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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."
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!
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.
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.
"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?
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.