NASA Learns Anew From the Apollo Program

solitas writes "NASA isn't just "going back to the drawing boards" to get back to the Moon, they're also going through the museums and archives so that the new engineers can rediscover/learn how it was done the first time." From the article: "Some old Apollo engineers are even being brought back on a contract basis to work with the young folks, some of whom were not even born when the Saturn V was flying lunar missions. The new manned exploration project, called Constellation, is deliberately drawing upon lessons from the past as the space agency works to meet a congressional deadline of flying the Ares rocket ... In fact, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has described the new program as 'Apollo on steroids.'"

Comments

Steroids, Hell

[overshoot]

From the description, it's more like "Apollo on Viagra."

Re:Steroids, Hell

[DPJohnny Canuck]

I was thinking more along the lines of "Apollo on Geritol."

Re:Steroids, Hell

[RandomPrecision]

They're both performance enhancing drugs.

Re:Steroids, Hell

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another new technology given to us by the space race.

Re:Steroids, Hell

[transwarp]

Isn't viagra a steroid?

Re:Steroids, Hell

[cloak42]

No... Didn't you know? Steroids SHRINK your weiner.

they should patent that idea

[Anonymous Coward]

"learning from past experience" - that has a nice ring to it.

Re:they should patent that idea

[ackthpt]

"learning from past experience" - that has a nice ring to it.

What?!? And break with tradition?

Honestly, when I was a lot younger I thought only new stuff was good, decent quality, reliable, etc. Eventually I learned, after wasting a lot of money, some new stuff is utter crap and some things build in the distant past were done with real craftsmanship and quality.

On another note, there was this great show on Discovery or History Channel or sommat, some years back. Engineers had struggled to figure out how three large stone slabs and been lowered into place in a crypt. No trace of ropes left pinched by the massive slabs, no pole holes, no marks of any kind. How did the bronze age engineers do it, that engineers from the 20th century were left so puzzled by?

Eventually a team of japanese engineering students realised the crypt had been filled with sand and the slabs place upon the top and gently lowered into place as the sand was removed from below.

Re:they should patent that idea

[Humming Frog]

Some stuff is crap, some stuff is good. The proportion doesn't really change as time goes on, but hindsight allows us to tell the difference between the two.

Re:they should patent that idea

[ackthpt]

Some stuff is crap, some stuff is good. The proportion doesn't really change as time goes on, but hindsight allows us to tell the difference between the two.

I seem to be finding more things today are engineered to be profitable, that is, to the minimum tolerances and material cost to do the job.

You can still find high grade things, but they're proving to be very, very expensive.

What would happen to NASA if they sourced components to a company which considers 30% failure rate, off the assembly line, to be "good enough"? The end customer doesn't often see the failures, because the parts are usually caught and dumped, but it can eventually show up, because the weaknesses in the manufacturing process which makes 30% failure possible will slip through within tolerances or when the part is intermittent. Rather, I imagine, like those O-Rings years ago.

Re:they should patent that idea

[MyLongNickName]

seem to be finding more things today are engineered to be profitable, that is, to the minimum tolerances and material cost to do the job.

The human body is an example of this. Evolution forces us to not overengineer. It might sound good to make a part on a car that will last for 25 years. But if the average car is scrapped in 10, what is the point? Excess cost for no reason.

Now to be honest, I think a lot of stuff is underengineered. Designed to make it past the waranty period, and that is it. But if something is designed to "just" make the specs, and the specs are designed well, then I have no probelm with that.

Re:they should patent that idea

[dan828]

Evolution tends to come up with Rube Goldberg solutions, not well engineered ones. Look up the recurrent laryngeal nerve for an example. Or take the testicals for example-- wouldn't you really prefer that they be tucked up safely out of the way or perhaps had a tough padded cover?

Re:they should patent that idea

[MyLongNickName]

I would. However, if they were inside my body, they would likely cook the sperm. Evolution tends to take all of the constraints into consideration when coming up with the "design". Thick padding might be nice, but might make procreation all the more difficult.

Re:they should patent that idea

[Deadstick]

Eventually a team of japanese engineering students realised the crypt had been filled with sand and the slabs place upon the top and gently lowered into place as the sand was removed from below.

If they didn't think of that right off, they must not have seen Howard Hawks's 1955 movie Land of the Pharaohs...

rj

Re:they should patent that idea

[mabhatter654]

NASA's problem is over engineering and relying too much on gimmicks rather than more modern designs. In reality of the manufacturing world, NASA is the 30% failure rate... that's why stuff costs so very much to make, because in some cases you may throw away 3 in 10 nearly completed parts because the manufacturing process is simply too complex. I worked in an electronics manufacturing firm that did FDA and military work, and the hoops are terrible, for very little benifit.

We need to design a space plan that can use parts mass-manufactured to Automotive standards. Most automakers mesure error in parts per MILLION and to thousandths of an inch or less. The current NASA way involves massively complex sample parts, impossible to remake, difficult to inspect, so 90% of the work is in trying to prove the part will be usable. In the auto industry lines will stop for 1 bad part in 1000 for the day. If they're serious about a long term space program they need to move to modular, mass produced fail-safe engineered parts.

Re:they should patent that idea

[mangu]

Eventually a team of japanese engineering students realised the crypt had been filled with sand and the slabs place upon the top and gently lowered into place as the sand was removed from below.

Rather obvious, to anyone who works with engineering. I have seen so many reports on how "smart" those ancient people must have been to think of those masterful methods... Only problem is that, if you work in solving that kind of problem day to day, you eventually come to think of new ways to do it, all by yourself, only to find out other people have thought the same way before.

My favorite problem is the "original straight edge". When I was 12 I asked my dad, who was a mechanical engineer, how could one create a straight edge without anything to compare it with. He showed me a book, "Engineering Tools and Processes" by Herman C. Hesse (not *the* Herman Hesse, but another guy by the same name) published in 1941. To create a straight edge from scratch, you use three pieces, a, b, and c. You make a as straight as you can by eye. Then you make b fit a exactly, and make c fit a exactly. Make b fit c. Since both b and c fit against a, the only way b and c can match is if all three are perfectly straight, so start over, each step will get you closer to a perfect straight edge.

This method has been known for many centuries, there are references to that in ancient Egypt, yet it has been patented a few times in the last hundred years.

Re:they should patent that idea

[jafac]

. . . or the stone slab was lowered on ropes, then the rope-tabs were chiseled-off once the slab was in place, and then the spot where the tabs were, was polished.

You can move your millions of cubic feet of sand. I'll use the rope-tab method.

Re:they should patent that idea

[WhiplashII]

Don't be silly! It was aliens, that came down and filled the passageways with ice. The block just slipped right in, and then the ice melted. Obviously aliens, because ancient Egyptians could not possibly have had ice yet....

Re:they should patent that idea

[Mattintosh]

Yeah, because evaporative cooling wasn't invented yet (isn't built into our bodies or anything), and can't work in the desert where anything wet will evaporate and cause that cooling effect...

(Just for the benefit of those that don't get your reference.)

Just for the record, the ancient Egyptians knew to place covered wooden trays of water into wet sand to make ice. When the once-wet sand is dry, you have ice.

To the Moon, Alice!

[ackthpt]

"NASA isn't just "going back to the drawing boards" to get back to the Moon, they're also going through the museums and archives so that the new engineers can rediscover/learn how it was done the first time."

What they can find is what was done, but only with the old Apollo engineers can they get some insight into the minds that worked out novel solutions where no obvious ones existed.

I've been hearing a few times over the past weeks how school children can't esitmate. Every mathematical problem has a definite answer presented by a calculator. Ask me what's 250 * 7 and I don't sit down and do math, I figure the first four 250's are 1,000 and the rest are 750. Ask me what's the square root of 27 and I'll say 5 and a bit, because the number squared closest I know is 5. Some kids today couldn't do that. Can today's engineers think on their feet?

In fact, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has described the new program as 'Apollo on steroids.'"

Uh. Don't mention steroids to Congress. They've already got the bee for baseball.

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do they need to - they've got calculators and computers.

Seriously. Who gives a ****?

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[jbrader]

So you can do mental math, fantastic. But generalising about school children is dangerous. You hang out on slashdot so it's fairly safe to assume you're some kind of nerd and use math in some way on a fairly regular basis. But think about all the people you went to school with. How many of them weren't nerds and didn't go into fields where being able to quickly estimate a sum weren't important? So I bet if you go talk to them they aren't very good at estimating either. I just finished teaching a summer of computer camp and guess what? Nerd children are good at mental math the same way nerd adults are. It's not a generational thing, it's a aptitude/vocational thing.

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[soft_guy]

There are kids that can do that too, dude.

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[roystgnr]

Why do they need to - they've got calculators and computers.

First, because calculators and computers will take Garbage In and give Garbage Out, and engineers who don't have an intuitive understanding of the approximate answers they should get are much less likely to catch simple software errors and user mistakes.

Second, because most engineering problems are far more complicated than "what's 250 times 7" but involve many, many such simple arithmetic steps. If you have to turn to the calculator on every trivial step it makes solving the whole problem correctly much harder.

Seriously. Who gives a ****?

In this case, mostly the taxpayers and the astronauts.

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[ackthpt]

So you can do mental math, fantastic. But generalising about school children is dangerous. You hang out on slashdot so it's fairly safe to assume you're some kind of nerd and use math in some way on a fairly regular basis.

I work in a school district. I develop interfaces between our database and external ones. I have to estimate several times, on average, each day. I've been involved in developing and improving student assessment. I can take a look at a table of numbers and quickly tell which are doing well and which aren't. I've worked with such large volumes of data and sums for years that with a bit of exposure I can quickly grasp trends, flow, patterns, etc. from samples. Testing everything is exhausting, but I can develop applications which look for things that don't "fit", as long as I have a general idea of what it is I'm looking for. Estimating is what makes my work possible.

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[Chris Mattern]

>> Why do they need to - they've got calculators and computers.

Which, of course, never make mistakes and never need cross-checking.

  >> Seriously. Who gives a ****?

Oh, I dunno. How about everyone who cares about the massive amounts of lost
money or the *lost lives* that can happen because of a stupid engineering
mistake? Mistakes that are caught by a guy looking at the figures and
and saying, "Wait a minute. That can't be right..."

Chris Mattern

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[squiggleslash]

That sounds like pretty much what most of us geeks can do.

I don't want to point out the obvious, but most people in most generations aren't great at maths. My mother can't do what you describe, but my wife can. Every generation thinks the generation beneath it is somehow mathematically illiterate.

