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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
failure *absolutely* should be focused on during design. Not knowing your potential points of failure, and not designing appropriately to mitigate their chances of being realized, is irresponsible at best and disastrous at worst.
i find your statement "Focus on doing your best. If you made a mistake, fix it" somewhat oxymoronic. your "best" should take into account possible failures and likely causes thereof in an attempt to *prevent* mistakes, not apologize for them afterward.
mistakes will happen. it is an inevitability. but to use that inevitability as an excuse to intentionally deemphasize the importance of analyzing failure points during development is a bad practice.
...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
I have a similar attitude: I'm biased against highway construction on ethical grounds. Highway construction has nothing to do with defending our individual rights, and that money could be better spent by the taxpayer. If someone wants a road to go somewhere, they can pay for its construction themself. Or private industry could build roads and sell access to them.
(This post was tongue-in-cheek for the sarcasm-impaired.)
BTW, about your point that there's no competition for NASA, you're missing all the other countries that have space programs. If the USA doesn't get off its butt and make serious space exploration a priority again, it's going to be eclipsed by China and India, which will have the further effect of making the US a 3rd world country as the other space powers reap the economic benefits of it.
"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
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
Scientists need to make observations of the natural world/universe in order to improve their theoretical models. It doesn't happen in a vacum. (Pun accidental ;-)
There is no spoon or sig.
Well then you'd have to add Military spending, Medicare, SS, education, what kind of soda is on Air Force One, etc. Basically, you'd have the entire US Goverment Budget attached.
We already have methods for "voting" for these things. It's called "voting." That's what elected goverment officials are for. Hence the term "representative." Unfortunately, you hardly know what their opinions are on anything except the current "hot topics," but nevertheless, their purpose is to represent you and your wishes. There is no need to re-invent this policy.
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.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
Managers at that level never do anything because they think it's right, they only do what will cover their asses, and they have no conscience about it whatsoever.
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
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
To me, there's one basic valid purpose of government, and that's to defend the individual rights of its citizens.
If you actually believe that then you are either very young or very sheltered (or perhaps both). I realize I sound trite and condescending, but I hear this sort of thing all the time. The basic problem with your assertion is that you are making decisions based on ideology rather than common sense and this has, and always will, lead to errors in judgement. In fact, I would argue that most incorrect decisions are made because of this very reason. There are many legitimate functions of governments that falls outside your very narrow definition that is the best solution to a given problem. By choosing a different solution is just because you *believe* that the government shouldn't be involved is simply shortsighted. Just ask the citizens of Atlanta about what they think about their water works. Of course it goes both ways, certain tasks that are currently performed by the government should be handed over to the private sector. Anyway, the world is not black and white and we shouldn't try to make it so.
--PCB
'Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.' B. Pascal
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
I believe that ice forms on the tanks as a result of the supercooled O2 in the rocket, not because of the weather. The launch could have happened anywhere any any time and the ice/foam problem would still exist.
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.)
I think one answer is UNION
Egads, do you have any idea why we have Unions? They are groups to protect *highly-specialized* jobs. Take commercial airline pilots. They spend their education learning how to fly 747s. That is a non-transferable skill. If the major airlines want to cut their pay by 50% and they didn't have a union to protect them, what would they do? What does an out of work 747 pilot do? Fly crop dusters? Drive a cab? Unions are in place because "the market" can't self-balance certain jobs. There is too much power in the hand of too few employers.
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.
Viva la capitalism!
No, I beg to differ.
Assume NASA did attempt to evaluate the damage and it revealed the Columbia to be a death trap. Yeah, there will be media coverage had it become necessary to send up a repair crew or something.
But there would be an Apollo 13 type effort. Atlantis could go up with a minimal crew and pick up the Columbia crew. Maybe do it in two flights. Leave the Columbia in space until repair becomes possible. Not possible? They'd find a way.
Or, engineer a solution on the ground and figure out a way to get that solution up into space and istalled. Again, an Atlantis crew would head up with the necessary materials and perhaps be the ones to do the repair job. Sounds like the Hubble, doesnt it? Also impossible? They'd find a way.
