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Ares I Rocket Rumored To Be Too Heavy
eldavojohn writes "In an article entitled "Constellation Battles the Blogosphere," problems with the Ares I lift vehicle are dispelled by NASA. An e-mail containing the rumor that the payload was a metric ton too heavy spurred this post which caused a lot of sidelines speculation that NASA might be setting themselves up for failure and simply need to start over. From the article, '[M]any who carp from the sidelines do not seem to understand the systems engineering process. They instead want to sensationalize any issue to whatever end or preferred outcome they wish," wrote Jeff Hanley the NASA official leading the development of the rockets and spacecraft the United States is building to replace the space shuttle and to return to the Moon.' The article also mentions that NASA looked at 10,000 to 20,000 different iterations of designs in their "Exploration Systems Architecture Study." As armchair speculators of space exploration, do our posts & blogs create negative fallout for NASA or is public criticism like this healthy for keeping government agencies in line?"
Personally, I leave rocket science to the rocket scientists. Von Braun, I'm not.
Why not ask questions of the people at NASA? They have been designing, building, and testing rockets for decades. Most arm-chair rocket scientists have no practical experience in doing things on the scale NASA does. Asking questions instead of making claims that NASA has screwed up would help us learn more about what NASA is doing and, perhaps, help them look at what they are doing from a different view-point.
Sounds like we need to be open-source in our approach to communicating with NASA - ask questions, offer ideas, create a solution that all may benefit from rather than firing the cannons of FUD.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
What does it mean to 'carp from the sidelines'?
I thought a carp was a type of fish, and I also thought we had many words to descibe what people on the sidelines do.
NASA has responded to this rumor over a week ago BTW.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=22553
Its basically a bunch of bullshit, shame on Slashdot for posting about a story that was a non-issue weeks ago.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Question: "As armchair speculators of space exploration, do our posts & blogs create negative fallout for NASA or is public criticism like this healthy for keeping government agencies in line?" Answer: Yes
Regarding the question posed at the end of the article lead, of course criticism, whether well-founded or not, is good for a bureaucracy. Not that they like it when they hear it. Naturally, an organization such as NASA has the mental horsepower available to sort out the wheat from the chaff. NASA has suffered in the past (to the tune of several dead astronauts) from inadequate criticism, internal and external. Now that they have this "culture of listening" or whatever it's called these days, it would be a pity of we had nothing to say.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
I apologize if you and anyone who feels like I propagated FUD, I only meant to draw attention to the fact that it was mere rumors causing a severe amount of fall out that should never have happened. Hence my final sentence in the submission.
My work here is dung.
First, this is just a rumor, second, every rocket program since Goddard fastbaked the first potato during his first liquid fueled rocket experiments has had weight problems. Phase I is to set the basic requirements of thrust and payload, phase II is to make it work. Things start heavy and get lightened. At one point during the Apollo program, the program managers were offering bounties to people who could cut an ounce so that they could meet the performance requirements needed for the missions.
This is not news, this is sensationalism. The stick concept will probably work just fine. It grates on me because I've got real problems with the SRB as relates to the shuttle, but with an actual launch abort system that can pull the capsule away, I guess it's a good and cheap solution. It'll probably be quite a ride, too.
C'mon folks, this isn't rocket sci- well... let me rephrase. C'mon folks, this isn't a new problem, and it's not even unexpected. It's a standard part of rocket development, just like debugging compile problems is a usual part of large software development projects.
So are most Slashdotters!
With the exception of the Mars rovers, most of NASA's recent history has been riddled with failures, mistakes and oversights. It seems to me they need to open up more projects to public scrutiny.
"Go fever" seems to be at least partially in remision, but when you look at the stupid stuff that's gone on recently in the NASA failures you have to wonder if they could have been avoided if they'd just asked a non-involved person for their perspective. I know that I for one would never have said an SST could lift off if large, hell... even small, chunks of foam were falling off the external tank and hitting the vehicle.
What if the entry plan for the Mars Climate Observer had been reviewed publicly? Don't you think there's a chance someone would have noticed the metric conversion issue and saved the project? If NASA wants fewer people harping on their opaque processes, and fewer Monday morning quarterbacks then they should allow more review and outside input. Inbreeding is rarely a good thing in in the long run.
The bigger question is does NASA have the ego to handle letting outsiders look at projects and can they accept the constructive criticism that results? NASA is continually trying to do more with fewer dollars, perhaps its time they tried a more open source/distributed computing approach to some of the work.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
I say nasa is suffering from... (wait for it)
Projectile Dysfunction.
Thank you, try the fish.
