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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"?
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.
The first definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary: Main Entry: carp Pronunciation: 'kärp Function: intransitive verb Etymology: Middle English, of Scandinavian origin; akin to Icelandic karpa to dispute : to find fault or complain querulously - carper noun
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!
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
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.
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.
Then you certainly would have called an abort if a spacecraft, on launch, was struck by lightning, right? You would have cancelled Apollo 12. Or does foam sound somehow worse than a bloody bolt of lightning?
With all of the things that *can* go wrong in a vehicle like a rocket, cancelling when anything *does* go wrong means that you never launch, and you abort right away if you ever get off the ground.
The issue with foam is that it doesn't have all that much energy even at high speeds, compared to how strong RCC is. The problem was with a property of foam that was unexpected: at high speeds, it impacts as a very rigid body.
What if the entry plan for the Mars Climate Observer had been reviewed publicly?
An English-Metric conversion error wasn't in the "entry plan". If you mean reviewing the code, I'm not sure how many lines of code MCO had, but Pathfinder had 160,000. Commercial code usually has 5-10 defects per line, and since most errors have the potential to cripple a craft, it's pretty darned impressive that they can get these things to work at all. When you look at their failsafe modes and the degree of testing they do, it becomes clear how prepared for fault they usually are. However, some faults aren't as easy to detect as others.
A good example of these failsafe modes is visible in the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Remember that flash memory error that they had? Spirit worked fine until it experienced a fault, and rebooted. The system automatically reboots itself on faults. Spirit's problem, however, was in the boot sequence, when it activated the flash memory. Well, they thought of this, and had the radio run on its own computer, and put a delay in between reboots. The radio also switched into a low bandwidth, wideband mode that would be easier to reach Earth if improperly pointed. So, Spirit rebooted every few minutes, but inbetween boots, there was time to briefly talk to it. Of course, normally, if you have a failed boot, you wouldn't be able to talk to it, but they thought of this, too, and had the radio's computer able to disable boot sequence elements on the main computer and to be able to order reboots. Thus, they were able to debug the boot sequence on a machine that they couldn't touch and had huge challenges in even communicating with.
All thanks to the sort of preparation that they do. When was the last time that you designed a system with this kind of fault tolerance?
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?
I think the biggest question is why do armchair quarterbacks like you feel compelled to criticize the work of people with the benefit of hindsight on a system that only with the most incredible dilligence could even get that far? NASA has had a relatively impressive success rate with Mars; compare this to the awful Russian space program attempts to visit the Red Planet, and ESA's ill-fated Mars program.
Rock Us, Dukakis.
> 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
Help is great. Having to answer every unfounded criticism any uninformed person on the internet spent 30 seconds typing and zero time researching is not help. It's a collosal waste of time.
Monday morning quarterbacks second-guessing your decisions after you've lost the game can be annoying. But that's not what's being complained about here. What's being complained about here are people wanting to stick their heads into the huddle during the game and demand the quaterback explain to them, while the clock is running, how he can possibly expect to score a home run with no bat.
Not all criticism is constructive, or even meaningful.
Some of the complainers definitely are unknowledgeable, including the ones referenced in this article. Some may be knowledgeable, but sorting these out from the masses of unknoledgeable ones is not cost-free.
"If there is a mechanism where NASA can get additional expertise/oversight with little to no increase in cost, then let's do it."
Absolutely. Is taking the time to answer every crank who makes some noise on a blog in case one of them turns out to not be a crank a cost-effective way to get that? Seems unlikely.
"One thing that all the 'leave the experts alone' posters are forgetting is that NASA is spending OUR money."
That is exactly what we do not forget. It's our money too, and we don't want it wasted dealing with people who think that because they pay taxes, their questions must be answered regardless of how inefficiently they ask them, and how little effort they put into finding the answers elsewhere.
I mean, read the article. A guy who didn't know what he was talking about, and who nobody should have expected to know what he was talking about, essentially made some stuff up, and made a bunch of noise about it. And dealing with it resulted in wasting a whole bunch of NASAs time, by which I mean, a whole bunch of OUR money.
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.
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'm no rocket scientist... but that doesn't invalidate the questions."
Of course it does. You don't know the basic background information, you're not going to produce useful questions.
You keep referencing how it would have been obvious to you the foam was a problem. Well, why wasn't it? Are you trying to suggest you were desperately trying to ask someone before the fact "What happens when the foam insulation falls off the tank during launch?", but they just wouldn't listen? If not, then how can you claim the problem is your frustrated ability to ask questions?
How much of MY tax money would you like NASA to spend evalutating questions from unknown strangers on the internet about designs nobody has ever called complete, or even ready for review?