I don't know how old you are. If you're a typical Slashdot reader, you're probably somewhere between 20 and 40. I'm in my mid-thirties. We were brought up with calculators. I don't see calculators as something new that the current generation of schoolkids are using in any major way they weren't before.

I suspect the NASA engineers and scientists are perfectly capable of guessing the approximate square root of 27 in their heads, even if they're all 15 years old.

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[mermaldad]

Well, I agree with your first point, an intuitive understanding is vital to spotting a mistake, but I think your second argument favors today's computer-armed engineers. Complicated, multi-disciplinary problems can be seriously mis-estimated using mental math or paper and pencil.

I have enormous respect for what the engineers of the 1960's did with the tools of the day. No doubt there were some brilliant minds working for NASA and its contractors at the time. However, I look at what my kids are learning in school (usually at an earlier age than in my day), and I look at some of the brilliant engineers I know at NASA today and then I look at the tools that they have available to them, and external factors being equal, I'll take today's generation.

Unfortunately for NASA's current mission, external factors are not equal. Without the Soviet threat, there is much less enthusiasm for human space flight now, and I fear that Congress will not have the persistance to see such a program through. I also see a NASA that is more top-heavy, burdened by government regulations, and risk averse. I hope that this initiative will capture the imagination and political support of the public. Mr. Griffin's "Apollo on steroids" comment was unfortunate, because it suggests that NASA is not doing anything new. But the Space Exploration Initiative is supposed to be more than a series "flag and footprints" missions. It's the groudwork for permanent human bases off our world.

Sorry for the long-windedness!

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[maynard]

First, because calculators and computers will take Garbage In and give Garbage Out, and engineers who don't have an intuitive understanding of the approximate answers they should get are much less likely to catch simple software errors and user mistakes.

That's why runtime garbage collection is so important. I mean, do we honestly expect these young'uns to call free() for every malloc()? It's all too damn complex. And we've got astronauts' lives to worry about! I say we just forget these ancient languages and slide rules and have these NASA rocket scientists code everything up in LOGO. It's untyped, has automatic garbage collection, and the little turtle can teach them engineers Lunar Lander to learn the tricks of the rocket science trade!

Damn, I'm good!

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask me what's 250 * 7 and I don't sit down and do math, I figure the first four 250's are 1,000 and the rest are 750.

How is that not math?

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[Leuf]

First, because calculators and computers will take Garbage In and give Garbage Out, and engineers who don't have an intuitive understanding of the approximate answers they should get are much less likely to catch simple software errors and user mistakes.

Do you really think becoming a rocket scientist today involves being handed a package of computer software and a 1-800 number to call for support if it blows up? Every engineer first learns the concepts and works the equations out by hand before going anywhere near the program that makes it easier.

Second, because most engineering problems are far more complicated than "what's 250 times 7" but involve many, many such simple arithmetic steps. If you have to turn to the calculator on every trivial step it makes solving the whole problem correctly much harder.

I hate to break this to you, but solving "many, many simple arithmetic steps" is sort of what we invented computers to do. And they're kind of good at it.

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, we get it now. You're real smart. Estimating and stuff. Extremely cool. And some kids can't do things you can. Must be very good for your esteem. You can be proud of yourself.

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[LWATCDR]

Because you can catch errors if you can estimate.
A classic example was when I was in college I had a physics professor put a simple question on a test.
How tall is the empire state building.
I put down 1000 feet.
Some people put 5000 or 10000 ft.
If you don't have a feeling for numbers you will may make a gross mistake and not catch it.

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[Anonymous Coward]

They can make mistakes because they were made by fallible creatures.

Get over yourself.

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. Who gives a ****?

Me, and everyone else who doesn't want to be run off the road by someone trying to use the poorly-designed calculator function on their phone to figure how long it will take to get to get from milepost 241 to exit 137 at 72 MPH, or whether they can make it 131 miles to the next gas station on 1/4 of a tank of gas...

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[Anonymous Coward]

They say the older generation adds things with a calculator then checks it by hand while when the younger does it by hand, they check it with a calculator. We tend to trust what we grew up with, know and are comfortable with.

Math was never my forte (thanks in part to my ADD and an unsympathetic 50's-60's school system) so I was forever stuggling with getting things to 'ADD up' (pun intended). As a consequence I had to evolve my own system to satisfy my day to day mathmatical needs. For some reason some denizens of the multiplication table stuck in my mind quite readily (like 8x8=64) while others continued to elude me. If I needed to know the sum of one that eluded me I'd find one I knew that was close and then add or subtract accordingly.

Over time I discovered I could 'ball-park' or 'guesstimate' pretty quickly and often had an answer 'close enough for government work' while my contemporaries were still looking for a pencil and napkin to arrive at the exact answer. I've seen far more intelligent droids than I struggle to figure out a 15% tip while i just use the simple trick of using the obvious 10% then adding one-half of it to itself for a total of 15%.

This ability to quickly arrive at an answer reasonably close for the situation at hand was one skill that showed my supervisiors that I was quick on my feet and in time I was promoted from the blue-collar crowd into mid-management. While it's not sufficient for more demanding scenarios that require precision, it has served me well and I can understand how the poster would see their inability to estimate as a problem. However, it reflects more perhaps on the general ability to adapt and/or simply think creatively.

So although my answers are often good enough for government work, I doubt NASA has a place for me.

Think Different

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[Anonymous Coward]

Most nerds end up as garbage men and toilet cleaners, fields where math isn't that important. What's your point again?

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[hackwrench]

What I don't understand is why, when the scope of the last pointer in the system of equations a memory location is involved with is closed, the memory is not freed. I mean, sure, there may be a few nontrivial cases, but how many are those? How many are the trivial ones?

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[The Breeze]

Agreed. Richard Feynman, who was arguably one of the 5 most brilliant men of the 20th century, stated that the only reason he was able to discover as many things as he did was because he could quickly arrive at rough answers by doing mathematical shortcuts in his head, and he was afraid - in the 1980's - that since the coming generations didn't have to learn those shortcuts, they would be a t a great disadvantage compared to the great physicists of the past.

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[Bob Uhl]

That's one of the great things about slide rules--they give one an excellent feel for the continuous nature of most mathematical & engineering work. Calculators give you an excellent answer, but they give just the answer--they don't have any indication what effect a small difference in the input parameters would have on the answer.

A fellow I know has created a set of brewing slide rules which illustrate this very well. You can, for instance, fiddle with your starting gravity and hop additions to get a particular final amount of IBUs (International BIttering Units--the standard measure of hop bitterness in beer); you can easily see what slight changes in hop amounts, boil times, starting gravity and so forth wil have. Or you can start with the desired IBUs, and see what ranges of additions make sense for your beer.

If all one can do is get the right answer, one's ability to think outside the box, to come up with new answers to new questions is reduced.

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[Anonymous Coward]

code everything up in LOGO. It's untyped,

LOGO has never been untyped. Typing is contextual rather than static, and dynamic typing (as in Lisp) is an unusual feature of some dialects.

Almost every LOGO has: first class procedures, numbers and lists. Some dialects support number subtypes, or a "word" supertype (as in UCBLogo). Some support arrays. Some dialects support closures. Most subtype procedures into commands and operations, where the former has side-effects (in the functional language sense).

Why not learn from the russians?

[QuantumFTL]

Seriously, how much would it cost just to get the Russians to fork over some of their old-school-but-reliable technology.

We may have "won" the cold war, but they definitely won the "spacecraft that aren't overly-engineered death traps" war.

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[geekoid]

which allowed them to win the highest death rate award.

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[kfg]

Seriously, how much would it cost just to get the Russians to fork over some of their old-school-but-reliable technology.

Russian Space Technology on sale

Looks pretty reasonably priced to me.

KFG

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[StarfishOne]

This reminds me of the old designer's adage of: "good, fast, or cheap, pick two".

But perhaps it's really not a bad idea to get some Russian hardware relatively cheaply as extra study/comparisson material/source of inspiration. If ones own source of information and material have deteriorated, why not look at similar things while taking into account the special risks involved. I mean, I'm sure NASA will not adapt the literally 'fly by wire' cockpit of the Russian would-be-Lunar-lander? (hmm, maybe they would.. :O)

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[quanticle]

The urban legend you are referring to has been disproven.

Also, how did you manage to insert a link without Slashcode diplaying the destination domain?

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[Cromac]

Seriously, how much would it cost just to get the Russians to fork over some of their old-school-but-reliable technology.

We may have "won" the cold war, but they definitely won the "spacecraft that aren't overly-engineered death traps" war.

And how many times exactly did the Russians put people on the moon or orbit the moon? Why should we listen to them instead of former NASA engineers who did send men to the moon?

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[kfg]

From the Snopes article:

". . .the Russians, they used pencils. . ."

Of course that is a bit of creative editing, but nonetheless an exact quote of the actual fact.

Also, how did you manage to insert a link without Slashcode diplaying the destination domain?

Ummmmmmmmmmmm, I didn't?

KFG

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[DerekLyons]

Seriously, how much would it cost just to get the Russians to fork over some of their old-school-but-reliable technology.

You can't buy from the Russians what the Russians don't have.
 
 

We may have "won" the cold war, but they definitely won the "spacecraft that aren't overly-engineered death traps" war.

That would be why the difference in failure rates between the US and Russia are statistically insensible. That would be why the latest mark of Soyuz (the TMA) has had serious problems on six out of eight flights to date.

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[LordoftheLemmings]

Little history lesson here from wikipedia: As of November 2004, 439 individuals have flown on spaceflights: Russia/Soviet Union (96), USA (277), others (66). Twenty-two have died while in a spacecraft: Apollo 1 (3), Soyuz 1 (1), X-15-3(1), Soyuz 11 (3), Challenger (7), Columbia (7), totaling 18 astronauts (4.1%) and 4 cosmonauts (0.9% of all the people launched). So actually the americans hold the award. The russians are still using the same rocket (the R-7) that they used to launch sputnik up with. It is a proven, reliable, and cheaper alternative to the space shuttle (in terms of launching people).

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[YrWrstNtmr]

Of course that is a bit of creative editing, but nonetheless an exact quote of the actual fact.

It's an 'actual fact' in that everyone used pencils early on. The Space Pen guy designed that pen with his own company's money, and sold several hundred to NASA and the Russians for a few dollars each.

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[peragrin]

and by your numbers alone we have launched three times the number of people into space. So the US has a 6% failure rate. versus the russian 4% And if you don't count apollo one as they died during a training accident on the ground, your down to 5%. either way both countries have roughly the same failure rate. it just goes to show you, you can make numbers mean what ever you want them to mean. it also means the shuttle is more reliable than the russian soyuz as it can handle twice the number of people per trip just as safely.