Engineers are quite capable of great things, and you seem to be underestimating the potential of great thinkers. When JFK made his "before this decade is out" challenge, everyone at NASA thought "No way! You've got to be kidding." But then the people who would do it got thinking of ways they could and they came through.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Its elegant.
Our space program needs a big KISS logo.
BS. Analyses have shown that the US economy has profited greatly from its endeavors in space travel (mostly the pre-Shuttle days I imagine), due to spin-off technologies. Do we really want China and India to become the technology leaders of the world? That'd just leave the US as a second-rate country, maybe worse.
Moreover, there's vast quantities of raw materials in space, such as metals that are rare on earth's crust and therefore very valuable. Whichever nation gets to these first and develops mining technology in space stands to gain a great deal.
Hog wash. The size of the orbiter precludes an inline configuration.
The existence of a large orbiter is the design flaw. There is no need for the launch vehicle to be "reusable". It serves no purpose except good publicity. A shuttle zooming downward to a 3-point landing projects an image of confidence and control. A capsule drifting to a soggy splashdown is humiliating by comparison- but the crew could survive the reentry even with the pilots unconcious and total failure of all onboard electronics.
If you want to fly "spam in a can" on top of a larger rockets then welcome back to 1960!
Yeah, when launches cost 30% as much and were 1400% safer...
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.
Read your history. Collective bargaining power is an essential tool to protect workers from abuse by those who can afford to win a war of "labor attrition" (the workers can't).
Every type of worker should have a union. Unionization provides the ability to leverage your labor pool as a whole, to strike, to increase publicity or awareness of certain issues, and is fundamental to determining and being treated according to your real and fair worth as a labor pool, rather than what the corporate monopolies and upper classes want you to believe you are worth (i.e. next to nothing).
One worker alone is expendable and can be manipulated, lied to and if necessary disposed of with relatively little impact on the bottom line. All workers together are a much bigger bear to strangle, and when workers get together it forces the Wealthy Powers That Be to grudginly admit that they actually do need hands to make their cars or their buildings or their documents, not just edicts from the board room sent out into the vacuum, from which goods magically emerge.
Some people argue that unions allow silly, backward workers to price the fruits of their labor out of the markets, much to the chagrin of the wise old management team who actually knows what they're worth. This is a stupid argument; workers don't set out to unionize their companies out of business. They set out to unionize the CEO's seven-figure salary down to six fixures and to unionize unnecessary layoffs which occur as a result of these salaries back into paid positions. It is the upper management who is generally shamefully willing to shut down an otherwise profitable plant, company, or location simply because they are unwilling to take a pay cut down to reasonable levels in order to remain competitive in the marketplace.
How many times have we seen companies lay of nearly their entire workforce, spending the last year or two before bankruptcy with an essentially empty workplace and sixteen VP's and their secretaries sitting around reading comic books drawing seven figures until the end? This is what Unions are trying to fight... Unions want to help companies remain viable by paying the workers in needed numbers a real and livable wage to do the best job possible, in order to ensure the well-being of the workers and the well-being of the company, which the workers need in order to work!
Of course management and shareholders are typically the short-term losers in this equation, because they are unable to passively rape and pillage entire economic sectors to the same degree that would otherwise be possible from the decks of their carribbean yachts. The desire to shamelessly suck all of the wealth from an otherwise healthy company and leave its workers and its former assets as so much junk on a barren landscape is exactly what drives many in the wealthy west and is exactly what unions want to stop.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Who cares if it's primitive if it's cheap and safe? Would you call the wheels on a car "primitive"? After all, wheels have been around for donkey's years.
Well, technically a politician is supposed to agregate the information of said experts and make a decision. The inherit flaw is in PAC's and campaign financing. A political system that runs of money/donations is a flawed one.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
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.
Then maybe the size of the orbiter is part of the design flaw. Separate the engines from the plane and you get a smaller, more reliable, more capable craft. Hell, the entire orbiter assembly is one giant design flaw.
