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Setbacks Cast Doubt On NASA's Ares Project
stoolpigeon writes with this excerpt from an Orlando Sentinel article about the Ares program, which paints a bleak picture of the program's future: "Bit by bit, the new rocket ship that is supposed to blast America into the second Space Age and return astronauts to the moon appears to be coming undone. First was the discovery that it lacked sufficient power to lift astronauts in a state-of-the-art capsule into orbit. Then engineers found out that it might vibrate like a giant tuning fork, shaking its crew to death. Now, in the latest setback to the Ares I, computer models show the ship could crash into its launch tower during liftoff. "
Experts say its problems stem from changes to the original design. These modifications, such as changing the engines and making the solid rocket boosters longer, created unexpected problems, including excessive shaking and the launch drift.
Changing design too late in the game, not enough time to review what consequences those changes might create? Too many requirements squeezed into too tight a schedule?
Hmm, sounds familiar to us who are doing large software projects.
Chair vibrating too much? simple.. just look at your compass floating away, undo your straps and let your chair crunch into the ceiling while you float for the rest of the trip.
S.R. Hadden: First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
"Persistance is Fertile" - Me. I can quote myself if I want to.
Looking around and seeing the tons of greedy and incompetent managers I have no doubt that Dilber law (it states that incompetent people will get promoted to managment) has taken over the old rule that managers where people that may have been lacking "social" skills but at least they knew what they where doing.
I have no problem to believe that suggestions and faults report of engineers where just ignored by some manager that decided that by doing so he will be in charge to build two projects (the faulty one and the possibly working one)
I suggest that we go back to the old school, managers must be taken from successful engineers that have worked on the field ! They may lack some "social" skill but at least they know what they are doing
The Saturn V is (was) built from what is now antiquated technology. I'd rather see then implement Jupiter.
Common guys, this isn't rocket science!
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Please, this is not a troll.
So what are the alternatives? I understand that not only is the shuttle getting very old (and presumably less safe with already a 1:100 chance of failure per launch) but is extremely expensive in terms of dollars/lb. to orbit.
Are there any reasonable alternatives that are available in say, 5 years? Such as using a man-rated Delta (very reliable commercial launcher) for the relatively small Orion crew capsule and perhaps some sort of Shuttle tank + Shuttle engines + 2 current boosters as a heavy lift vehicle? Or will the U.S. be without manned space flight capabilities in a few years (ceding it to the Russians and Chinese!).
Any NASA/ex-NASA/space experts out there? (By the way, really disappointed that the SSTO efforts like the Delta Clipper and X-34(?) didn't work out. Also, no, the Japanese space elevator will not be available for at least 20 years and probably not within our lifetimes).
An even more bleak picture comes from this blog/editorial:
http://rocketsandsuch.blogspot.com/2008/10/getting-specific.html
It seems as though NASA hasn't learned about what went wrong with the development of the Space Shuttle and are bound and determined to repeat those mistakes of the past and make new ones on top of that. This is a rocket being designed by committee, with some of the top management folks who don't want to compromise on the basic premise: to "reuse" as many of the Shuttle parts as possible.
I hate to break the word to anybody still ignorant on this, but so little is being re-used from the Shuttle design that they might as well have gone back to the Saturn V design instead, or even made something completely from a blank piece of paper and rebuilt the supply chains from scratch.
There are also so many engineers who are working for NASA that are complaining about this design that at the very least somebody in political leadership (aka congressmen & senators) ought to be starting to listen to the grumblings going on here. The lines of communication between Griffin and the engineers doing the actual number crunching and the basic design of this vehicle are completely broken.
Of course, NASA has a wonderful reputation for listenting to its engineers that you can put full confidence in the NASA administration being able to listen to what needs to be fixed.
Anyway, I'd rather they found these errors now, rather than later...