Now cheaper well no, that it's not. The shuttle failed to live up to that part of it's design.

And yes while Apollo one is a tragic accident of the space agency, they weren't launching that day, it was just a pressure test that went horribly wrong. So can you really classify it as a space failure?

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so borrow some expendible cosmonauts too.

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[Soft]

That would be why the latest mark of Soyuz (the TMA) has had serious problems on six out of eight flights to date.

Care to elaborate? I remember the first flight ending in a ballistic reentry, and maybe the fifth having problems during docking, but what about the others?

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[tigersha]

Not to forget the disaster the Soviets had on a Launchpad somewhere in the early 60's where a rocket exploded killing many people on the ground, including the director of their space program.

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[Anonymous Coward]

and that would be when they learned not to stand too close to the rockets when they are taking off.

Re:Why not learn from the russians?

[tigersha]

From the Wikipedia article:

As the day wore on, Nedelin grew impatient with the delays and left the viewing area where the military dignitaries were seated a safe distance away. Nedelin returned to the launch pad to personally oversee the preparations, setting up a chair right beside the rocket.t

Nedelin was the director of the space program. Needless to say, he was blown to pieces. Talk about stupid.

Space Cowboys

[Enderandrew]

The movie doesn't sound so far fetched now, does it?

I'm no expert but two of my best friends are a physicist and a mechanical engineer. Both follow the space program and both say that money and politics have firmly grounded NASA in 1960's science with little to no possibility to explore new options.

Plenty of guys in the X Prize world are saying the same thing. So before I visit a museum, I'd look into varied options from some of today's best minds based upon current or evolving technologies.

Then again, if NASA was scrapped tomorrow, or maybe shelved for a few decades until space flight is cheaper, safer and more feasible, I wouldn't care. We've thrown tens of billions of dollars on a pride issue, and what have we gotten in return? How much more do we know about the universe?

I'd rather throw that money are universities and I bet you money, society will benefit considerably more.

Re:Space Cowboys

[geekoid]

without NASA, space flight won't get cheaper.

Re:Space Cowboys

[clarkmoody]

We've gained a huge number of advances in science and technology from NASA. If you consider materials science alone, the cost is worth it. They conduct research on a monumentous scale. Everything from structural design to hydroponics to supercomputing is subject to NASA's research effort. Yes, Velcro too.

The Space Shuttle is the most complicated machine ever built. It's thirty years old. It's time to move on with exploration, and the best way to do that is with existing strategies (a.k.a. Apollo-esque rockets). And they're going to be way better in terms of efficiency and strength, given advanced composites and new engines.

As for private space companies, they simply do not have the money to launch space station components or interplanetary vehicles. Their niche is transporting people. Lifting 4-20 people into a parabolic transport route or into low earth orbit costs way less in terms of fuel, complexity, and R&D than lifting half a million pounds into orbit or to the moon!

And society would benefit WAY more from 'throwing' that money to elementary schools. We should make the best minds compete for jobs teaching the next generation. Education majors shouldn't be the people who can't make it in any other major.

NASA even funds research and projects in universities, so there you are.

Re:Space Cowboys

[Unknown_monkey]

Your friends "follow" the space program, which means they read news. Dan Goldin started the "smarter" NASA when I worked as a contractor at KSC back in the 90's. Crippen pushed safety and cost effectiveness. I worked with some of the best people in the industry, and never have I met a group more focused on a mission. The mission was the mission statement.
And if NASA was scrapped tomorrow, you'd get no more of these:
http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html Spinoffs.
And I just bet that your house is filled with things that came as a spinoff of the program.
And now you whine "But because I want them they would have been invented anyways" but when? By whom?
And as another poster mentioned, NASA puts lots of money into research that is carried out by Universities and schools.
I'd suggest you get more information from the sources, and less from your "friends"

Re:Space Cowboys

[DerekLyons]

I'm no expert but two of my best friends are a physicist and a mechanical engineer. Both follow the space program and both say that money and politics have firmly grounded NASA in 1960's science with little to no possibility to explore new options.

They aren't experts either seemingly. NASA isn't ground in 1960's 'science' (whatever that means) at all. You'll note the use of composites in the structures of the new vehicles. You'll note modern computers (modern by aerospace standards - ancient by geek standards) in use aboard them too... etc... etc... In other things, the state of the art simply hasn't evolved that much. In yet others, decades old solutions are more than adequate and quite well proven. (In the real world with real money and real lives at stake - progress is slow and measured.)
 
 

Plenty of guys in the X Prize world are saying the same thing.

You mean in the X-prize forums? They are bunch of regular joes like you. The guys at the level of Musk/Branson/etc... (I.E. those flying actual performing hardware - everyone else is a wannabee) are largely silent on the issue. (The exception is Rutan - but Rutan hates NASA with a passion. His word on anything about NASA should be taken with a largish grain of salt.)

Re:Space Cowboys

[DynaSoar]

Enderandrew (866215) sez (out of order):

> We've thrown tens of billions of dollars on a pride issue,
> and what have we gotten in return?

NASA has a technology transfer system set up specifically to give the things it invents away.
See http://www.nal.usda.gov/ttic/guide.htm#NASA
It doesn't actually give away its patents and such for free. It is allowed to sell them for the cost of operating the technology transfer system.

If NASA were allowed to profit from its inventions, then on the developments it made in just 4 areas, microelectronics, cryogenics, medical telemetry and systems analysis software, it would have made $4.50 in the twenty years following Apollo for every dollar spent up to the end of Apollo. We know how much NASA would have made, because we know who picked up those balls and ran with them, and how much they made. And that's just 4 areas. NASA has contributed tens of thousands of inventions, developments and patents of all kinds, and someone has made something off of most of them. That's contributed far more to the economy than the taxes taken out to fund the program in the first place. As for you personally, I'd bet an inventory of your home would show a number of things that either wouldn't be there, wouldn't be as good, or would cost a lot more, if it weren't for the contributions of NASA. And when it comes to number of lives saved by the various technologies that NASA contributed to, we're well beyond talking about profit and loss.

> How much more do we know about the universe?

Aw geez, seriously? Don't you read any science news? We know tons more about the universe because of NASA programs and their participation with other programs. The Science and Discovery Channels are always running that stuff.

> I'm no expert but two of my best friends are a physicist and a
> mechanical engineer. Both follow the space program and both say
> that money and politics have firmly grounded NASA in 1960's
> science with little to no possibility to explore new options.

In large part your friends are correct. NASA has become a corporate welfare system for the aerospace industry. There have been many, many tried and proven technologies and even space transportation systems that were started by NASA, R&D funded by NASA to the aerospace companies, and cancelled when enough people had made enough money. There were also many spaceworthy systems developed by others that were far cheaper than what NASA had the aerospace companies crank out, and those never saw the inside of a hangar. It is only the large number of recently very rich people willing to gamble on space that have created visibility for the private space business upstarts. There have been many in the past that died on the vine. Read up on Robert Truax for example. People were so convinved he'd be the first person into space without a government program behind him that they even made a TV show based on him (Salvage I).

NASA and the aerospace industry it exists in symbiosis with (they live off NASA, but NASA lives off the money it gets to give them) do not stand to gain from the sort of massive forward movement such as we saw from 1960 to 1970. They stand to gain more by the same stepwise, incremental improvement such as has been happening in the consumer computer/electronics industry for years. This definitely slows the pace of progress, but not the amount of R&D done by NASA which gets passed into the US economy. That remains.

When engineers ran the space program, we got "Failure is not an option." (Apollo 13)
When bureaucrats ran the space program, we got "My God, Thiokol, what do you want me to do, wait until April to launch?" (Challenger)

Frankly, regardless of the success or failure or sheer bullheaded political wrangling or welfare status of NASA and its corporate children, I'd throw in with the likes of Burt Rutan, and anyone else who tackles the job without any help from NASA. Those

Re:Space Cowboys

[Enderandrew]

I don't follow the X-prize forums, but I've seen interviews with no less than 3 people who've had successful projects, and all were extremely critical of NASA and their approach. It isn't about the material of the shuttle, but the concept of the shuttle and how it is launched.

We are using the same shuttles, theories and propulsions systems we were using 40 years ago. Considering the exponential rate that this technology rate has evolved, that is plain silly.

But NASA was a huge money-sink, with the promise to Congress that the money involved would last decades and decades. To start over on any level would be unacceptable to those writing the checks.

Re:Space Cowboys

[Enderandrew]

Thanks for the informative reply.

My only qualm is that I'm not sure we really have learned anything about space and our universe, save from the Hubble project, which came very close to being a huge bust.

Every few months I read new articles, many linked here, which suggest that no one can agree on anything.

How many times have I read in the past 5 years that no one agrees on what causes red shifts, in space is finite, whether dark matter or dark energy exist, how old the planet is, how old the universe is, or whether or not we have 8, 9, 10, or 11 planets in the solar system?

Re:Space Cowboys

[Enderandrew]

I think without projects like the X-Prize, space flight won't get cheaper. Government programs are never about making a profit, or marketing to a consumer.

If affordable space flight becomes feasible, it will be in the civilian world.

Re:Space Cowboys

[Anonymous Coward]

More importantly, NASA inspires people. That alone has paid back the investment many times over. Of course, Star Trek inspired just as many...dear God.

Re:Space Cowboys

[AsnFkr]

Yes, Velcro too.

Actually...

"The hook and loop fastener was invented in 1948 by Georges de Mestral, a Swiss engineer. The idea came to him after he took a close look at the Burdock seeds which kept sticking to his clothes and his dog's fur on their daily walk in the Alps. De Mestral named his invention "VELCRO" after the French words velours, meaning 'velvet', and crochet, meaning 'hook'."

...from Wikipedia


But hey....I agree with your fundamental argument that NASA pushes development in general, plus I'm a huge Apollo dork so this is all cool news to me.

Re:Space Cowboys

[2nd Post!]

How many times have I read in the past 5 years that no one agrees on what causes red shifts, in space is finite, whether dark matter or dark energy exist, how old the planet is, how old the universe is, or whether or not we have 8, 9, 10, or 11 planets in the solar system?

None of those are NASA problems to solve though.

You can't measure redshift by sending a man to the Moon. You measure redshift using spectrometers, CCDs, and telescopes.
You don't discover if space is finite through sending men to Mars. You measure the size of the universe with LIGOS, gravity waves, extra sensitive space telescopes, and redshift.
You can't verify dark matter by sending men into space. You detect dark matter with ariel surveys, LIGOS, telescopes, and predictive computer models. You verify dark matter using quasar and supernova bursts and telescopes.
And on and on and on.

