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Spacecraft Crashes Into Satellite
Juha-Matti Laurio writes "A robotic NASA spacecraft designed to rendezvous with an orbiting satellite instead crashed into its target. Unbeknownst to engineers at the time, DART's main sensor mistakenly believed it was flying away from the satellite when it was actually moving 5 feet per second toward it, investigators found."
So yes, you are right. It's always the manager's fault. By definition.
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Management -never- seem to know what the hell they're doing. Companies seem to make the constant mistake of believing that you can manage something you know nothing about. Take the following example. I know a guy who used to work in computing and electrical engineering, in around the 60s, 70s, so pretty primitive stuff. Apparently at the time it was common to approximate integrals electronically by building up a charge on a capacitor over some time, representing the range of the integral, with the current behaving as the function to be integrated. He had to try and explain this concept to a member of senior management one day. The first question he was ask was "what the hell's an integral?".
From the Feynman report:
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Have *you* got $110 million in spare cash to throw at space research?
"Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity." - Anonymous
But what is the bigger cock-up: Deliberately ignoring the advice of your engineers, or not knowing that they themselves have cocked up? Surely the former - in the latter case, they have an excuse for not knowing.
im in ur
Bullshit!
Why even bother with engineers if that is your attitude? Why bother having projects at all? Let's just funnel money directly into defense and aerospace contractors' pockets, and make it easier for them to pay off the politicians. It'll be a whole lot more efficient, and, in cases like the shuttle, won't lead to any loss of life.
I've posted this link elsewhere, but it bears repeating.
And WTF is a "newspaper deal"?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Did you happen to read those quotes? It points out the disconnect between the engineers who design the system and build, and know what it is and isn't capable of, and the PHB management that is bowing to pressure from above in rushing things into production without adequate regard to safety or overlooking the safety objects of the engineers. Columbia and Challenger were direct results of management looking at something pointed out by engineers and blatantly ignoring the facts, under pressure to keep the shuttle running.
BTW, this isn't the 1920's, so anybody getting a "newspaper deal" is in for a rude shock when they get the check.
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Unfortunately, the faulty design was due to the screw ups of a private contractor, so there goes your "private sector" argument.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Snore. And out come the free enterprise loonies. The only trouble with your argument is that free enterprise is already perfectly able to indulge in space exploration and, well, hasn't. You can rent time on a launch pad, you can rent space in a rocket. There are many excellent engineering companies who can build more or less any satellite or other space craft you want. But there's no return on doing anything more ambitious than communications satellite. What exactly is the private sector going to do with a Mars probe, say? Sell ad hoardings on the side? (Didn't Beagle II do this?) It's better to regard what NASA and ESA do as a public infrastructure project rather than as competition for private enterprise. The work NASA is doing (mostly competently) is more like building the channel tunnel than a profit-based business. We tried building the tunnel through the private sector, but Eurotunnel has been bailed out by the giovernment and the banks so many times that it's actually ended up costing us far more than it would have done if we'd done it the old fashioned way, even assuming the usual obscene project over-run costs of a public project.
With no structure, they would never convince congress to give them any money. It's good when unstructured research happens, but structured, result-oriented research is always going to be ablt to get more funding.
NASA is clearly poorly managed, but it seems to me that the solution is good management, not no management at all. Of course, I have no idea how to actually implement good management.
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And yes, I had the box checked so it would be considered for posting.
It's a curse being ahead of the curve.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Yes, Yawn. I'm all for the X-Prize and private endeavors into spaceflight, but really, what's been acomplished? They are decades behind. Last I heard, Space Ship One barely managed to reach a sub-orbital altitude and return safely. This is comporable to what the X-15 did in 1960 and is so far removed from the complexety of a single shuttle mission (not to mention Apollo) that it's totally outragous to think the private sector is somehow doing better because they didn't screw it up.. Actually, they did screw it up, just not enough to kill anyone. Besides Rutan, everyone else is still doing test fire's or has had their unmanned rocket explode on the launch pad. It will be a long while before they can reach orbit relatively safely and repeatadly. Will they make less mistakes on their way there? No but that's ok because space is really hard. Meanwhile, NASA has contributed an enourmous amount to planatary scinece and space exploration in the past decades despite seemingly wary public support and a dimished budget. It really is amazing what they've accomplished. Their paradigm has been rightly adjusted to focus on science and exploration. They pursue one of the noblest of human endeavors (and if you don't understand why science and understanding the universe is noble, well..) and in my mind are pretty detached from political and corporate bullshit and burracracy. To bad some of you don't want to pay attention.
