saturn v blueprints" and you'll find any number of sites debunking that "the Saturn V blueprints were destroyed" stupidity.
The difficulty with reviving the Saturn V is not in the absence of the plans... those are safe and sound; but in the fact that the Saturn V was built with 1960's technology, most of the parts aren't made anymore, and many of the companies that made parts of the Saturn V don't even exist anymore. Furthermore, the production facilities that made said parts have long since been either shut down, or retooled. And NASA's own facilities, including the all-important Launch Complex 39, have long since been modified from Saturn V specs, for use with the shuttle.
With all of the modifications to the design that would be necessary to start production on a new run of Saturn V's, on modern production lines, with modern manufactureing techniques, with modern components and electronics; it'd be easier just keep the basic math, but design an entirely new rocket. Certianly, it'd be a damn sight easier than finding vendors to recreate the '60's era parts to build new examples of the original design.
But not a whit of the Saturn V design or data is "gone".
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
Think about it, you have wings that are subject to thousands of tons of force during braking manuvers, and you want some kind of kinetic linking system or components on tracks?
It'd be impossible (well nearly) to design such a system that wouldn't increase the weight of the vehicle appreciably. A rigid design helps to minimize reinforcement, which minimizes weight, well, you get it now.
And do you know of any standard aircraft that have this amazing feature? Baby steps...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
...then thats what it takes.
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.
There's plenty of commercial interest in space, it's just being strangled to death by government regulation and that nice socialist treat that says any profit from space must be shared equally among all the peoples of the Earth, or some other such asinine nonsense.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
>>The problem with private enterprise is that it expects rewards from its funding - rewards that generate $$$, not scientific knowledge or nationalistic pride, but cold hard cash. The problem with space is that there is as-of-yet, no viable way to make $$$ out there.
I guess that's why Bell Labs, a privately funded corporate research company has so many nobel laureates and so many patents and technology breakthroughs. Ditto Xerox. Ditto GE. Ditto HP. Nearly all scientific breakthroughs have come from private enterprise, because these businesses know that future cold, hard cash comes from R&D paying off. You've been reading too much socialist drivel.
As far as commercial returns in space? How about high-vacuum, microgravity manufacturing?
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Since governments make things inefficient, and, free markets rule as you say, then, where is the stampede of corporations to eliminate copyrights and software patents. Instead of letting a machine innately good at copying information thrive to its fullest, why do corporations demand the government pass laws against people copying songs?
Governments can exist without corporations, but corporations cannot exist without government. If you truly do believe that big government is as intrusive and unnecessary as you say it is, then let us have government eliminate the patent office, the trademark office, the copywrite office, the various acts for the laws of the seas, the notion of a currency and currency exchange between nations, the laws that give corporations the right to enforce non-compete agreements, the laws that give corporations the right to investigate potential employees and the laws that protect trade secrets. If you want to have a free enterprise system and a reduced government, then, get rid of all of those things above, because your corporate welfare is no different than gov't cheese for rich people.
This is my sig.
Disaster is the loss of 3000 people and the WTC.
The space shuttle hardly rates, except as a vehicle for your anti-American rants, you pathetic bastard.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
"So if you want to call it mismanagement, it can only be due to the administrative decision to fly Space Shuttles at all."
That's the extreme. It's just my opinion from listening and reading to a range of expert opinions that they let got sloppier with each mission. After Challenger, they should have learned not to push the envelope. Actually, I think they did learn it, and then forgot.
If the standards for ensuring the integrity of the heat shield had stayed as high as they were in the beginning, then they would have had to fix the foam, or prove that they can't fix it and stay on earth. They were lucky enough to discover the potential failure mode without actually having a catastrophe and they failed to address it.
It also needed an aircraft carrier and helicopters etc. to pick it up. If you put some sort of steering mechanism, like a paraglider, presumably the pickup gets cheaper and easier as the search area gets smaller. (The Russians landed on land, so that is also an option). I was thinking about reusable capsules, rather than a new one every time, which was my reasoning behind the heat shield using shuttle-style tiles. Plus they should be easier to fit/ replace on a symmetrical object, rather than the individually fitted shuttle tiles.
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
"Let private enterprise underwrite it, and all you need is commercial interest. That's a MUCH easier beast to summon."
After all, we all know how safe the trains are now that commercial interests are running it. Why not apply the same safety and reliability standards to space travel?