Re:Space Cowboys

[Abcd1234]

My only qualm is that I'm not sure we really have learned anything about space and our universe, save from the Hubble project, which came very close to being a huge bust.

Are you *insane*? Geez, the WMAP project alone has provided incredible insight into the formation of our universe. It's all but confirmed the inflationary model of stellar evolution, not to mention pinning down the age of the universe to +-200 million years.

And that's just one project. Chandra is providing some fantastic insights into galactic evolution (heck, just today their was an announcement from the Chandra project which all but confirms the existence of dark matter). If you're more interested in our "backyard", there's the enormously successful Mars rovers, not to mention the Cassini mission.

Honestly, we're in a veritable rennaissance as far as astronomy and astrophysics goes. It's an extremely exciting time!

Re:Space Cowboys

[GreggBz]

We've thrown tens of billions of dollars on a pride issue, and what have we gotten in return? How much more do we know about the universe?

Have you not been paying attention?

What do you want to know about the Universe or the Planets? Ask a question and I bet NASA the ESA or the Russian Space Agency has answered it, or attempted to. NASA has filled more books with knowledge and science for those universities you wish to fund then any other one agency or government organization. Really.

Everything that we know about the outer solar system, which is a library full, is almost entirely thanks to Voyager 1 & 2. A great number of the things that we know about deep space and how stars are born is thanks to Hubble. What we know about the Ozone Layer, Global Warming, CFC's (Russian Venus Probes, planet side observations and later science funded by NASA) Van Allen Radiation (Explorer Probe) Solar Flairs (The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) and the composition
of our own planets atmosphere is thanks to the planetary science that NASA has funded or championed. I'd say that our knowledge of the planet Mars and it's unique dynamics has shed a lot of light on our own atmosphere thanks to, NASA. There are volumes of information on the geology and composition of Mars now. Thanks Mars Rovers. How was the moon born? Well, Apollo and the open disclosure of Moon rocks to scientists around the world has likely given us the correct answer. Thanks again. Just read the press releases at NASA.

Here is an interesting thing we learned yesterday.

Your tax dollars, friend, learn us some fantastic, inspirational things. Sure it could be better. But I feel good making the investment to what might be an imperfect organization, because I can see the value and learn something new whenever I try.

Re:Space Cowboys

[Mr. Slippery]

And I just bet that your house is filled with things that came as a spinoff of the program. And now you whine "But because I want them they would have been invented anyways" but when? By whom?

How about by federally funded researchers given the mission "Develop useful stuff for use here on Earth" rather than "Send guys to the moon to bring back some rocks?"

I like the space program as much as anybody. But the spinoff argument doesn't fly as a primary reason to go into space.

Re:Space Cowboys

[prichardson]

"We've thrown tens of billions of dollars on a pride issue, and what have we gotten in return? How much more do we know about the universe?"

What about the Hubble space telescope? That has taught us amazing things. How can you possibly say that NASA hasn't done anything worthwhile? Because of Hubble we know that the universe is actually accelerating outward. Hubble alone is worth the space program.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescop e

Re:Space Cowboys

[Enderandrew]

You can't have it both ways. You can't credit NASA for all these breakthroughs, but when they fail to deliver any answers say that isn't their department.

Re:Space Cowboys

[DerekLyons]

I don't follow the X-prize forums, but I've seen interviews with no less than 3 people who've had successful projects,

Considering that there has only been *one* person with a sucessful X-prize project (Rutan), that's flat-out impossible.
 
 

and all were extremely critical of NASA and their approach. It isn't about the material of the shuttle, but the concept of the shuttle and how it is launched.

You need to understand the alt.spacer mindset - part and parcel of it is the rock solid belief that Evil NASA has, with malice aforethought, held back the development of space in the same way oil companies do gas mileage enhancers. They (the alt.spacers) are the Brave and Plucky Lone Heros fighting against great odds to Save Humanity - just like in the Heinlein juveniles they read back in fifth grade. (I'm sympathetic with their goals, but that doesn't blind me.) Worse yet, it's largely rote noise - very few in the alt.space movement actually understand the complex web of politics, technology, and sociology that lead first to Apollo, and then to the Shuttle. (Building a small rocket doesn't make you an expert on all rockets any more than building a bridge of Lego bricks qualifies you to build one of steel and concrete.)
 
 

We are using the same shuttles, theories and propulsions systems we were using 40 years ago. Considering the exponential rate that this technology rate has evolved, that is plain silly.

Here in the real world not all technologies have evolved at an exponential rate - and some simply can't. Take liquid rocket engines for example - by the 60's they were already near their maximum theoretical efficiency, and have made only modest incremental gains since then - they can't do any better without repealing the laws of physics and chemistry. We can make 'em a bit lighter now a days, and bit better in some other areas, but that's about it. In other cases, there simply isn't enough to be worth sinking massive amounts of R&D dollars into research.
 
 

But NASA was a huge money-sink, with the promise to Congress that the money involved would last decades and decades. To start over on any level would be unacceptable to those writing the checks.

I've parsed this about three different ways - and it makes no sense. NASA never promised Congress anything with regards as to how long money would last.

Re:Space Cowboys

[qwix]

Both follow the space program and both say that money and politics have firmly grounded NASA in 1960's science with little to no possibility to explore new options.
[...] So before I visit a museum, I'd look into varied options from some of today's best minds based upon current or evolving technologies.

Now why would the nice folks for which the politics business is already working risk their jobs and look for people who actually know stuff?

Re:Space Cowboys

[grimwell]

Maybe Oil companies should be encouraged to get into the space game. Exxon Mobil earn $4.7 Million in profit per HOUR between April-June 2006; $10.4 Billion profit for second quarter 2006. Source

It would seem they have the cash on hand for space exploration. I don't think space tourism is going to interest them but resource "mining" might.

Re:Space Cowboys

[Anonymous Coward]

When engineers ran the space program, we got "Failure is not an option." (Apollo 13)
When bureaucrats ran the space program, we got "My God, Thiokol, what do you want me to do, wait until April to launch?" (Challenger)

Actually the engineers were the bureaucrats. If you look into the background of the Challenger accident, you'll see names like Arnie Aldrich, Glynn Lunney, and Jay Greene... the men who helped to send Apollo to the moon in the 60s. Which just proves that it's the culture, not the people.

(Incidentally, the quote is "My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, April?" It's a bit more succint.)

Re:Space Cowboys

[Bob Uhl]

We've gained a huge number of advances in science and technology from NASA. If you consider materials science alone, the cost is worth it. They conduct research on a monumentous scale.

One needs to examine both the cost and the benefit. It'd be absurd to deny that the space program has had some massive benefits--but it'd also be absurd to deny that its cost has been staggering. Now, is that cost worth it? Are Tang and zero-G pens worth several trillion dollars in R&D? I'm being more than a little facetious, but I think you see my point.

Even the materials science that you mention: how useful has it actually been? Certainly the heat-resistant tiles on the shuttle are neat, but are they useful outside of the space programme?

I don't doubt that there might be many benefits of the space program that I don't know of, but I do know that it has been one of the largest expenditures of money ever. It'd be cool someday to see a final accounting by an unbiased party.

A big benefit I can think of: satellite program, thus satcom, thus GPS.

Re:Space Cowboys

[2nd Post!]

Yes I can! NASA's goals and methods are conducive to specific things, not EVERYTHING. You are asking for everything and anything.

NASA can put up satellites, space stations, design rockets, design satellites, etc. Researchers working with NASA discover answers and at the same time discover NEW QUESTIONS.

For example, dark matter, as a theory, didn't exist 100 years ago. It wasn't until researchers (including NASA) discovered enough about the universe to make the discrepency between observed matter and observed gravity noticable.

The speed of light has always been fixed, but it wasn't until the tools became available that it became apparant that was true; nor until Einstein came up with general and special relativity that the reason for that limit existed.

NASA finds answers, and finds more questions. In searching space they discover that the cosmos is different, and so more questions get asked and old questions answered, discarded, or ignored. All the questions you bring up:
Red shift (only an issue because size is incorrect)
Size (only an issue because gravity/light doesn't measure up)
Dark matter (only an issue because observations don't match predictions)
Age (only an issue because size, redshift, and gravity doesn't match up)
Planets (only an issue because we NEVER had a definition for planet before)

They aren't "truths" you write down and then fix. That is the realm of religion, faith, and the philosophical. Science, and NASA, is about continued search, exploration, breaking apart of old truths, discovering new models, and abandoning old models.

Re:Space Cowboys

[DynaSoar]

Enderandrew (866215) sez: "How many times have I read in the past 5 years that no one agrees on what causes red shifts, in space is finite, whether dark matter or dark energy exist, how old the planet is, how old the universe is, or whether or not we have 8, 9, 10, or 11 planets in the solar system?"

That, my friend, is science in progress. It is the outcome of the results from the various space science projects. The fact that they have not arrived at complete and final answers does not invalidate it. In fact it validates it as scientific progress. We have more and better answers now than we did before. In the future, we will have answers that are better yet.

If it can't be questioned, and potentially invalidated by disproof of the hypothesis, it's not science. You're just seeing them going at each other trying to disprove. By this method we trim away the false and get closer to the true. Even the rare, on target, and often accidental, accurate discoveries go through this process. This is also why even those things which we know well get changed (ref. recent story about the atomic force being found to be a millionth of a per cent different than thought). It's why we call things that are well supported such as relativity to be theories. We're not down to the final answer yet. And the philosophers of science make a good point (primarily by extending from history) that we may never arrive at final answers, because we'll find theories that invalidate the old ones, which are themselves starting points closer to the truth, and continue the process from there.

{humor} Besides, if it weren't for this continual process of refinement, we'd arrive at final truths, and all of us working scientists would be out of a job. {/humor}

So, Old becomes New again

[dontbflat]

"Snoddy, a manager at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, has been removing valves and other parts from Apollo exhibits as he oversees construction of the upper-stage engine on the new moon rocket, dubbed Ares 1."
Cool, so maybe we can have a cheaper shuttle to the moon. Who knows, maybe with using old tech we can setup a tourist information center on the moon, and give guided tours of the craters. Ah...that will be the day, when a normal joe can touch/stand on the moon.

Re:So, Old becomes New again

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if we could do it with the same 32 kilobytes that they had.

What archives?

[Browzer]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/08/14/space.tap es.reut/index.html

Re:What archives?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly why they need the old staff.