If you think Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed are merely private contractors, you've not been paying attention. They are as integrated into the current system as they can be while still retaining the title of "corporation". This is part of what Eisenhower was warning us about - when the private sector controls and influences the public sector in an industry, they become intermingled in ways that do not inspire greatness. And it becomes dangerous for the autonomy of the state from private control.
NASA, while purportedly a civilian agency, is obviously tremendously influenced by not only the military but also those private contractors. It's pretty amazing that Scaled Composited was able to even get a bid in on the recent manned capsule designs - and they almost didn't. Notice that their proposal wasn't accepted, though. Whether it wasn't as good (doubtful) or whether there are other barriers to entry (probable) is up for debate.
***
I do agree that in a slower speed collision, an airbag may do more harm than good. Although, people can be killed in accidents as slow as 15 MPH. I also know people who have been in some pretty serious accidents and were very glad to have hit an airbag as opposed to the steering wheel. Also, newer airbags are much better than the older ones in terms of force.
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They should never have rejected the dried-frog-pills allowance in NASA'a budget.
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I disagree categorically with the perception that leaving technical people unfettered by management or time pressure will result in better designs, products or concepts. After RTFA, one notes that one reason provided for the failure is that the teams disregarded expert input - a characteristic that I have witnessed time and again within groups of bright technical people. Call it an adjunct of NIH - not invented here.
Another example is the cowboy coder, writing without specifications or testing. For some development methodologies, this may be an efficient way to rapidly prototype a UI or system, but for the most part it generates sh*t for quality. But, it's fun.
Every technical person would love to work in a Xerox- or Bell Labs-style environment of pure research with a virtually unlimited budget. Very innovative ideas are bred from such environments, but they rarely produce market-ready concepts. I think you need to differentiate between science and engineering, and pure research vs. development. NASA is both a research and a development organization. Engineering is all about trade-offs between time, budgetary and technical constraints. Science is about uncovering new knowledge. Science in the absence of constraints is marvelous. Engineering in the absence of constraints and experience is a disaster. Ask any contractor.
The mission failed due to poor engineering and a lack of oversight (no process to detect and correct technical errors). The only way humans can deal with such issues is through management and process. It sucks, but it's all we have.
Damage depends on the speed *and mass* of the robot, doesn't it?
Try driving your car into a fire hydrant at 3.4 mph and see what that does to the bumper...
It has lived up to its name, DART.
LOL! Wish it worked like that, I'd love to find a meritocracy in industry. From what I see, it's who you know that determines how far you go. That whole "Work hard and you'll make more money!" idea is just a scam perpetuated by rich knobs so they can make more money off of you. Look at corporate CEOs. They run a company into the ground, fire all the employees and scuttle off with their "golden parachutes," only to get hired by their buddies on the board of a different scam-poration where they do it all again. I guess it is a meritocracy, those who are better at screwing over their fellow man get ahead.
People who believe in meritocracies are just holding on to the idea in order to prop up their sense of self worth, and to keep from having to feel empathy for those who are less lucky. "OOhh, look at me! I got where I am through hard work. Forget that daddy got me into an Ivy league school and my chums there got me a job I don't deserve and can't do well. I did it on my own! Anyone who isn't successful is obviously a lazy git who deserves nothing."
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
'm not faulting the engineers. I'm just saying that if these predicted problems were really as some people painted them (inevitable), then engineers would surely share some of the blame for not communicating properly if it was not fixed.
Engineer: "Don't point the gun at that clown and pull the trigger, because he will die."
Manager: "Don't be absurd, there is a chance I may not even hit him."
Engineer: "Don't point the gun at that clown and pull the trigger, because he will die."
Manager: "Thank you for your analysis of the situation. I've determined that the risk is worth the reward."
The engineer is to blame, how exactly? Managers go against the judgment of Those In The Know all the time, even effectively communicated. If the engineer says "We can't launch, the rocket will explode because of A and B and C, not to mention Z," and the manager decides to push ahead with the launch anyway, how did the engineer not effectively communicate this? You cannot lay blame on someone for someone else's stupidity or willful ignorance.
Sometimes, sure, an engineer may downplay a problem. THAT is something he can surely be blamed for. I was taking exception to your blanket statement where you said that if a project has inevitable problems and is pushed ahead anyway, that the engineers must share the blame (supposedly because Managers never go against advice given to them).