If you want to fly "spam in a can" on top of a larger rockets then welcome back to 1960!
Refresh my memory. Is this the same 1960 where we went from no manned spaceflight to walking on the fucking moon in nine years? The same 1960 which started a period of American manned spaceflight in which there was not a single death off the ground despite a lightning strike (!) on a running rocket filled with five million pounds of explosive fuel (Apollo 12), an explosion onboard a ship 200,000 miles out from Earth (Apollo 13), a potentially disastrous "pogo" resonance problem in the second stage of an entire series of rockets (all Saturn V missions up to Apollo 13), a heat shield that nearly fell off (Mercury 13), and a host of other problems that occur when newbies explore a hostile environment for the first time? From your commentary, I think your 1960 and my 1960 are not the same one.
The vehicles before the shuttle could take punishment and survive. The shuttle cannot. Both shuttle accidents would have either been impossible or resulted in a big zero fatalities with a 1960s-design space craft. The escape tower would have pulled everyone to safety with a Challenger-type rocket-explodes-during-launch accident, and the ablative heat shields used on those craft are much more durable than the fragile tiles on the shuttle, even if they could have been hit with debris which they can't.
The sad thing about the shuttle is that safety was sacrificed in the name of reusability. This reusability was supposed to give us more capabilities for less money. Yet the shuttle is both less capable and more expensive than the equivalent vehicle it replaced. In the end, we have gained nothing from it but a series of expensive, mostly useless programs and fourteen dead.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
It comes down to two fundamental beliefs:
- The people are smart enough to govern themselves.
- Capitalistic forces will always find the optimal solution to any problem.
You're wrong on both counts.
If you put it to a vote, everyone in the United States would have to worship Jesus Christ, and the Death Certificate of Elvis Presley would be declared invalid. And universities would get funding money for "astrological research." The world is too complex to let all of our decisions be made by people who merely BELIEVE in things. It's far, far better to try to elect a government that will make the best decisions they can. Sometimes they make bad moves, and sometimes they make good moves. Your primary role as a citizen in the U.S. is to make sure your government is run in a way that you agree with. Not that you necessarily agree with all of their choices, but that the process works.
How would you make national freeways? How can capitalistic forces balance the rights and freedoms of the individual versus the needs of society? People are not smart enough to research which lipstick manufacturer pours less toxic waste into the ocean - and to boycott the one that dumps more. They just aren't. And hoping that "concerned citizens" and the media will help achieve that optimal solution is pure foolishness. For one, media is run by corporations. The best way to achieve that balance is to give the power to make those decisions over to a government, and keep your government in check.
I'm glad that we as a society don't directly vote for government funding. I think we would make HORRIBLE choices. For one, we would probably vote away our national debt ("why should we pay?!"). We would probably stop aid to Afghanistan ("feed Americans, not Afghans!"). We would probably chop public schools ("I have a right to raise my kid like I want to - in Catholic schools!"). We would probably stop AIDS research ("Why should we pay to find a cure to a disease they got by sinning against God?"). We never would have gotten involved in the European Theater in WWII ("what have the Nazis ever done to us?"). There would be no national archive ("who cares about old books?"). The results of the Human Genome Project would be patented and copyright by [insert major corporation here] ("Why should taxpayers pay for something that a private company is perfectly willing to do?"). Hell, there would be no public domain! ("You mean someone could make pornography with Mickey Mouse in it! Hell no! Let Disney hold the Copyright forever, so we can PROTECT THE CHILDREN!")
Never underestimate the stupidity of a crowd. I, for one, am glad we don't live in a true Democracy.
Education is the silver bullet.
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.
I'm aware of the cross-range requirement. NASA willingly took on those putative DoD requirements in order to acquire the Pentagon's support in Congress and with OMB. Once they'd locked themselves into that design, the military jumped ship.
I'm not against wings per se; I just want to use the cheapest, safest and simplest way to get to LEO. No one has demonstrated, yet, that wings are the way to go. At this point, I can't support spending more money on solving the wrong problem
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
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.
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