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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.""
1) Cheap, reliable, frequent trips to geosnychronous orbit.
2) First generation platform at one of the Lagrange points.
3) Lunar observatory on the dark side.
4) Another Hubble-like telescope at L3.
5) Space elevators, aynone?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Yes, Freedom was supposed to be in a different orbit that the Russians cannot reach, but it would have been disasterous after the Columbia accident, as either the Shuttle fleet would have had to have been flown with a known (and now highly public) flaw or grounded and the station abandoned for the interim period. Could NASA have gotten away with flying Shuttles after Columbia?
NASA Admin Says Shuttle and ISS are Mistakes
is not the same thing as
he suggested that the past three decades have been a huge mistake and a waste of resources
which is not the same as
"It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible....we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in"
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
This is not meant to be a troll. I love the space program and everything about it. But I do have a serious question to make sure I'm not overlooking something.
At this stage of the game, what is it that we can do on Mars with a manned mission that we cannot accomplish better, cheaper, and safer, with a robotic mission?
I really don't see a point in a manned mission to Mars until we've been on the Moon long enough to have a permanent station of some kind there.
As much as I loved Apollo, I'm not sure I see that it really accomplished anything with manned missions that a robotic mission couldn't have done. Especially since if I'm not mistaken only one or two real 'scientists' went on any of those missions.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
The problem isn't overinflated budgets, it's poor management of those budgets. People who design soemthing turn around and say "hey look, we need more money to keep going, this is going to be more expensive"; make them quantify why it will be more expensive, come up with a list of alternatives, and make these people work for the money they're getting.
If Scaled Composite was handed a check for 250 Billion they'd wet themselves, hire a ton of new engineers, and start on their way to becoming NASA. But forcing them to work with a small budget makes each and every bolt a considered cost, and a lot more streamlined.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that Scaled Composites can do better than NASA, but it will take some self control when it comes to spending, designing and testing. But I would be greatly disappointed if they were handed a huge check for a quarter trillion dollars.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Thanks for pointing this out. I was doing some research on NASA knowledge management a while ago, and I came across a quote to the effect that "The Shuttle was built to supply the ISS, and the ISS was built to give the shuttle someplace to go", which I think fits in pretty well with what you mention. The only thing I'd disagree about is why Bush is talking up the Moon/Mars again - I think it has little to do with China, it's just that he knows it sounds good and inspiring, but all the real problems and expenses will be safely pushed onto his successors.
Freedom was foreseen as primarily a US venture for launch and support, as already indicated. Ascent from French Guiana was possible (they were our friends, right?) without too much trouble in a 28.5 deg inclined orbit, but it took a fair bit of delta-V to get from Baikanor to 28.5 deg. Of course, that wasn't our problem as the Soviets were on the other side.
OK, international politics aside.
One of the real problems we saw was the US Congress, and yes, NASA management.Space Station Freedom was often a dumping ground for "retired in place" senior engineering management waiting for that magic day when they could sit at home and impede their wives instead of coming to the office and impeding engineers. That's not to say we didn't have decent, enthusiastic, qualified management but they were outnumbered... or simply out-numbed... by the incompetents.
A lot was preordained, despite engineering advances. "Don't try to convince me, my mind is made up." I could go on at length about the decision to scrap the 100 khz power distribution system on Freedom in favor of the DC system. I was around when the "test" destroyed some computer hardware at MSFC that was used as justification, despite the fact that the test was protested by competent engineers with a knowledge of VAX power supply design. Were there problems with the high frequency AC distribution? Some, but not insurmountable.
SSF was also a training ground for kids right out of college. Get them in, turn 'em loose with little guidance, slap 'em around a bit until they started doing good design, then move them to Shuttle.
We had a lot of design by Aerospace Conglomerate, too. Let's get that design that Lockheed wants, because it'll make them easier to deal with at contract time. Let's use THIS design that MD wants, even if it's not what NASA wants/requires, because we think their design is going to make them do something else for us on another project.
Still, and all, most of the conglomerate designs I saw, worked with, and helped shape (and, yes, I worked for a contractor company, too, but I was doing specs and requirements, as well as working with the prototyping) would have been acceptable, even if somewhat limiting in their own ways.
The BIG problem, however, was Congress. Every three years or so, we'd get a "stop what you're doing, reassess the design, and then start over" command from the Hill. I've gotta say, we wasted a LOT of money on those exercises, and we wasted a LOT of time.
There are improvements borne of waiting time and engineering advances in ISS that would not have been, and may never have reached SSF or Alpha, but we could well have bent metal and flown hardware by 1990 if Congress had stuck to original budgets and timelines and stayed the hell out of the way. I flew prototype hardware in 1992 that was the first piece of Space Station hardware to fly, be proven and certified for on-orbit Space Station operation. I could have flown it 3 years earlier save the Challenger accident.
Final thought. We developed or promoted a lot of stuff that's now common place in the world. Speaking from the perspective of medical hardware development (I also did a bit for the medical facility in terms of GNCC and COMMS) there's a lot of stuff I see in hospitals, doctors' offices, dentists' offices and ambulances that makes me smile and think, "I worked with the prototype of that...", or, in a couple of cases, "I wrote the SBIR paperwork that made that happen".
So, yes, NASA's efforts HAVE improved life ont he planet. Really.
Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by tenure.
Well, it depends on whether they know what they want to spend it on.