For those without experience of UK trains, imagine your "First Power" company running space travel. Of Microsoft, another example of how commerical interests always put safety before profit.
The airlines care about their planes first and foremost. Losing four of those planes across the board must have put a huge dent in the airline industry, and now they really need to care about their planes more.
If tight security makes people want to drive and risk their lives, that's their business. But don't blame the airlines. If they could, they would remove half the security and let everybody on board, and then in case a terrorist stands up, gas everyone on board and land the plane in autopilot. This is the only option possible for the airlines, since a plane's survival is important to them.
But how many people would agree to such a system? Even if such a risk of this happening was less fatal to the passenger (by chance) than if he drove instead? Would people agree to this? No? Then the airlines have to keep their planes alive by searching everybody thoroughly.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Most (American) companies are spending less on R&D these days than they did in the past.
I don't know whether this is due to the recession, or due to an increasing "let's not look beyond next quarter" mentality.
Probably both.
Face it, like the British before us, and the French and Spain before them, we are stagnating, as anyone at the top always does.
We can only hope that China becomes more free and open as it passes us to become the world's next dominant power.
(There are already signs of this happening, albeit somewhat more slowly than most of us would like.)
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
"i _could_ be wrong"
Uh, here on Slashdot, you can use html.
You don't have to use "_" to indicate italics.
For example, "i <i>could</i> be wrong" produces "i could be wrong".
Use the misnamed "Plain Old Text" mode to get this result.
God - do we have to have this argument AGAIN on slashdot?
You're kidding, right?
The report is nutz. Imagery denied becasue no one knew who if anyone 'officially' requested it despite the fact it was requested and they knew they had a significant impact that at the time of the deinal was classified as an out of family event. At the very worst it may have put to rest any doubts regarding the impact. There are stories from old timers here ( MSFC ) talking about photos with legible tile serial numbers on the first shuttle flight were provided by military assests. However the people that denied the requests and thought the imagery would not be sufficient were not cleared to know the level of detail that could be provided if needed. Jevuss.
Granted after reading the report I still hold that most likely once the foam hit they were fucked. The repair option borders on the insane and the Atlantis rescue scenario was at the raw edge of feasibility before considering how perfect everything would have had to be just to get Atlantis up there before they died from a toxic atmosphere. Granted both options have the edge of sounding just crazy enough to actually work.
However I think that question is moot. The system is inherrently flawed. Failure is inevitable and in a system this far on the ragged edge merely a question of time. The culture of living with that fact is inevitably going to become callous. People question how the program could continually ignore impact damage from the foam and the answer is because that it wasn't the only thing that was on their plate. It was part of a never ending stream of items with potentially catastrophic results. It was background noise. It wasn't like Tile damage was the one glaring fault to an otherwise perfect system. In that kind of environment if you obessess over every possible failure the way it should be all the time on a system as problematic as SHuttle has prooven to be the only possible outcome is insanity. The callousness and complacency were an almost inevitable result. An independent safety board will help but only so much. The reactor managment example is somewhat deciving. The margin for error in running a nuclear reactor is far more manageable than the safety margin of rocket and re-entry operations.
In otherwords the complacent management is merely the means by which the system failed. You could have had an entirely techncially savvy decision making process appropriately concious at ever step of the process and perhaps in this case you would have had a dramatic rescue or on orbit repair story to talk about now instead of a man made meteor shower over Texas. However it would be just as likely that given that level of management a critical system would have catastrophcially failed or hull integrity compromised by an un-avoidable piece of space junk that no amount of management could avoid or recover from. In that case a system would be redesigned. In this case managment needs and over haul... and a serious influx of technical knowledge with which to assess the lower level analysis infomration provided.
THe statistics regarding shuttle system dictate failure at some point on some level. The system is to complex and to far out on the edge with to little margin. In this case the system that failed was the human system. Next time we may have a mechanical system go down. Its not an excuse to fail to improove, its just reality.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
I recognize that my post was somewhat long (for slashdot), but you really should try to read the whole post before replying...