They lost the data and they are hoping these guys remember.. :)

Re:What archives?

[humankind]

I have a 1969 Time-Life box set of LPs with pictures and recordings of the landing. I could make this available to the government for the bargain price of, say $50M. It would still be cheaper/better than probably whatever they plan to do.

Back in my day...

[Kesch]

...we had to get to the moon in foot deep snow, and it was all uphill, both directions!

Re:Back in my day...

[smittyoneeach]

ah, what four Yorkshiremen won't do for a little 'shine.

And you try to explain that to the youth of today...

Not all of it

[RandomPrecision]

Well, I guess they won't be learning from this part of the Apollo program...

Veterans - the ultimate backup when you run out of

[D4C5CE]

...tapes:

Some old Apollo engineers are even being brought back on a contract basis to work with the young folks

...who just had their share of training videos and previous mission data cancelled.

Heh

[andreyw]

...Idiots. They've basically watched their entire knowledge base die, disintegrate and retire of the past 30 years, and only /NOW/ they're doing something about it.

Re:Heh

[humankind]

...Idiots. They've basically watched their entire knowledge base die, disintegrate and retire of the past 30 years, and only /NOW/ they're doing something about it.

Hey, look on the bright side... back then those poor people only had one kind of Coca Cola. Now we have Diet Coke, Vanilla Coke, Caffeine Free Coke, Cherry Coke and more! We're still exploring the horizons. They've just dipped a little lower.

Re:Heh

[T-Ranger]

Excluding Caffeine Free Coke, all of those were available in the '60s.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

"Diet Coke or Diet Coca-Cola is a sugar-free soft drink produced and distributed by The Coca-Cola Company. It was introduced in the United States in July 1982, and was the first new brand since 1886 to use the Coca-Cola trademark."

In those days it was blood, sweat, tears and..

[Anonymous Coward]

Ammonium perclorate?

Great idea ...

[Anonymous Coward]

.. thirty years too late.

Re:Joke...

[R3d M3rcury]

Actually, my favorite was the guy I saw in Florida who had a Challenger license plate with the inscription "KABOOM."

Apollo on steroids is bad

[Anonymous Coward]

This is bad. In the 60's, things were fast and loose with the smoking and drinking and drugging and all. But now they are testing for mission-enhancing substances and might disqualify any moon landings or mars missions if any program tests dirty.

I certainly hope not!

[RyanFenton]

NASA has lost track of all kinds of old stuff in those archives! And with recent policy on science funding, I certainly hope we won't have to go back to the drawing board in order to relearn basic science all over again! Really though - NASA makes its mistakes, but it's one of the better agencies left alive in our government.

Then again, if we go back to the drawing board, perhaps we'd consider funding basic education and research again beyond just memorization and giveaways to the isolated private sector interests. You know - like back when we used to combat national crisises by growing to meet the threat against us, sacrificing our private and party interests to build a stronger society together using honesty and science.

That, and seeing experiments with primates in space again would be pretty neat.

Ryan Fenton

Re:I certainly hope not!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe we need the soviets to come back and play with us again?

Bygone era

[humankind]

A few months ago, one of the old Apollo monitoring stations went on sale and we went to look at this unique property. A building in the middle of nowhere up on a mountain, with a six-story-high satellite dish. It was amazing and awe-inspiring to crawl through this rusted dinosaur skeleton of a bygone era. There wasn't much left of the place when I visited, but I felt proud just to be standing on the hallowed ground where great minds plotted of men flying through space and landing on the moon. Now on this site, sits a big obnoxious cell tower. It's kind of sad that kids today don't look up at the stars.

I cannot imagine America having the resources to land on the moon successfully now. Our society was different back then. Science was something to revere. Now we are more concerned with American Idol.

Re:Bygone era

[geekoid]

"Science was something to revere. Now we are more concerned with American Idol."

nothing has changed. While people where plotting to get us to the moon, others where goggling their current american idol, Elvis.
The only thing different is that now they're googling american idol.

Re:Bygone era

[captjc]

One can't look up at the stars any more, there is too much light pollution. (at least where I am anyway)

Re:Bygone era

[ZeroExistenZ]

It's kind of sad that kids today don't look up at the stars.

They can't with all the Light pollution
Seriously, it's that bad.

I'm 24, and today I biked out into the fields (I have to bike 20km to get far enough from a quite tiny studentcity to get a small path of clear sky between blobs of light from the streets) and just was amazed at HOW MANY STARS there actually are visible to the naked eye, and wondered how it'd look like without light from the roads and what not.

I grew up just seeing the basic constellations, I've always grown up in regions where there's ALOT of light 24/7 and couldn't see any stars but the few of the clearest.

Re:Bygone era

[Carbon Blob]

and just was amazed at HOW MANY STARS there actually are visible to the naked eye

I'm amazed at how few stars are visible, even under perfect conditions. Most people will guess "millions".

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_eye :

"Theoretically, at up to +6m the human eye would see about 2,500 stars in the clear sky but, in practice, the atmospheric extinction and dust reduce the number to 1500 to 2000"

-CB

Re:Bygone era

[Yehooti]

It's not all as bad as you might see, humankind. NASA may have given up old groundstations, but they're not totally lost. I suggest looking at http://www.pari.edu/ as an example of one oldy put to very good use.

Re:Bygone era

[humankind]

I know what you mean. This is why I was looking at property up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere. It's nice to see what the sky really looks like.

Re:Bygone era

[Tairnyn]

"The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us."

-- G.K. Chesterton

defense contractors are the builders...

[SuperBanana]

that even a republican congress would want to spend money on this program.

Why? Nearly everything thrown up into space is built by "defense" companies, and republicans LOVE to give money to "defense" companies.

Re:defense contractors are the builders...

[pixelguru]

I think Bush is still Republican, and he did give that odd speech about building Moon bases and going to Mars. Until I read this story, I didn't think anyone took him seriously.

Also, the Marathon reference in your sig is priceless.

Why go to the Moon?

[NotQuiteReal]

Why should we go to the Moon with a bunch of expensive little space ships that can only bring back a few pounds of material for study?

Why don't we just put some big rockets on the dark side and push the whole thing down here were we can get at it easily?

We could land it where it came from in the first place - the location of Atlantis.

Anyhow, dropping the Moon onto the Earth should would shut up a lot of whiners.

Re:Why go to the Moon?

[torvince]

LOL

Re:Why go to the Moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Historians claim that millions of years ago, an asteroid collided with the Earth and the resulting chunk that came off of it hardened and became the Moon. What historians didn't know is that the Earth was actually Chuck Norris, and that the Moon was actually Vin Diesel.

NASA gets stiffed...

[Anonymous Coward]

...because the government won't cut loose with the black ops projects tech. Too valuable to keep the top shelf stuff secret and in the military realm. They can hit near-space on demand now, routinely....anyone really think the sr-71 was "it", and they just stopped developing after that?

Reaching for his tin foil hat...

[kiwipom]

With the advances in CGI there's no need to dust off those old studios, the moon landings can be faked entirely in a computer.

Sorry, it had to be said ;-)

Re:Reaching for his tin foil hat...

[vegasmacguy]

Bring in the old astronauts to show them how to rig the wires and set up the lights.

Re:Reaching for his tin foil hat...

[Monkeys!!!]

heh, I just had a thought.

What if the original moon landings were faked but the secret was so well kept it never got back to the current administration? So the American government spends all this time and money, and actually makes it there.

Just thinking about that makes me giggle for some reason.

*disclaimer: I'm not wearing a tin foil hat, I just found this idea amusing*

Re:Reaching for his tin foil hat...

[jonwil]

Maybe they should get the same guys who did the excellent HBO documentary "From The Earth To The Moon" to do it :)

Open source,patent free frontier development zone

[NZheretic]

The 1960s space program was only possible because of the freely cooperative relationship between the organizations and businesses involved. The sharing of ideas, methods and all sorts of patentable technology took place between all of the stakeholders without concern for license fees for use in the space program.

Part of the reason was the secrecy with the ongoing race with the old Soviet Union. A company could not file a patent without the patent being publicly available from the US patent office. The other reason was that the end user, the US Government, would just appropriate the royalty free use of any patent with space or military applications.

Whatever that reasons, the rabid and successful development of the space program would not have been possible in today's IP lawyer driven patent filing, royalty seeking economic environment.

A similar situation took place in the software industry from 1970 to 1990, to quote:

PATENTS: If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. I feel certain that some large company will patent some obvious thing related to interface, object orientation, algorithm, application extension or other crucial technique. If we assume this company has no need of any of our patents then the have a 17-year right to take as much of our profits as they want. The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can. Amazingly we havn't done any patent exchanges tha I am aware of. Amazingly we havn't found a way to use our licensing position to avoid having our own customers cause patent problems for us. I know these aren't simply problems but they deserve more effort by both Legal and other groups. For example we need to do a patent exchange with HP as part of our new relationship. In many application categories straighforward thinking ahead allows you to come up with patentable ideas. A recent paper from the League for Programming Freedom (available from the Legal department) explains some problems with the way patents are applied to software.

Challenges and Strategy Bill Gates May 16, 1991

The space frontier needs to be designated a patent free development zone. Also without the current need for cold war secrecy, the US Government should encourage as much design development to be done in an open source licensed manner.

Re:Veterans - the ultimate backup when you run out

[Anonymous Coward]

yip - I'm one of the those training folks who was recently run off by bad management at USA (United Space Alliance). Now they're hiring sub to sub contractors to finish projects and adding even more tasks to engineers which have nothing to do with engineering. Sad, really. I used to be so gung ho on NASA but working in the environment killed it. So much wasted money and effort with no innovation in even the simplest areas.

I will crawl on my hands and knees...

[rickb928]

...to see another Saturn launch.

Hell yeah.

rick

Re:I will crawl on my hands and knees...

[Anonymous Coward]

Saw one Saturn V launch from up close at the Cape. Stupifying - almost beyond belief and certainly beyond description. Considerably more impressive than Shuttle launches. Never got to see a moon launch except on TV. Really wish I had seen one up close.

Re:I will crawl on my hands and knees...

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw Apollo 15 launch 35 years ago last month. Unforgettable.

Re: Highest death rate?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to this link, the score is 17 american vs 4 russian deaths. Ok, ok... 14 americans have died in just two accidents. But, either way, it's two russian accidents vs 3.

Re:Veterans - the ultimate backup when you run out

[zoomzit]

Some old Apollo engineers are even being brought back on a contract basis to work with the young folks

Old Guy (to young NASA punk): Sonny, I am going to teach you how to get to the moon! First off, we'll need a really big sound stage...

