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X-37 Flies but Runs Off Runway
mknewman writes "The X-37 drop test was completed today with a lift by White Knight. It had a successful flight but it ran off the end of the runway."
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I hadn't heard about this new project till I read the article. It's neat that Spaceship One's "White Knight" is being used to haul a DARPA-sponsored project into the Ether! This truly heralds a new age of independent aeronautics.
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
Yes. You are damn right actually.
The shuttle has no breaks, neither does SpaceShip 1. Extra weight which has no or little use. The former uses parachutes to break and the latter uses a slide instead of a front wheel which doubles up as a friction break. Dunno about Buran, but I would not be surprised if it has no breaks either.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
What many people hope is that a small company that is independent of this process, in the sense that they don't have any long history with the Feds, or gigantic conventional-warfare contracts to preserve, can be more innovative, and break the apparent barrier to lowering access to space costs that seems to have solidified in the past 20 years
Innovation? In aerospace, where everything positively has to have wings, including spacecraft? I'll tell you the innovation I' like to see: standard buses for satellites. Standard software for navigation, mission planning, etc. Most of what I see is people creating one-off solutions that cost a fortune to test, re-test and certify. The few that aren't are making Just Another Rocket. Why does this bother me? Because 99% of the parts are custom rigged for the mission, including those that have the same role since Sputnik went around the Earth 49 years ago.
And in academia it's worse. Professors get a micro sat project and pick random not-space-hardened hardware like shitty CCD's because their brother/wife/cousin/friend has a camera that took good pictures on their vacation. Then all the students have to work around that bad choice. It's almost like a stupid corporate pet project: doomed to fail because of the idiots at the helm.
Either that, or you could insert your favorite military-industrial-complex or CIA spy satellite consipircy theory here.
What about the future? All the poor blokes are making rockes out in the $X desert, but they will always have to spend +6 months on gov't permits just to wipe their behinds on the launchpad let alone toss something into the air. There is a quote about cars that applied to everything in the aerospace world. If cars had developed on the same schedule as computers: they'd get 300MPG, idle at 6,000MPH, parallel park themselves, cost $100 for a low-end new model which you'd need as the patchwork of private toll roads includes tar pits and your car explodes randomly. At least with spacecraft, they already do the last and most the good Earth orbits are pretty crowded, so it really wouldn't be a change.
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
Boeing, like all aerospace majors, has tended to be very cautious about space vehicle design, perhaps in part simply because the cost-plus nature of major NASA and DoD contracts has meant there's less incentive to innovate. Why try some weird new design that may fail if the same old boring design, just multiplied by sixty, will work fine? So what if costs $bazillions? Your profit margin is guaranteed no matter how bloated the budget gets.
Actually, when I worked for the DoD, "cost-plus" contracts (short for "cost plus fixed fee") were a means of providing an incentive to come in on or under budget. The contract price was negotiated and agreed upon, and the "fixed fee" was determined as a percentage of the negotiated cost. If the project ran over budget, the governmnet still paid the "cost", but the "fixed fee" didn't change. Thus, the profit margin decreased. If the project came in under budget, the government again only paid the (lower) "cost", and the "fixed fee" represented a higher profit margin.
At least that was how we used those contracts at the time. For some new weird design, the "cost-plus" structure would have some advantages for the government, because it puts some of the risk on the contractor.
The contractor would probably want to use the "time-and-materials" mechanism where, indeed, the "profit margin is guaranteed no matter how bloated the budget gets". Then all the risk is on the government. (Perhaps this is the contract structure these projects usually use?)
This is not to say that there isn't lots of fraud/waste/abuse in these kinds of government activities, just that it was present in many more subtle (and institutionalized) ways than just the contract mechanism or the relationship between the project mangers and the contractors.
And that does not even get into micromanagement by Congress, changing the mission requirements every 9 months at random...
In my experience, this is closer to the primary problem. The lack of long-term vision and leadership is the biggest killer of budgets and innovation. At the Congressional and Administration level, vision - by definition - does not extend beyond the next election.
As important is the following: For upper and middle managers in civil service, continuously increasing your annual budget is the priority. The way you grow an organization (and by extension, your pay scale and prestige) is by increasing your budget. Decreasing your budget through effeciency or innovation shrinks the organization, your pay scale, and your prestige. (Actually, it makes your job go away, because you pay scale can't be decreased.)
In my organization, not using all of your budget for the year in the first 3 quarters was really bad. It resulted in your remaining budget getting pulled by headquarters and sent somewhere else (where they could spend it immediately), and your budget request for the next year being cut by a corresponding (or greater) amount. It also reflected badly in preformance reviews. Consequently the incentive was this: spend as much money as fast as you can. (That was not how the management put it, of course, but that was the net effect.) I don't believe this was an isolated situation, either.
Thus, there is no institutional incentive for cost effeciency and innovation. I think that an organization independent of this process is the only way to achieve greater cost effeciency in the near term. In the long-term the institutional incentive must be changed. A new contractor (Scaled) is a start, and maybe this is the catalyst.
Prehaps the government project managers in charge of this NASA/DoD project have found a way to resist or avoid this dis-incentive system. [Insert diety here] knows all the project managers I worked with wanted to. I'm hoping so.