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NASA Admin Says Shuttle and ISS are Mistakes
Teancum writes "NASA Administrator Michael Griffin was recently interviewed by the USA Today Editorial Board regarding the current direction of the U.S. Space Program, and in the interview he suggested that the past three decades have been a huge mistake and a waste of resources. As a total cost for both programs that has exceeded $250 Billion, you have to wonder what other useful things could have been developed using the same resources. Griffin quoted in the interview regarding if the shuttle had been a mistake "My opinion is that it was... It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible." Regarding the ISS: "Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in.""
I'm sure I've heard that the ISS was supposed to have a more equatorial orbit, but when Russia came on board the orbit was tilted to give them easier access to it.
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As Richard Feynman's brilliant analysis from 1986 clearly states, the shuttle's main engines were NOT designed properly and are doomed to be both expensive to maintain and markedly dangerous to use.
t ml
A link to his comments is at http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.h
He has a wonderful explanation, in terms that non-engineers as well as engineers can understand, about how to build complex devices. Good engineering, he says, comes from dividing the task in to component parts, creating specifications for those parts, building samples, testing them to their limits, retesting them to various other limits, until you have a complete understanding of all the failure modes of that component, as well as the reliability of your manufacturing process for that component. Then, you assemble multiple components together and test that assembly together in all the modes you can conjure up, to create what I have always heard termed, "A Well-characterized System".
As he points out, the space shuttle main engines (SSME's), though complex and "groundbreaking" in the sense that they were very big and incorporating some (at the time) quite advanced technologies, they were NOT WELL CHARACTERIZED on a component basis. To my knowledge (although I'm not a NASA watcher with as much fervor as some) I don't believe the SSMEs have EVER BEEN analyzed and re-engineered to create characterizations of their failure points, reliability, etc.
The fact that NASA's next plan is to use them in the follow-on vehicles for heavy lift only testifies to NASA's complete lack of focus here. They should put out several contracts for heavy lift engines with well-characterized failure modes, with focuses on reusability, reliability, maintenance cost, and overall operating cost.
We're soon going to be stuck with the next-gen heavy lift using components of unknown reliability, which forces us to replace component parts ("tune-up" or "overhaul") the system too often and with too large an expense.
Feynman was right. Solve the root cause. Engineer these things with good methodologies. And don't tie us down to next-gen-of-schlock-engineering if we don't have to be. I congratulate the able engineers who worked on the SSME's, but I respect Feynman's analysis that correct procedures benefit lowering long-term costs and ensure safety of the admirable crews who pilot our national spacecraft.
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You are a liar and a loser. You criticize Griffin without any grasp of the facts, and in doing so lie and distort his significant record. Griffin was distinguished head of the Space Department at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Before that he worked at NASA and previously did important work for SDI which led the development of the Delta anti-missle system. When he was appointed to head NASA he had just been elected to be president of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, a group of scholarly aeronautics engineers. He is also shockingly well educated: BS Engineering from University of Maryland College Park Masters in Aerospace Engineering from Catholic University Masters in Electrical Engineering from University of Southern California Masters in Applied Physics from Johns Hopkins Masters in Civil Engineering from George Washington University MBA from Loyola College, MD BS Physics Johns Hopkins He was working on his BS in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins when he left for NASA. He plans to return at then of his term. He co-wrote what many believe to be the definitive textbook on space vehicle design used in virtually every graduate aeronautical program. In general, you are an asshole. Griffin is not a hack. He is a shockingly well qualified man. His views expressed here are refined, excellently thought out, and very reasonable. Disagree? Fine. Say why and be prepared to be ripped apart. Assholes like you are the reason qualified people avoid politics and positions of responsbility. You labeled him a hack without even knowing anything about his impressive qualifications.
This is complete fud. There is lots of interesting research that has/is going on in the ISS. Any attempt to say otherwise is just ignorant.
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- APS.html (Antibiotic Production). html (Radiation Damage). html (Protein Crystal Growth). html (Viscous Liquid Foam/ Metallic Glass)
For some quick ideas see: http://www.spaceislandgroup.com/manufacturing.htm
or for a more detailed list of publicized experiments try: http://exploration.nasa.gov/programs/station/list
Some of interest I've found:
http://exploration.nasa.gov/programs/station/CGBA
http://exploration.nasa.gov/programs/station/BBND
http://exploration.nasa.gov/programs/station/APCF
http://exploration.nasa.gov/programs/station/Foam
--DarkFrog
If the dead rise again, we're going to have some serious population control issues.
100 KHz? Really? I don't know much about power distribution, but wouldn't AC at that frequency cause all sorts of interference? And wouldn't you have to stick transformers everywhere to actually use it?
A bit of googling says yeah, people really do 100 khz power supplies, and higher. But I don't understand the advantage.