"I guess that's why Bell Labs, a privately funded corporate research company has so many nobel laureates and so many patents and technology breakthroughs. Ditto Xerox. Ditto GE. Ditto HP. Nearly all scientific breakthroughs have come from private enterprise, because these businesses know that future cold, hard cash comes from R&D paying off. "
Well, the pedantic in me would point out that Bell Labs actually recieves a lot of government funding, but you do have good points with Xerox, GE, and HP. However, I would disagree with your contention that "Nearly all scientific breakthroughs have come from private enterprise". The apollo and Gemini programs generated a huge amount of technology, and a lot of the private enterprises which have significant R+D are government defense contractors like Lockheed Martin. Even so, I would still argue that the risk-benefits ratios of space R+D are prohibitive for private companies.
As for high-vacuum microgravity manufacturing, can you give me one application in which this is even useful, let alone worth the cost of hauling all the raw materials into orbit? This without even considering that all kinks have yet to be worked out and that there will be numerous expensive failures before such a system is perfected makes me believe that we won't see this until space has been opened up a lot more.
There is no incentive for long-term research right now, everything is focused on short-term profit.
While this is generally true of dying companies that have been overrun by clueless MBA types, it is not the case for serious tech companies. Research is a huge part of the expenses at IBM, Airbus, Corning, DuPont and many more. Where do you think all these new products are coming from? Even the dumbest MBAs understand that when half your revenue comes from products less than 3 years old, you have to invest in R&D or die. Shareholders in these companies hate the kill-research-and-jump-ship roaming execs and keep them at bay.
Now, you have to distinguish between pure research and applied research. No private company is going to fund a probe to Jupiter unless there is a profit to make, so such pure science missions will be the apanage of NASA and other tax-funded agencies. The state agencies also fund a space branch of their defense, and these should probably not be privatized for national security reasons.
But ask yourself: What valuable research do you do when you launch a telecom satellite? Answer: None. This is old stuff. It's operation-driven engineering, not research. The only thing you can learn is to cut costs for making future launches cheaper.
Then ask yourself: Since the telecom business is a commercial venture, while should the taxpayer subsidize their launches?
NASA is currently doing many commercial launches that should all be private. Moreover, it is risking human lives and wasting money by relying entirely on the Shuttle system. Why do some commercial operators put satellites on board of the Shuttle, hereby turning astronauts into glorified delivery people, when they could buy the services of Boeing, Lockheed, Arianespace, etc.? Because NASA subsidizes its launches heavily and makes them competitive with private launches, thereby harming commercial launch companies. Is it a good use of taxpayers' money? And remember, the only reason NASA does that is because they need to justify the budget of their Shuttle system, which is so expensive they cannot justify it just for the science missions. (Keep in mind that NASA stopped producing its cheaper unmanned launchers such as Saturn V to free budgets for the Shuttle).
NASA should keep launching the Mars probes and other research. It should not subsidize mundane commercial missions to the detriment of the US aerospace industry. Launching a private satellite should be done by private funds and private launchers. Otherwise the US will never get off the ground.
If you ever want to see humanity get off this wretched rock, we need to increase NASA's budget
NASA was a science outfit in the 60s. Now it's an administration. Its goal is to employ more people next year, not to deliver cheap access to space. Increase its budget and you'll get more expensive systems, not cheaper access to space. If you really want to enter the space age, you want to lower the cost of orbit per kilogram. NASA has no incentive to do that. Only private companies have an incentive to reduce costs. An administration's incentive is to raise them. The metrics for getting promoted are unfortunately rigged that way.
You want a moon base? Set an X-Prize kind of competition for, say, $10 billion, and it will be done. Jerry Pournelle has suggested to pass a law saying this:
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
NASA at the time of Apollo 1 was pretty much where NASA is now: pie-in-the-sky engineering. Everything was assumed to go right; no options for failure were designed into the system. It was thus doomed to failure.
On Apollo 1, the cabin atmosphere was exclusively oxygen to simplify plumbing. The astronauts sat on "couches" of miles of wiring. The exit/escape hatch took 90 seconds to open in perfect conditions and swung inwards because no one wanted the door to pop open on re-entry. Everything was made out of lighter and easier to manufacture plastics. The Saturn booster had a shell supported by air pressure.
A wire on a seat eventually because chafed by the door. The astronauts had been warned beforehand that at the sign of even the smallest problem, even with communications, they were supposed to start working on that door. There were communication problems, but everyone was trying to resolve it rather than escape. Safeguards were passed over in favor of convenience.