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
How much has NASA spent, in PR money and man-hours on trying to debunk the "faked moon landing"? How many Congresscritters believe there must be something to this?
It isn't that criticism is wrong, it is that an important part of criticism called "critical thinking" is absent. At least the thinking part is. While this has existed since the beginning of time with people complaining about the pyramids going to fall over the first time it rained, this sort of nonsense has been made far, far more accessible to the average Joe now. Is the answer censorship? I doubt it. But what if someone wrote a long Wikipedia article about this sort of thing and a devoted group of followers kept any attempt at introducing reason, logic and common sense from being added?
These are normal development issues. Here is a good summary. Also it is not the Ares I launch vehicle that is overweight, but the Orion CEV.
an ill wind that blows no good
For the most part you just described the last Congressional elections too.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Every time I read that I chuckle. I have owned several Fisher Space Pens over the past ten years and my wife owns one. The best thing about it is it fits next to my pocket knife in it's sheath, therefore I don't need to dig around in my pocket to find it...I'm sorry, this is turning into a Slashvertisment(tm).
Every time I think of pencils in space I chuckle. It might work, but I would not want to deal with bits of broken led in 0g, or even worse, sharpening in 0g.
Astronaut: Huston, we have a problem. The mission commander got led in his eye and we are all choking on dust from the sharpener.
We are the Borg...
I love to hate this one.
Sure the pencil's simple. It sounds so good on the surface. But don't pencils create a lot of shavings and graphite dust? I bet that does lovely things to electronics in space.
I'm sure this was no ordinary pencil. They can use the tape-wrapped variety to avoid having to create free-floating sawdust, but it's still going to create some dust. I'm sure NASA had a good reason for spending so much effort to develop a zero gravity compatible writing utensil.
Everybody knows that a Rocket must have something to push against to fly. A rocket will never work in space. I know because I read this in the New York Times!
In other words nothing new. People that can write seem to think they always have something worth saying.
BTW the New York Times did print a retraction of that statement on July 20th 1969.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Of possible interest, there might be a couple of people that don't know that the phrase referenced above is an urban legend. Fisher developed the pen on their own without any tax payer money, NASA thought it was a neat idea and bought some. The russians.... also bought them. Nobody wants conductive graphite shavings floating behind circuit panels. Well, nobody except Jello Biafra and anyone else who delights in the death of astronauts/cosmonauts.
It's terribly off-topic, I know, but hopefully it's interesting enough to avoid burnination.
3. Have said government or government agency spend untold hours trying to get the truth out. Usually this operation fails.
At for this audience here, you must add:
3(b). Complain that the government has propoganda machine set up to "get out the truth" and straighten out toxic spin-FUD spread by idiots, because obviously any office run by a government agency specifically to "correct" wrong-headed or outright BS notions circulating in the news or blogosphere is obviously Evil.
At least, that always seems to be the groupthink take on it. Unless of course it's NASA doing the correcting, I'm guessing. If the FCC or DoD do exactly the same thing, then The Evil goes without saying. *sigh*
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
> As armchair speculators of space exploration, do our posts & blogs create negative fallout for NASA or is public criticism like this healthy for keeping government agencies in line?
Yes. And yes.
"No sane man will dance." -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
"An e-mail containing the rumor that the payload was a metric ton too heavy"
... and yet these same engineers just randomly throw an engine onto a rocket while screaming "ye haw!!" and hope that it works??
So, people honestly think that actual engineers, with actual engineering degrees, and actual engineering experience - people who can calculate exactly how much compression force a load-bearnig wall is under, and exactly how much tension the cables on a bridge need to be able to withstand, and exactly where to point and how much thrust is needed to send Cassini inward to Mercury, then back out past Venus, then inward again, then past Earth, then past Jupiter, and go into orbit at SAturn - going right past Titan so that it can release a probe...
*takes a breath*
And then some random guy on the Internets looks over their work and says, "whoa guys, I may not have any education or experience and not even be able to balance my checkbook, but it looks to me that you're 1 metric ton too heavy."
Is that how the world works?
Blog oversight is healthy even when critical. The only real issue here is that in the specific case of NASA, oversight is both preposterous difficult and attracts an enormous number of unqualified individuals. You know, what with it being rocket science, and all.
Should we allow it to go on? Yes: NASA has a thick skin, and in other industries and venues (notably politics) it's crucially important. Here, well, it's just sort of detritus. Fermat's theorem attracted this kind of noise too. The short version? When it's at the very edge of human capacity, and when it's popularized, then you just have to crank the bullshit filter up a ways.
