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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.'"
"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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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.
Ammonium perclorate?
...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.
"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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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!
-MerkX
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
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
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.)
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.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
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: Anytime humanity loses knowledge, it's a bad thing.
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.