Boy I hope so....

[StressGuy]

Wierd that this comes up. Just today, at my latest gig, I had casually mentioned running some rough computation on engine cowl latching loads that showed we might be a little tight on safety margin. However, I needed to see that Nastran load simulation to cross-check the results.

The response I got stunned me a bit...

One of the most senior structural engineers there told me that the loads within an engine core are far too complex and why was I even bothering with hand computations?

It made me immediately think of two things:

1) We were building jet engines long before there was a Nastran (or a NASA for that matter)

2) Complexity!?...NASA brought Apollo 13 home using slide rules and one hell of a pilot. I'm old enough that I remember that. In fact, it's probably why I'm in the aerospace industry.

I hate to sound like an old man, but sometimes I worry that we rely too much on tools that separate the engineer from the analysis. Don't get me wrong, Nastran is great, but if you have no way to cross validate the results, how do you spot an error?

Ya, know...the method I used to evaluate those loads probably came from around the mid 1940's.

Re:Boy I hope so....

[GenKreton]

How were you verifying by hand?

Re:Boy I hope so....

[Zackbass]

Umm, that engineer was right, you don't check computation with more computation, whether it be by hand or computer. You check ALL computation with testing. Are you telling me that you'll make any progress checking even remotely complex structures by hand? Any analysis should be assumed faulty in critical cases and on low FOS. All your analysis is worthless until you apply the actual loads with actual instrumentation.

Re:Boy I hope so....

[StressGuy]

First off, obtaining a consistent result via two independant methods is an excellent way to cross-check your work.

Secondly, testing is a good way, but the only way. At some point, you have to make you best accessment without the benefit of testing.

Finally, you have no idea what specific analysis I was doing so have no basis to say it was too complex to do by hand.

I suggest you research the origin of the term "back of the envelope calculation", you will learn the story of one "Sir Geoffrey Taylor". Then come back and tell me again what is too complex to do by hand.

You are a perfect example of the problem I was trying to present. No ingenuity, just reliance on machines....pity you don't seem to understand how dangerous that can be.

Re:Boy I hope so....

[StressGuy]

It actually boiled down to a variation of a pressure vessel problem. If you can obtain a copy of Bruhn, look at chapter A16. The basic idea is there.

Re:Boy I hope so....

[Anonymous Coward]

In spirit I agree with you, but there is a problem with ingenuity - it's in short supply, and its very expensive. It takes years of training to be able to do what you can do, and most people don't have the chops to handle it. Watch some middle and high school math classes (or basic undergraduate ones even). It takes intense mental training to be really good at this stuff, and that means having people who really WANT to do it. Socially the US at least does not encourage these kind of activities, but that's another post. Statistically, the financial returns vs. the effort required to be ingenious aren't a very good bet for most people.

Since ever more complex work needs to be done on a daily basis however, we instead automate things that (in theory) SHOULD be doable by computer. As you noted, you can't always trust the machine. This is sound, but impractical in many situations. One of my favorite areas of computer science is how you can build machines that you can be sure ARE correct, and what it means to be sure something is correct (after all, humans are faulty too - how sure is sure?) Proof theory, proving properties of systems, and other such tools may someday make great strides in reliable computers and computing.

Is this dangerous? Absolutely. In the end there is no substitute for a trained, intelligent, insiteful, and ingenious individual working on hard problems (I've known a couple folks in school that were and probably still are capable of such work.) Unfortunately, resource constraints in that department force us to look for other usable ways to perform complex tasks with a high degree of reliability.

Re:Boy I hope so....

[GenKreton]

Unfortunately I am paying enough for books right now as it is. I will try to see if someone I know has it though. I am a rising junior in mechanical engineering so these sorts of things greatly interest me. I've always been a fan of mixing the old school and the new school. I even use a slide rule in class for fun sometimes, heh.

Re:Boy I hope so....

[dcam]

I suggest you research the origin of the term "back of the envelope calculation", you will learn the story of one "Sir Geoffrey Taylor". Then come back and tell me again what is too complex to do by hand.

According to Wikipedia at least the term has more to do with Fermi.

Re:Boy I hope so....

[Zackbass]

I certainly didn't think my post should have come off advocating a reliance on machines; my point was that proper engineering should have a reliance on real world testing. I firmly believe that anyone running FEA software should at very least have a working knowledge of both traditional methods of analysis and be familiar with the actual mathematical process of FEA. As many others have said, you'll never know when the software is wrong without a sense of what is right, but I'd like to add that if someone is relying on software they should know how the algorithm works and how it fails.

You're right that an alternative method of analysis is a good way to check a problem, but it's still no excuse for proper testing of a critical part. Structural analysis is based on so many assumptions and approximations (let's put our hands over our ears and yell 'linear elastic!') that it can never be 100%. Something can always come out of a blind spot and kill someone. No matter how good your analysis is it'll never tell you that the manufacturer's process leaves cracks in the material. I could say something that Tacoma Narrows, but it's far too abused.

I don't know the specifics of the problem you worked out but your mention of NASTRAN told me it was originally done with FEA. I assumed that if the original guy broke out FEA to solve the problem it wouldn't have been as trivial as you made it out to be. Of course, I just showed a coworker how to solve a beam bending problem when he wanted a copy of ANSYS to do it (it DID take several pages of my notebook to figure out good path to the solution, but still, doing FEA on the thing was ridiculous) so there goes my theory.

I am quite familiar with Fermi problems and back of the envelope calculations (my notebook is filled with them). Knowing how to break a problem down into something that can be checked for feasibility is something that too many engineers I know are useless at. They'll never know what ideas are worth pursuit without preliminary analysis. However it is exactly that, preliminary. In the end real testing is required.

Re:Boy I hope so....

[StressGuy]

Understood, depending on the specifics of your beam bending problem (I assume we are talking about a multi-span beam, otherwise the problem really is trivial), you can solve it via well known tablulated solutions, the Hardy Cross method (which works great on an Excel spreadsheet), or, these days, I just use an Octave script (or Matlab if you got it). Just a matter defining the stiffness matrix and letting Octave do it's thing.

If you're talking about something a little more exotic, say a variable cross-section multi-span or a built-up intermidiate diagonal tension beam, well, there are well established methods for those as well. In the case of the IDT beam, for example, NACA has an excellent approach, and, if you have a basic grasp of shear flow, you can do some "quick and dirty" computations that will give you and idea of how well you can expect your beam to evaluate in a matter of minutes (which is great for making a go/no-go decision on a design drawing).

Incidentally, the Hardy Cross method (also called the moment distribution method), comes from the early 1900's.

Also, hand analysis of structures does not necessarily limit you to linear elastic assumptions (Cozzone's method for example) and the vast majority of FEA done in the field also assumes linear-elastic (don't be fooled by the Von-Mises output - it's a strain energy density measure, not a stress field). As far as manufacturing defects are concerned, Nastran won't help you either. You still have to know they are there and account for them regardless of the method you employ. If you are talking about multiple site damage (MSD), then you are using a statistical approach and/or a rogue flaw assumption regardless.

Testing is an excellent and even necessary validation tool. However, before you can even do the test, you must do some kind of analysis to even have an idea of what parameters are important, plus, it would be nice if you could pass the test on the first try. Yea, you can "shotgun" it if you've got time and money to burn. However, there are methods that enable you to do sufficient analysis to devise a test with even a minimal understanding of the underlying physics (see "Buckingham Pi" theorem).

Sorry to come down on you as hard as I did, but your response came across as dismissive. Furthermore, it touches on something I come across constantly in the field. That is, engineers who are clearly knowledgable, but lack even basic understanding of how to access a structure. They're smart enough, it's just that no one seems willing to teach that anymore. I can't tell you how many times I've had to reject bad FEA, or how hard that is to do in a culture that believes anything that comes out of a computer is pure gold.

I'm so disappointed in this whole CEV garbage...

[MerkX]

As a child and into my young adult years I was so proud of NASA and looked so forward to the future of manned space exploration. Sure, I began to become disappointed in the '90's that NASA wasn't doing much and that no Shuttle replacement was even on the horizon.

However, this whole CEV concept is "One Giant Step Backward for Mankind" - I don't care how they spin it. It represents a failure of nerve before the Universe and reflects a "tuck tail and run" policy of our nation as a whole.

Freeking politicians are screwing the whole thing up and NASA is a massive beuracracy maintaining jobs for the "less than creatives". Long live Burt Rutan, Richard Branson and their crews - poke the crap out of NASA's eye!

Re:I'm so disappointed in this whole CEV garbage..

[DerekLyons]

Freeking politicians are screwing the whole thing up and NASA is a massive beuracracy maintaining jobs for the "less than creatives". Long live Burt Rutan, Richard Branson and their crews - poke the crap out of NASA's eye!

Oh, yes... replicating something that NASA did 45+ years ago is really a poke in their eye. (And NASA did it time, after time, after time - for nearly a decade. Branson & Rutan haven't flown in over two years - after only flying a handful of times.)

Re: Highest death rate?

[Killall -9 Bash]

Mod parent informative.

Re:I find it hard to believe

[Anonymous Coward]

Look back at the Reagan tax cuts and you will see that lowert taxes lead to higher government revenues. It's actually starting to look that way for the Bush tax cuts as well.

All Blueprints's and Jigs were..

[TheHawke]

destroyed by Boeing, Grumman, and the various subcontractors on orders from the Gov't due to them being worried that some Bad Guy was going to try to duplicate the feat. As if someone had the money and resources to do that!

The Saturn Project held so much promise as an general-purpose heavy-lift vehicle. I just hope that some plans escaped the shredders and reside in someone's collection that would be a hefty bonus to the new HLV program.

I'll bet that they will take over the Kansas Cosmosphere for a month or two, reverse engineer the Apollo CM and SM they got there, not to mention pick over the LEM as well.

Re:All Blueprints's and Jigs were..

[Anonymous Coward]

the blueprints are there or they exist someplace in a rows of cabinets. Also they exist on microfiche. However the problem is locating specific details of all the various parts, i.e. from many many companies that no longer exist and the ones that build the parts are all dead of old age.

Re: Highest death rate?

[elakazal]

Actually, if you're willing to count deaths to others besides astronauts themselves, the Soviets had a much higher kill rate, because of a bad track record on launches. You're excluding:

(1960) The "Nedelin Disaster", in which an R-7 rocket undergoing repairs on the launchpad exploded. Estimates of the dead vary a lot, but the least I've seen is 100 people. Unquestionably the worst space disaster yet.