Now, the *best* would be if NASA left comments on these blogs explaining why these people were wrong, in a rude way, so that they'd shut up until they grokked. Unfortunately that'd be prohibitively time consuming, but it'd be great, wouldn't it?
StoneCypher is Full of BS
It's spelt "tonne".
The Launch Services Purchase Act was intended to prevent this kind of development. I should know since I was intimately involved in the drafting and passage of that act. The intent was to get NASA out of the launch services business and by implication they should not be doing design of launch service since to do so usurps the role of the private sector in risk management. Designing an entire launch vehicle is such a large part of designing a launch service that it simply isn't reasonable to allow NASA to do so.
Seastead this.
"every rocket program since Goddard fastbaked the first potato during his first liquid fueled rocket experiments has had weight problems."
Is this a sentence, or a random collection of english words thrown into a sentence-like structure?
Why not ask questions of the people at Microsoft? They have been designing, building, and testing operating systems for decades. Most arm-chair Linux zealots have no practical experience in doing things on the scale Microsoft does. Asking questions instead of making claims that Microsoft has screwed up would help us learn more about what Microsoft is doing and, perhaps, help them look at what they are doing from a different view-point.
Sounds like we need to be open-source in our approach to communicating with Microsoft - ask questions, offer ideas, create a solution that all may benefit from rather than firing the cannons of FUD.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
One word: Mechanical Pencils.
-- Cave quid dicis, quando, et cui
The intent was to get NASA out of the launch services business and by implication they should not be doing design of launch service since to do so usurps the role of the private sector in risk management. Designing an entire launch vehicle is such a large part of designing a launch service that it simply isn't reasonable to allow NASA to do so.
If the rocket blows up and kills astronauts, it will be NASA's neck which gets chopped, not Lockmart's. Their optimal "risk management" strategy is to transfer risk to taxpayer and agency, and profit to themselves.
Realistically, nobody except the Russian organization has experience in making rockets this large for human flight. This is not a wide-open competitive market.
Private enterprise is not a magic spray which automagically makes hard engineering problems easy.
Remember the Mars probe which was lost because of a "units problem" in the guidance? That was because some of the operation was outsourced to a large aerospace contractor in some Congressdroid's district, and this contractor put a fresh out of college person on this critical task, and internally they were still using imperial units.
By contrast, the prior Pathfinder mission, and the subsequent Mars Exploration Rover missions were done mostly at JPL with strong academic partners. They worked very well.
Two Words: broken led
That people are paying attention to what NASA does and have at least some interest in space. If it takes "carping" and armchair rocket science to get people involved, then I think the negative publicity of a few people is worth the additional attention NASA gets.
If everyone ignored NASA, which has been the case in recent years, then why bother even having them. that's the line of thought I fear pervades the general populace and in congress.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Who here is a rocket scientist and therefore qualified to comment on such matters? Thought so. Sometimes the experts are just that and we should let them be. Everybody's a critic.
Terrible karma and aiming lower, which in this environment of one-sided reason, is higher.
"As armchair speculators of space exploration, do our posts & blogs create negative fallout for NASA or is public criticism like this healthy for keeping government agencies in line?"
Yes.
No, I really mean that. Naysayers and people playing devil's advocate ALWAYS create problems for those in power, and for groups working on giant projects. Investors don't like hearing about major problems in the projects they're investing in, even if they're governments, and, well... that sort of trouble just gets spread around. On the other hand, if no one ever says "It'll never work, and here's why", a lot of problems will go overlooked. Hey, SOMEONE has to spot the problems, and it's not necessarily going to be the person you're paying to do it.
We already did Apollo! It's time for something different, but you're not going to get it out of NASA. Every program with a significant engineering advance eventually gets pidgeon-holed or cancled by various factions composed of scientists ("unmanned-probes are a better return on investment, spend the money on my pet project") or politicians ("foster interanational cooperation" or "send jobs to my district").
... as only NASA can"? Enough people with financial means have finally asked themselves this question wo that there is finally a private space station (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_1) and private human space flight. Does anyone find it that difficult to believe that a private individual or group will have functioning spaceship ready before Ares flies? I predict when that happens, NASA will undergo a tremendous shake-up as people see it has done more to hold back human spaceflight than to promote it.
Space is not for rocket scientists anymore than climbing Mt. Everest is only for explorers. Lots of average people want to go there because it is interesting. How many people are interested in sending unmanned probes to the top of Everest or to the ocean bottom? Some, for sure, but a lot more people are interested in visiting in person for reasons that have nothing to do with science.