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
As the Chinese already have a working man-rated launch vehicle, I suspect that the US will have to make the Areas work no matter what, or else you'll be seeing the Chinese on the moon first (and at this rate even the Russians and the Europeans too, since the Europeans are currently looking at man-rating the Ariane and launching astronauts with a modified ATV).
There, my contribution to the Slashdot US vs. the rest of the world slanging match.
... that engineers at NASA have formed a group to develop an alternative to "Ares", because of the perception that it was too little for too much effort. And the fact that NASA has so far rejected their plan without having looked at it seriously.
I have been saying this for years now: NASA has been dropping the ball when it comes to man in space. It has been doing great with robotics, but otherwise has been dropping the ball.
You want to see another man on the moon from the United States? Make it a $10 Billion dollar prize. NASA blows that (or pretty close) on a single Shuttle launch. I bet private industry would do it in under 10 years.
NASA has been losing it, big time. Can they make a comeback? I would be the happiest person if they did. But I have my doubts.
Despite what people will say about the environmental side-effects, I still feel that Project Orion is the best possible way for us to get back to space fast, and actually travel useful distances with a live crew.
I remember, as a kid, being very excited about reports that the reusable 'Space Shuttle' was going to be like a 'space pickup truck' and reduce launch costs to $50/lb. It was still expensive, but I remember calculating the price for a kid my size. ($4500. Wow!) Then the cost went up to $100/lb. Not great, but still cheaper than what we had. Then $500/lb. Tolerable, I guess. Then they quit talking about it at all.
NASA has done a lot of amazing things in the last 30 years, no doubt. But their manned program is a complete fuck-story. Just once, I'd like to see senior NASA management acknowledge a problem in the manned program, own up to causing it, and taking the action necessary to fix it. I like it that they've split cargo and humans (after 30 years of agonizingly expensive lessons that have greatly diminished American space capability) and are going back to mostly disposable systems (again, after 30 years of expensive lessons). But, why--Oh, why!?--can't they get this right?
It looks like they're going to drive this thing into the ground, just like the shuttle. The public secret is that the NASA manned program shows all the signs of a dysfunctional organization, and has for 30 years. The next president, senate, and congress need to seriously look at scrapping NASA's manned program and building a new one from scratch, possibly outside of the auspices of NASA. For the good of the country and of humankind, I hope that they do.
There are going to be setbacks. Mistakes will be made. For the most part these rocket surgeons do the job, on time.
Personally, I'd like to see them re-engineer the Saturn V. Didn't it run linux?
Why should we worry about setbacks? The Delta IV Heavy is launching just fine and could have easily done the job. All that they would have had to do would be the man-rating of the spacecraft and the redesign of the fairing. Additionally, the Delta IV Heavy has a lot of upgrade potential. Cross feeding propellant and adding additional strap-on boosters could easily double its capacity. And should I also mention that you can shut off the engines on the Delta IV if you have a problem (which might be convenient when you are transporting humans who don't like to explode when malfunctions occur).
You also have a conceptual error. The problem is with the Ares I, not the Ares V. The Ares I is a crappy 25 tonne rocket that is being built because it will provide pork to Utah. The Ares V, which also supplies pork to Utah, is the 130 tonne ultra heavy lift rocket that is in the same class as the Saturn V.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
Maybe they should just remake the gear from Apollo. We know it worked (cue the conspiracy theorists) and we could definitely do quite a lot of stuff with it, given advancements in technology in the past 40 years. Just compare the monstrosity that was the Apollo guidance computer (thousands of RTL NOR ICs, magnetic core memory) to something modern to do the same thing (Hell, my pocket calculator could likely provide much of the functionality if you rad-hardened it.) and you can save a ton (probably literally) of weight for other stuff.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
How have our standards of failure become so high that we freak out because there could be flaws in simulations? This is the POINT of these projects, to push ourselves forward
Nobody wants to have to scrap their work to fix a problem, but it's going to happen. If it's not, we're not pushing ourselves hard enough. Probes are going to crash, projects are going to overrun, people are going to make mistakes. If we keep at it, however, thats when we reap the rewards.