Once the fire started, the astronauts had no chance to escape even though they were the only functioning systems on that craft. Their bodies were found in the precise positions their emergency duties would have been. One astronaut was trying to open a door held shut by tons of air pressure. Another was found trying to vent a cabin atmosphere poisoned by burning plastics, but the actuating lever had melted onto his hands. The last astronaut was found sitting on the seat; even in all the chaos, he stayed focused on his task of keeping Mission Control apprised on the situation.
The service personnel outside of the craft knew there was a risk the escape rocket would detonate, but some ran in a vain attempt to rescue the astronauts. None of the rescuers had proper gear and some suffered severe burns. All three astronauts had died because in the midst of competing with the Russians, the designers had forgotten that men were going into these contraptions. No one had given the astronauts a chance.
Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died and the country was responsible enough to rebuild the entire project, from the ground up, the right way. I doubt we will see the same here with Columbia. NASA culture is to blame, but American culture is also to be indicted. At this point, we should give a few billion dollars to build a *good* space-plane, but our priorities lie in killing and dying in battlefields, and consequently our astronauts will continue to suffer the same fates on shoddy spacecraft.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
The newer American rockets are basically updated attempts at Saturn V. They still fail because they try to add feature at the expense of safety. Someone should write up a realistic feature set and then stick tightly to it. No more features.
Just like software, one may add.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
I recognize that my post was somewhat long (for slashdot), but you really should try to read the whole post before replying...
But that would be so... un-slashdot...
Sorry, I did miss that sentence at the end about the prizes.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
uh, some people prefer the added emphasis of using _underscores_ rather than italics in some situations... :)
The NYT and NYC in general are responsible for the weak backbone perception that most of the world has of america. Fuck NYT! and think for yourself.
>As for high-vacuum microgravity manufacturing, can you give me one application in which this is even useful, let alone worth the cost of hauling all the raw materials into orbit?
I'll give you three:
Pharmecuticals.
Nanomachinery.
Integrated circuits
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
My point is that anonymous cowards are stupid; that is why they remain anonymous.
-russ
p.s. they die before leaving Everest, as opposed to the other three-quarters, who make it to the bottom alive.
Duh.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I am an engineer tho I do not work on the shuttle ;) I just work with 1000 gallon containers of explosive solvent and try to do chemical reactions in them, safely.
You are absolutely right- those plots of the shuttle damage were horribly done. The data presented was horribly wrong. And the ultimate price for a mistake was paid, not by the people that made the mistake, but by the people they were sworn to protect- in some form or another
But when you come right down to it... you have a mentality of conjecture that surrounds the failures. Someone plotted the information wrong the first time and THAT BECAME THE PARADIGM as to how to present the information. It's easy to look back and stick the o-ring into a glass of cold water and notice it's not deforming properly, but how many people actually would DIP a segment of plastic into their iced tea while taking a break? None. Period. You'll also note that the senator did NOT drink from his glass afterwards
Experiments cost money. I hate to say it. And when you are an overworked (read 7 til 730 and i'm talking more than 12 hours here) you get to overlook some details now and then. In the 60's it was unlimited funding- a whole crop of enigineers coming and learning it all from the beginning. In the 90's it was 'faster, cheaper, better'. And thats what you get- risk benefit analysis. No room for an engineers 'gut' instict- there isn't a dollar sign and the experiments haven't been performed... so shut up and show us the data (I actually was told that the other day, heh, so I did it and proved my point, but it took me a week...)
It's so very easy to start now and look backwards. But sitting there you don't have the benefit of what would happen. Hell, looking at the tapes of the challenger launch you can see that huge first puff of black smoke come out of the SRB. In that instant an abort should have been made... but... no one saw it until much much later.
Accidents, whether thru misconjecture, not enough information, or just plain 'newness'are the worst type to have to live with. Don't hold everyone there responsible for a few shortsighted business decisions that seemed 'safe.
I don't know about that. Commercial "interest" might very well be easier to muster than public support, but in most cases commercial "interest" == profit, and profit from space exploration simply doesn't exist ... not yet. Although there are probably things one can gain income from the efforts to explore space (physically, mechanically, optically, or otherwise), they are vastly inferior in quantity and profit potential to the amount of R & D that must be spent on them.
Simply put: if you want a space program, it's got to be funded by the government. Businesses see no way to make money, and therefore aren't all that interested.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)