(1961) Cosmonaut Bondarenko dies in simulator accident

(1969) The N-1 launchpad explosion. The N-1 rocket was supposed to be the USSR's Saturn V, but it failed repeatedly, and took out 5 people and the launchpad on the final attempt.

(1973) Kosmos 3M explodes on the pad, 7 dead

(1980) At least 50 people die when a rocket explodes during refueling.

Including these sort of things adds the one casualty caused by a Titan launch crane accident.

I suspect Brazil is in second place in the casualty race, since their launchpad explosion in 2003 killed twenty-odd people. (I seem to recall India having a recent space-related accident, but I can't remember what it was.)

Lesson #1

[tverbeek]

Bring duct tape. Plenty of duct tape.

Re:Lesson #1

[waferhead]

Lesson #1
(Score:5, Funny)
by tverbeek (457094) Alter Relationship on Tuesday August 15, @09:09PM (#15915761)
(http://microsoft.toddverbeek.com/)
Bring duct tape. Plenty of duct tape.

That's actually insightful.
My father was at the cape for many years early on, and was the pad foreman for John Glenns launch---

He assures me that Duck tape was actually used to help secure and seal exterior panels on some of the early launches.

In fact, if you look closely at the pictures, you can see the silver outlines on the panels...

Re: Highest death rate?

[grumbel]

According to this link, the score is 17 american vs 4 russian deaths. Ok, ok... 14 americans have died in just two accidents. But, either way, it's two russian accidents vs 3.

That list only lists astronauts and cosmonauts, there have been a bunch of other accidents in space exploration killing quite a bunch of ground crew, for example while fueling a russian Vostok-2M rocket it exploded and killed 50 people and there have been some other accidents.

In the end the death count in both russian and american space exploration is however still pretty low compared to all the advances it provided and the money that was spend.

Re:NASA gets stiffed...

[Andy Dodd]

Potentially yes

Remember that the SR-71 was a recon aircraft. Why make a recon aircraft that can fly faster/higher when you can just upgrade the optics and imager on a satellite and get improved results, less risk of intelligence asset loss, and greater ground coverage from a bunch of satellites?

Republicans and Democrats aren't engineers.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's no wonder that the American politicians of the past few decades have made such mistakes. Basically none of them have an engineering or scientific background, and thus likely cannot understand any of the issues involving such fields.

Take the presidents, for instance. Nixon's background was law. Ford's background is law. Reagan's background was economics and sociology. The first Bush's background was mainly in war making. Clinton's background is law. The current Bush's background is history and business. At least Carter obtained a Bachelor of Science degree.

When none of the past seven presidents have had any engineering background, and only one has significant scientific experience, it's no wonder that they have had no clue when it comes to NASA. What NASA does is completely foreign to people who are mainly educated in social studies.

Re: Highest death rate?

[elakazal]

Ach, should have hit Preview. Just to clarify, the Titan accident is the only additional U.S. casualty I could come up with.

I thought the originals *were* on steroids

[r_jensen11]

With as many deaths from accidents/errors/mishaps/fuckups on both sides (US and USSR,) I thought that the original Apollo missions *were* on steroids

My bad, I guess they were on speed.

Contract with the Russians

[Kasar]

They seem to be the only ones able to get anything into space with any reliability, normally with old rocket types.

Bigelow had to use a Ukrainian rocket to get into space as well. http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/060721_bigelo w_genesis-1.html

NASA's going to end up just a very expensive federal regulatory agency protecting it's monopoly by preventing all space launches from the US except by their own craft.

Re:Space Cowboys, Feasible?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apollo went to the moon. If I wanted to learn how to go to the moon, I'd look at Apollo, even if I thought I had something better or perfect.

The biggest thing about this is that some things that made Apollo successful aren't common knowledge, or worse, they aren't written down anywhere. Some of the guys that did Apollo are dead, and there's a chance they carried unique knowledge to the grave with them. New engineers and scientists really should be taking this opportunity to refresh that knowledge and store it, now that we have computer technology to store it with.

We don't need to wake up 50 years from now and wonder why a support bar on the lunar lander that should've been perfectly straight has a slight bend to it, especially if the design documents and blueprints all specify a straight bar.

Read some of the stories about the nuclear doorstop, especially one quote from here:

The United States has not built a nuclear warhead since 1991. The government spends about $5 billion a year maintaining the weapons, and engineers have patched problems by opening up warheads that were never meant to be opened. The accumulation of tiny engineering changes meant the bombs moved incrementally away from their original designs, with unknown effects.

Anytime humanity loses knowledge, it's a bad thing.

I'm just disappointed ...

[slightlyspacey]

Yes, the CEV *is* a disappointment. It would have been way cooler if the capsule looked more like the Tardis

Times, they have changed

[Mantrid42]

So... 37 years ago we could go to the moon with slide rules and 64 k of RAM... but today its really hard? WTF?

Re:Times, they have changed

[Anonymous Coward]

> we could go to the moon with slide rules and 64 k of RAM

bzzt!! wrong analogy. The computer does not take you to the moon, it is the rocket. Until we have a reliable mansize rocket like the Saturn V, not these girlymen rockets, then we can discuss about going to the moon.

During Apollo, one of the first things they had to do was develop a launch vehicle. If that could not be done, then everything else doesn't matter. Russians developed the Soyuz to go to the moon but wimped out on developing the N1 (started too late in the 1960s). Technical difficulties with the N1 were more than they could handle so Soyuz never went beyond LEO.

Blueprints should still be around somewhere

[starseeker]

See, for example - http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/saturn_five _000313.html There are most likely microfiche archives in a number of locations (NASA, National Archives are probable starting points for hunting them up) but they are of limited utility unless you want to machine up the entire support structure required to make all of those parts again. I think most of the "the government destroyed the Saturn V blueprints" comments trace back to some claims made by John Lewis in "Mining the Sky" in 1996 - I haven't seen too many others making that claim that sound authorative.

That said, it would be one heck of a project to get ahold of them, as being buried in government archives is sometimes very much like sticking a needle in a haystack (insofar as the public is concerned, at least.) I would very much like to see the full blueprints to all parts and aspects of the Saturn rockets made available, modernized, and released to the world. In many respects the Saturn V represents a social and technological milestone the likes of which we probably still don't fully appreciate - it is an achievement unique to mankind, a tremendous triumpth of science, technology, and exploration. I think the full details of how this was achieved should be stored online and made available as widely as possible. I don't know what it takes to convert microfiche to svg or some other modern vector graphics/blueprint ready files (I'm sure it's nothing trivial) but why not make it a community project online? Scan the buggers, and gradually make them into modern blueprints. Then we can publish them far and wide, which is always the best way to preserve knowledge over long historical timespans.

Re:I find it hard to believe

[soft_guy]

I have no problem wiht tax cuts. I just wish we also had a balanced budget - and I don't really care what programs they would have to cut to achieve this goal.

Re: Highest death rate?

[njchick]

Actually, there was a much worse disaster on Baikonur, which killed over 100 people

Re:Joke...

[AsnFkr]

What was the last thing said onboard the Challenger?

"...whats this button do?"

Ba-dump.

Meat-based Robots Are Not the Answer

[Dr. Mu]

Meat-based robots (a.k.a. humans) are ill-suited for duty on remote worlds. They're incredibly fragile, hyper-sensitive to cosmic rays, require hugely expensive support systems, consume energy constantly — even while idle — and generate noxious waste products. Not only that, they are difficult to program, and memory dumps are unreliable at best. Interaction among multiple units on long missions can be a challenge as well, sometimes leading to erratic and even harmful behavior. But the worst part is, they can't simply be left at their destinations when their missions are complete: they have to be brought back to Earth — at tremendous expense.

By the time we are ready to send more of these units to the Moon and beyond, their silicon-and-metal counterparts will have advanced to such a point as to render them obsolete for such missions. It seems to me a much better use of our national resources to advance the cause of our metallic, compliant brethren, develop their capabilities to the fullest, and save a ton of cash in the process. By pushing their new Meat In Space program, our government is once again pandering to jingoistic sentimentailty rather than the needs of hard science.

Re:Meat-based Robots Are Not the Answer

[Locke03]

Sheesh, don't you have any sense of adventure? What about going just because you can? Granted, the practical side of me says "you're right" but the other side thats more fun, exciting and much more likely to do something worthwhile says "practicality be damned, I want to go to the moon". Robots are cool and make menial tasks interesting, actually walking on the moon transcends cool.

Re:Meat-based Robots Are Not the Answer

[mark-t]

But nothing we can produce artificially, at any expense, comes anywhere even close to how versatile and adaptable the meat-based robot is at coping with completely unpredicted circumstances.

To say nothing about the human spirit of adventure and exploration...

Re:Meat-based Robots Are Not the Answer

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a good answer if the question is "What's a good name for a rock band?".

Actually the early NASA engineers had Slide Rules

[Name Anonymous]

The ealry NASA engineers probably learned to use sliderules - http://www.hpmuseum.org/sliderul.htm and therefore learned how to approximate real well.

If you punch numbers into a calculator and hit the wrong buttons and don't know how to approximate... well you don't always realize your answer is off.

Father

[jafac]

If Werner Von Braun was the father of American Manned Spaceflight, surely Michael Griffith is its executioner.

Constellation/Ares is a clusterfuck.
Granted, the Shuttle situation has them in a bind, and we don't have the budget to spend our way out (because $90 Billion a year down the Iraq rat hole) - but the current plan is designed to fail while we're looking like we're trying.

It's sad, really. Kind of how we talk about how there used to be a British Empire, and they used to be a major sea power. Kind of how we talk about the accomplishments of the Hellenic Greeks. The Ancient Egyptians used to build these great pyramids. And the US used to put people into space.

Re: Father

[Cid Highwind]

You only mod the parent post "troll" because you know he's right. ...now where's my goddamn bread and circuses? I was promised a Wendy's super value meal and a new episode of American Idol tonight!

The more they change ....

[slightlyspacey]

It's not that we don't know how to get there, we do ... we just no longer have a man-rated vehicle, the ground support infrastructure, and budget to get there.

Re:NASA gets stiffed...

[jafiwam]

Recon aircraft have one big bonus.

They don't orbit, so they can't be timed (to hide your stuff) and you can put them more or less exactly over what you want when you want.

Doing that with sats is either really really REALLY expensive or uses up the product (the birds and the fuel); or both.

Plus, a sat looks like a hunk of metal. Recon aircraft are cool. :)

I can't wait to see whatever the new one is.

You have it backwards

[www.sorehands.com]

Warranty periods are determined by failure rate. If a 13 month life is expected, you get a 12 month warranty.

