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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.
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.
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
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?
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
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
Well, it's an extremely high-performing rocket engine. A top-fuel dragster also has a an extremely high-performing engine. Neither engine is necessarily the "best" for any application other than performing stunts. For most applications, whether it's cars or rockets, you want a reliable, cost-effective engine that operates on an easy-to-use fuel.
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.
I think you underestimate the size of the problem you propose.
Space will never be cheap, except perhaps in terms of low-performance sub-orbital excursion rockets. Those will become cheap, but nothing that can reach orbit ever will.
Dog is my co-pilot.