Why do we have a government agency who has mottos like "doing [insert activity]
Ares is just an Apollo repeat (initial Apollo plans called for a moon base too). Lets have them try for something better, like a true spaceship that can be reused. Ancient mariners were vastly limitted as long as they were unable/afraid to sail out of sight of land. We need a space equivalent to the vast ocean liners, container ships, research vessels, etc. that are capable of staying away from ports for long periods of time and with an open-ended lifespan. Think of the aircraft carriers that are nuclear power and capable of staying at see for several years!
Let's move past the current life rafts that can't even hold a dozen people and have NASA work on the big stuff that nobody else can do (yet). Hopefully NASA or its successor will get its charter changed to have it really work on space exploration instead of trying to be all things to all people and failing at most of them. But I wouldn't bet on it starting down this road until Ares fails or it gets shown up by private efforts doing the same thing at a fraction of the cost.
science is a religion
Download Orbiter. Track down and download the Aries 1 simulation. It can't reach orbit using the SRB and the J2 stages. It needs to burn the service module engine for a long time. The service module is part of the 50,000 - 60,000 lb payload that supposedly can be put into orbit by the first 2 stages but really requires the first 2 stages + part of the payload. Their payload target of course has a 20% margin of error.
How is criticizm that is not well-founded (unfounded?) good for anything, much less a bureaucracy? It seems to me that such criticizm only results in growth of said bureaucracy.
On my planet, a growing bureaucracy is generally considered to be about as desireable as a growing fungal infection.
science is a religion
I'd like to point out that "systems engineering" regularly fails to produce rockets. Like every "X" vehicle of the past 2 decades. I'll trust actual rocket scientists over viewgraph-flying Systems Engineers any day. NASA hasn't designed a real rocket since the mid-70s, and they are following their typical Mafia-tactics in dealing with outside criticism.
The Stick may or may not be over/underweight. The real issues, to me, are that it uses the most dangerous part of the Shuttle architecture (but rebuilds into an untested new stage) while promising to be as absolutely expensive as possible. All this while replicating current (Atlas, Delta, Soyuz, Ariane) capabilities. Just buy your flights to LEO and base-camp from there! Instead of waiting 15 years for crewed access to the moon, NASA could be building the deep space hardware they are actually good at and leave the Earth-LEO segment to the companies that already do it regularly.
NASA, where having something, maybe in a couple decades, is more important than keeping today's capability.
And yes, I'm a big supporter. Except when Hanley and the others act like 6th graders because someone criticized their wittle wocket.
Josh - proud member of the peanut gallery
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
"The bigger question is does NASA have the ego to handle letting outsiders look at projects and can they accept the constructive criticism that results? NASA is continually trying to do more with fewer dollars, perhaps its time they tried a more open source/distributed computing approach to some of the work."
National security concerns restrict access to some of the technologies. I'm sure N. Korea and other unfriendly countries would love to get unfettered to man-rated launch systems to improve their balistic missile systems. As much as I'd like to see the nitty-gritty details, I have to respect that there is a legitimate security concern by opening up development for public review.
science is a religion
There is a joker from the U of Hawaii in a faculty position that he does not deserve who calls himself a 'recovering space cadet'. This man has made it his mission in life to sabotage the American space program at every public or publishable opportunity. I think the /. audience knows who this vandal is. Saying the new mars vehicle or whatever is 'too heavy' or 'violates the "rocket equation" ' is typical of him. He is adept at the use of pseudoscience, and /. ers should be aware of him. We need to go to the moon, and if people like him have their way, the first real territorial claims on the moon for fusion fuel will be Chinese, Indian, anybody BUT American. This traitor should crawl back into his hole before his bad advice manages to kill one of our astronauts.
In the Free Dictionary, if I search for pencil led, it redirects to pencil lead.
Although, there's another poster two replies down making the same mistake, so I'm wondering if this is some elementary school teachers idea of how to resolve the confusion of many school-age children. I distinctly remember several of my classmates being unable to accept that pencil lead contained no lead.
(off-topic, so posting anonymously) Ross
What is worse than getting caught taking notes in a clean room with a pencil?
Getting caught with an eraser.
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphys_law"
Ironic that Murphy's Law (originally stated when a sensor was wired backward prior to a rocket-sled test) was coined by people eventually sucked into NASA.
science is a religion
>>Things start heavy and get lightened.
Not in any aerospace project I've ever heard of.
I think the GNAA must be recruiting again. Today has been trollday for some reason. Maybe because it's monday?
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
We need to concentrate, for the time being, on killing all the people who use words like "blogosphere".
I've been watching this very closely since before NASA officially announced the project. I firmly believe that Ares I and V are in trouble. This article isn't the first that has claimed there are big problems with using a single 5-segment SRB.