Software is not engineered these days, it is slapped together and is sloppy. Years ago, if a mainframe system went down, people are fired. Now, it is expected. Companies get away with charging for bug fixes. People accept bugs as normal.

To bad

[majortom1981]

Too bad one of the companies, namely Grumman doesnt exist anymore. I work for a library here in huntington li. One of our patrons was a project head of the moon lander program at grumman. He was actually at mission control when the lander landed on the moon the first time. I dont know if this idea will work. I think a lot of people where lost when grumman was bought and the two plants in bethpage and Calverton where closed.

Alzheimer's Might be a Threat CODE RED

[cogno64]

Job Description: Mature Engineers with Extensive Seasoning to Breathe Life into Somnolent Space Program which, if were a reality show, would have been axed by the network honchos Occupational Hazard: Alzheimer's Disease Symptom Treater: Any of a number of pharmaceutical preparations Heuristic Treatment: AJAX BRAIN Test . Get that Brain to Shine, Buster, or no Star Command for You.... newsflash..movie: Chimp plays PacMan

Re:NASA gets stiffed... // SR-71

[dsmall]

Because satellites are in fixed, very predictable orbits, and SR-71's can go places that have (heaven forbid!) clouds and other things that really mess up satellite imaging. SR=71 imagery has prevented wars where the satellites have not.

      But what you're really missing is that the SR-71 is beautiful, and we ought to be flying beautiful things.

      Not putting them in museums so our kids can say, "Our country used to be cool".

    -- David Small

Reserch?

[Bo'Bob'O]

Engineers researching past work before they begin working on the best solution available to them?

Shocking.

Something seems broken...

[dtjohnson]

It's hard to put a finger on it but something seems broken about the way this kind of project is done now vs. how it was done in the past. The young engineers are as smart as the engineers in the past were. The materials, tools and resources are an order of magnitude better than they were then. The people are likely working as hard or harder or harder than their counterparts did then. But the end result of the project seems likely to be way over budget, way behind schedule, and unlikely to work very well, if indeed, it even works at all. The problem, I think, is with the experience level of the people involved. The engineers and technicians obtained for the project are probably mostly very inexperienced at doing a *design* of something complex that actually works as intended. Engineering design is a creative process that takes years of experience to develop the skills for. There are relatively few opportunities for the new NASA people to have acquired the necessary experience simply because there is a lot less of that kind of work done in the United States now, compared with then. One of the reasons they are scouring the museums may be because they are desperate to acquire past engineering designs after discovering how difficult it is to do new ones.

Re:I'm so disappointed in this whole CEV garbage..

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Actually, the CEV is exactly how it should be done. The Shuttle and all winged space vehicles are the mistake. Why do you need wings in space?

Bn ther, that's wht we do, so let's gt done:

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked in the labs where both the Mercury and the Gemini spacecraft were built, some few years after those projects, but with those fabulous engineers. We built chunks of all the Shuttles. Most of those folks who guided me had also built B-52s, DCs, F4s and every other large hurling-metallic object. Everyone passed a lot of subtle tests just to be allowed into the lab, much more for an interview, and way more for an offer to help. I was given a lab coat which was worn by the guys bolting-in Ed White. Since I left there I've tried to recruit young(er) space-happy engineers-to-be, and have made several careers happen. However the problem remains: how to encourage young engineers, and especially minority and female, so as to make these professions less one-voiced. All of us owe our progeny to expand our professions. I moved to open-source software as a career.

copypaste?

[PrayingWolf]

Does this involve code reuse by copy-pasting code from the previous Apollo missions' software?
Why fix it if it ain't broke? :-)

Meat-based Robots, answer which question?

[Soft]

By pushing their new Meat In Space program, our government is once again pandering to jingoistic sentimentailty rather than the needs of hard science.

Manned spaceflight is not for science, it is for exploration and eventual colonization. You may equate that to "jingoistic sentimentality" but the need is there, and sending meat-based people to remote places is the goal per se.

And they will do science too, a lot of it--maybe less than what a same-budget unmanned program would have yielded in the short term, but it will also contribute to making it cheaper in the long run. Wasn't there a debate on this here a few days ago--which it seems I left dangling?

Cell towers are a feat of engineering too

[kalamazoo15]

I felt proud just to be standing on the hallowed ground where great minds plotted of men flying through space and landing on the moon. Now on this site, sits a big obnoxious cell tower. It's kind of sad that kids today don't look up at the stars.

Back in those days, kids dreamed of being able to talk to each other through their wristwatch communicators. Now they can, thanks to that "obnoxious" cell tower. That's a miraculous bit of engineering too.

I heard...

[Kennric]

they wanted to go back to the drawing boards, but couldn't find them. Best guess is that retiring engineers took all the original drawing boards home with them, and they are gathering dust in garages and attics. The children and grandchildren of those engineers simply have no idea how essential drawing boards were to our space program, or how valuable they could be to it now.

Why wait for spinoffs?

[kalamazoo15]

If NASA were allowed to profit from its inventions, then on the developments it made in just 4 areas, microelectronics, cryogenics, medical telemetry and systems analysis software, it would have made $4.50 in the twenty years following Apollo for every dollar spent up to the end of Apollo... NASA has contributed tens of thousands of inventions, developments and patents of all kinds

ok, so some useful inventions have come out as unexpected side-effects of the Apollo program. But why throw money at manned spaceflight and hope some spinoffs result by accident? Wouldn't it be much more productive to spend the money directly on the problems we want to solve?

Spending billions on Apollo II could help us solve climate change - or it could give us some more fasteners and powdered drinks. Why not spend billions on developing better wind/solar/nuclear/etc?

Mein Fuhrer! I can walk!

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA should just aknowledge the imported german engineers died and import new ones.

Re:NASA gets stiffed...

[Ihlosi]

Why make a recon aircraft that can fly faster/higher when you can just upgrade the optics and imager on a satellite and get improved results, less risk of intelligence asset loss, and greater ground coverage from a bunch of satellites?

Because it annoys the living **** out of them commies.

Back of the Envelope

[StressGuy]

Search Wikipedia again for "The Buckingham Pi Theorem". Sir Taylor, considered by many to be one of the greatest physicist of the 20th century, was invited to witness the first US ground test of an atomic blast. Moments before the blast, he pulls an old envelope out of his coat and starts scribbling some computations on it. Just before the blast, he tore the envelope up into small fragments and tossed them in the air as the shock wave went by. He then paces off the distance they flew through the air and made of rough estimate of their time of flight. Based upon that, he makes an estimate of the blast energy that was almost in exact agreement with what US would determine several weeks later using the best computational methods of the day.

By the way, what he came up with on "the back of that envelope" is now known as "Taylor's equation".

This is my understanding of the origin of that expression.

Re:Back of the Envelope

[dcam]

In the article I referenced in Wikipedia attributes that (the bits of paper) to Fermi not Taylor. A quick googling would seem to confirm this.

According to the wikipedia article on the Buckingham Pi Theorem, Taylor is commended for his calculations on the energy from the atomic bomb based on the videos. This is a similar story to the Fermi one, but there appear to be two distinct stories here.

Re:Open source,patent free frontier development zo

[MichaelSmith]

The 1960s space program was only possible because of the freely cooperative relationship between the organizations and businesses involved

You might want to read the apollo 17 ALSJ. The gravity wave detector deployed on that mission was an exact prequel to Hubble. The device was designed wrong and could never have worked. NASA were prevented from testing it because doing so would have revealed nasa trade secrets.

I will give you the secret.....

[StressGuy]

You ready? Here it is:

Mathematics in not a science, it is a language

Let me explain....

Many people think in terms of using mathematics to figure out how nature behaves. What I propose is a slight change of philosophy. All your life, you've experienced and observed nature in action. Let your instincts and understanding of nature guide you to what you think is going on first, then use math to describe it.

Re: Highest death rate?

[mikerich]

Thanks for the list of accidents, but the 'Nedelin Disaster' was caused by a fault on the prototype R16 ICBM; it was not a space-related accident.

Back to space, there was also the 1996 failure of a Chinese Long March 3B which crashed into a nearby village; the Chinese media said six people were killed.

Re: Highest death rate?

[khallow]

Actually, if you're willing to count deaths to others besides astronauts themselves, the Soviets had a much higher kill rate, because of a bad track record on launches.

I think it's reasonable to exclude these since they don't actually reflect on the safety of the Soyuz manned vehicle. We could trace all the way through the manufacturing process, but it would just tell us that Russia has a less safe work environment than the US does, which we already knew.

Didn't anyone notice

[Anonymous Coward]

The NASA managers name? I mean think of all the "I need warp speed now Snoddy" and "Beam me up Snoddy" jokes we are missing out on...

see the stars

[Anonymous Coward]

It's kind of sad that kids today don't look up at the stars.

What's even sadder is that many of the kids that might want to see the stars can't due to light pollution.

Re: Highest death rate?

[Jivecat]

If non-flight, space-related deaths are included, one would have to include Charlie Bassett, Elliott See, and C.C. Williams. All three astronauts died in T-38 crashes while in the line of duty for the American space program.

Houston...

[bilgebag]

This time, let's decide whether all the CO2 scrubbers should be round or square, before take-off?

I'm a vegatarian . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

. . . you insensitive clod!

Re: Highest death rate?

[elakazal]

Okay, I guess you're right on that...they hypothesis when I original read about it (and in much of the existing literature) is that this was a Mars mission, however it does seem to have turned out to be an ICBM. Although at that stage, I really think it's difficult to draw a real line between the space and missile programs, particularly considering it was a prototype, it might well have been utilized in either capacity eventually.

Re: Highest death rate?

[elakazal]

Well, just looking solely at the numbers of astronauts ony tells us that the U.S. has larger crews, which we already knew, too. If we want to go with a strict definition of spaceflight fatalies, and exclude Apollo 1 on the grounds that the accident didn't occur during an actual launch or mission, then the Soviets and Americans are tied, with Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 on the Soviet side, and Challenger and Columbia on the American side. That would probably be a better reflection of the safety of the vehicle. I think the numbers of launches are pretty comparable, although I could be wrong.

exactly, read xlr 129

[cheekyboy]

http://www.americanantigravity.com/articles/574/1/ Aurora-%26-Beyond

Yes, if it was easy in 1964, imagine today, with better automation and manufacturing abilities and computers.
Just remove the managers and their 'control'

Re: Highest death rate?

[khallow]

This analysis has a big problem. It ignores that all the Russian (not Soviet anymore) failures happens in the 60's and 70's while the latest US failure occured in 2003.