The first prerequisite of any successful engineering project is to have a worthy goal that is clearly identifiable and governs everything else. In this sense, Scaled Comoposite's acheivement has a lot in common with Apollo, and the Shuttle and ISS have a lot in common with each other. The Spaceship One effort and the Apollo program were both narrowly focused on one thing -- sending one or more humans to a specific place and returning them safely. All the engineering done on them was focused on achieving that goal. The Shuttle and ISS programs, while they support many worthy scientific an technical goals, are primarily driven by pleasing enough constituencies to continue their operation. These are political goals, which means many types of missions under many types of conditions.
If you had to put the Shuttle's purpose on a bumper sticker, it would be "Cheap Access to Space". Except "Access to Space" is vague. Obviously, we mean "Manned Access to Space", but even stipulating that, different missions under different scenarios require different performance characteristics. The shuttle has all kinds of capabilities that it uses on very or none of its missions; yet all the things needed for those capabilities are shot up to space and landed on every single mission. I'm thinking primarily the wings here, but its large payload capacity and its capacity to launch satellites into polar orbit count here too. It follows that the Shuttle design is likely never to be the cheapest way of doing any mission. But, without the ability to perform a wide array of missions, NASA would never have got the backing of the Air Force, which wasn't really all that interested in the Shuttle.
You can't design any system to do everything; and the more the system does the more complex costly and unreliable it's bound to be.
Specific goals such as "get two men higher than 100km and return them to the surface safely" are inherently more efficent to pursue than broad, vague goals such as "build an orbital launch capability" or "cheap access to space". And, this has other consequences. Scaled's accomplishment, while signficant in its own right, gets them practically zero percent of the way to orbit. They just built an air launched rocket plane like the X-15. About the only thing they're almost immediately ready to do is create a suborbital space tourist business. If the mission was "get two men higher than 100km and return them to the surface safely primarily with components that will be part of a future orbital capacity," they'd have spent a lot more money, taken longer, and may not have been as safe.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Efficiency is the advantage. One of the new advances that has helped to miniaturize "wall-wart" type AC power supplies is they use a "chopper" transistor to chop the 60 Hz AC into a much higher frequency. That higher frequency AC can be run through a much smaller transformer to get the required voltage out of it, with less waste heat generated.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Newsgroups: sci.space
From: j...@pnet01.cts.com (Jim Bowery)
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1993 07:16:54 GMT
Local: Tues, Jun 29 1993 12:16 am
Subject: Who I am and why I support Big Science
There have been some questions about who I am and what my positions are. Here are the relevant details for sci.space readers:
As chairman of the Coalition for Science and Commerce, I have, over the last 5 or so years, been the principle activist promoting the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 and the launch voucher provision of the 1992 NASA authorization.
To preempt some noise:
Allen Sherzer has yet to apologize to me for his repeated slanders in this forum 2 years ago, declaring that my contributions to the passage of the LSPA were insignificant compared to those of Glenn Reynolds, then chairman of the legislative committee of the National Space Society. However, during congressional hearings on space commercialization, the LSPA's sponsor, Congressman Packard, gave me a personal introduction (the only panelist out of over 10 to receive such an introduction) and my organization credit for passage of the LSPA. Congressman Packard did so with Glenn Reynolds sitting next to me on the same panel -- and he did not mention Glenn Reynolds or the NSS. This is in the Congressional Record and on video tape. Allen Sherzer's words are in the sci.space archives of late spring to early summer 1991. I encourage those with access to the sci.space archives to retrieve them and see exactly what Allen Sherzer said and the manner in which he said it.
I've been involved in several other, as yet unsuccessful, legislative efforts to reform NASA, DoE (primarily fusion), NSF and DARPA. In so doing I've come across gross inefficiencies in technology development -- inefficiencies that some small high technology startups were ready to fill with technical advances of great economic and social import. The government agencies I just mentioned see these high technology startups, not as vital partners, but as deadly political threats to the credibility of those, within the agencies, that picked incorrect technical directions. These government-funded individuals drive funding away from those who would bring us critically needed technical advances -- rather than working with and help them.
The dollars we spend on NASA, DoE, DARPA and NSF to promote technology are actually used to suppress this country's technology in a frighteningly effective manner. But when one looks at the political incentives of these institutions, one wonders how anyone could believe it to be otherwise.
My first and most tragic experience in this area was George Koopman's statement to me, made in person just before his untimely death, that NASA had been relentlessly driving his suppliers and investors away from doing business with his company, AMROC. NASA appeared to reverse its behavior in a tokenistic manner just prior to Koopman's death. The first test of an AMROC booster, shortly thereafter, failed and AMROC was forced into capitulation with established aerospace firms. This pattern of hostile behavior from NASA, combined with the means, motive and opportunity, leave room for reasonable suspicions of murder against individuals within or funded by NASA.
This is only one story and I wasn't even inv
Seastead this.
It's all tradeoffs. Linear supplies are also much lighter, at that frequency you can make the transformers very small. Filtering is easier because the ripple is high frequency.
The tradeoff is that the transmission lines become more difficult. At 60hz you can run the power on nearly any old wire and it'll be fine. At 100khz the skin effect is stronger so fat wires to carry lots of amps don't work. You need special litz wires that have individually insulated strands.
Interference isn't much of an issue, at 100khz the wavelength is 9,835 feet long. You won't get anything even near 1/4 wavelength long that could radiate a significant amount of power. For the same reason transmission line impedance isn't much of a thing to worry about.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.