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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.'"
which allowed them to win the highest death rate award.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
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?
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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?
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"
Why are women so complicated? Find out how little I know here.
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.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
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.)
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).
Yes, Velcro too.
...from Wikipedia
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'."
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.
adventure-today.com
No... Didn't you know? Steroids SHRINK your weiner.
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.
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.