I submitted an article about the formation of a grass roots effort to fix the project before it goes any further in the wrong direction. Check out the Direct Launcher website. The project claims to have several NASA staff as founding members but they are remaining anonymous for now. They have prepared a study detailing the flaws in the current Ares designs and also propose a simpler alternative launcher more closely based on existing shuttle technology.
872835240
It's not random armchair engineers second-guessing NASA's approach but people from the program itself, having to go through the internet because, exaggerated, they would be fired if they sent messages of possible problems to their superiors. NASA has a culture problems.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Rocket Science ain't magic and NASA's engineers aren't some high priests. This can be discussed and examined rationally. I'm sad that Hanley and Horowitz have taken such an opponent-seeking attitude. Sure, some of the opposition is just sour grapes and some are armchair engineers with little skills or knowledge, but many are established engineers, some even "rocket scientists" from NASA. There are many alternatives to the solid Ares I launcher, also known as "Stick".
It is sad how strong opinions how many slashdotters form on these things with so little knowledge.
The contractors you are talking about don't get paid for mission success. Service providers do -- often including purchasing insurance for mission failure. Airlines do this and they handle many deaths per year -- a lot more than a few joy-stick jockies.
You might not see the difference but it is so fundamental to risk management that your joke about Lockmart's "risk management" falls flat due to ignorance of the very principle.
Seastead this.
You forgot:
Those are just off the top of my head. You could go to a listing of all the missions of the past 20 years and see a consistent pattern of improvement in success rate, coupled with a tendency to greatly exceed expectations on those missions where they don't get bit by that one fatal bug, as happens now and then.
So the booster stage is an SRB and the upper stage uses an SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engine). Trouble is that an SSME has never been started in flight -- they are started on the ground before the big SRB's are lit. Inflight engine starts have to be engineered into the design. Saturn V used solid rocket motors on the "inter-stages" to provide small amounts of acceleration to settle the fuel in the tanks to get upper stage starts. Centaur uses something called an expander cycle -- the vaporization of LH2 runs the turbopump, and has someway to bootstrap itself from tank pressure. Agena had some kind of metal mesh in the fuel tank to trap globs of liquid fuel in front of the pump inlets to get its multiple-restart-in-0-G capability.
So they revert to a J2s -- a reworked J2 engine from the Saturn upper stages. This has less efficiency than the ultra-high-pressure SSME, which uses a regenerative cycle to run the pumps, so the upper stage needs to get much bigger. And to lift this heavier upper stage, you now need a 5-segment instead of a 4-segment SRB, so the development cost goes up to 4-5 billion from 1 billion, just for the uprated SRB alone (different propellant grain, different casing, extra joint).
Then the story is that the Stick is, well, a stick -- this very tall bean pole like thing that has some interesting flight dynamics. It is not clear whether you can guide the thing by swivelling the SRB nozzle, and there definitely is an issue about controlling the vehicle in roll, so some vernier rocket engines have to be added somewhere. Think of one of these software projects where the enhancement to an existing design seem like a piece of cake and turn out to have a cascade of unintended consequences.
So where does this thing have problems? You are boosting on an SRB -- yes, reliable, but it is said to be terribly rough riding, and you can't get loose from it for the 2 minutes it is operating. Then you have, again, a Stick -- it is much taller than the Shuttle stack, so you need all kinds of new facilities to service it and get the crew up into it. And then you have the flight dynamic problems from this tall spindly thing.
So I guess it is back to the EELV, but those are kind of interesting. The Delta IV EELV has a LH2-LO2 first stage -- they start the engines so H2 rich that the insulation on the first stage catches fire and chars in flight -- maybe not a problem but looks kind of scary to stick people on that. The Delta IV Heavy runs 3 core stages in parallel. The Saturn V ran 5 engines but had a certain degree of engine-out capability. It is not certain that an engine could go out on a Delta IV Heavy without having to use the abort rocket for rescue from an out-of-control vehicle.
Then there is this whole business about the NASA engineers knowing best and the webonauts being ignorant second-guessers. It turns out NASA sent the whole new Moon landing thing "out for bids" and got tons of interesting proposals from the usual suspects -- Boeing, LockMart, etc. Yes, these proposals relied on the EELV, which has its own set of problems for human launch, but they had some insights, like following the Soyuz plan of separate reentry and cruise habitation modules along with the cool i
I'm glad you're not working on the Ares! Are you?
Anyone else read it as the Arse I Rocket?
| What a stupid ****** moderator.
Shutup Kramer.
" Ares I Rocket Rumored to be Too Happy".
Time for bed...