No doubt we need to eliminate needless risk and move what other risks we can away from the loss of life and property, but lets not confuse that with eliminating any risk at all. To remove all risk is to end all progress and change.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but we had a series of really nice, multi-stage rockets... what, forty years ago? Just off the top of my head, we had... Vanguard, Atlas, Saturn, Delta, Titan.. And they all worked pretty well.
We seem to have made them in the "dark ages" of technology, too, relatively speaking.
What's the problem now? Are our engineers less smart? Do we have fewer materials? Are we under a budget that's too strict? There has to be something that's keeping us from being able to do this. I mean, we made a fricking space plane twenty years ago to build up public opinion and convince people that we were on the edge of the future -- now we can't go back and make a rocket?
I mean, at worst, what's keeping us from looking at, say, the Saturn design and updating it with modern technologies, materials, and safety measures?
I feel like I'm missing something here.
If what is stated in the summary is true, then I think I've simply have to give up any trust in the prowess of NASA.
What happened to this organisation that managed to put people on the moon, that managed to build a huge telescope in orbit around the earth, that even built a permanently manned space station? How is it possible they can't even design a rocket to take us to the moon?
It is for sure not an easy task - but with the immense expertise that should be present within NASA, and commercial rocket launches now being commonplace, I'd say even geostationary orbit is an off-the-shelf technology, and I don't believe the step from there to the moon is that big, technically speaking.
Not having enough power to lift off in the first place, come on! Someone didn't read the design specs, or were they not written down properly? It is really the most mundane if not stupid problem I can imagine when designing a moon rocket system.
The other two mentioned problems (liftoff drift and the shaking) seem to me more like scaling issues, that presumably can be solved. Nasty ones I bet when you find them out, but the fact that they are found on the drawing board already means they're known issues. Then why making so much fuss about it! I bet they have had to deal with many more design issues that they found out only when modeling their new upgraded rocket.
One huge difference between the Apollo/Saturn design and the Space Shuttle was multiple methods of abort that would separate the manned portion from the rest of the rocket. Things like the launch escape rocket (the little pointy thing on the top of the command module) and the ability to fire subsequent stages to at least get the astronauts way the hell away from a problem stage would have saved the astronauts in the event that the Saturn V had problems.
The Saturn V got a little more dicey once you decided to move out of low earth orbit on the 3rd stage and head for the Moon.... such as what Apollo 13 found out the hard way. But even that had redundancies that simply haven't existed for the Space Shuttle.
I certainly would trust the Saturn V and its safety record over the Shuttle. Had we been using the Saturn V for the past 40 years with the same level of upgrades and technical improvements that have gone into the Shuttle, including proposed "Apollo II" vehicles that would have carried seven astronauts at once, I have no doubt that we would have a vehicle right now that would be considerably more reliable than even the Soyuz spacecraft (currently the best "proven" manned spacecraft design for safety).
We might have even saved a whole bunch of money compared to what it has cost us to run the whole Shuttle program. Wernher von Braun certainly was anticipating production runs on the Saturn V on the order of hundreds of rockets, not the dozen or so that actually were built.
They did lose a crew. Apollo I during pad testing.
The Apollo 1 fatalities were not due to the rocket. Additionally, Apollo 1 wasn't mounted on a Saturn V, so the comparison is moot.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
the ship could crash into its launch tower during liftoff"
Would that be bad, then?
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
Why can't we just beam them into orbit? Seriously, do we not have working teleporters yet?
True it was a IB. Sorry, late and forgot.
The Saturn V is (was) built from what is now antiquated technology.
Except for the J2 second stage engine, of course, which is being reused on Ares (with some mods.)
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
One huge difference between the Apollo/Saturn design and the Space Shuttle was multiple methods of abort that would separate the manned portion from the rest of the rocket. Things like the launch escape rocket (the little pointy thing on the top of the command module) and the ability to fire subsequent stages to at least get the astronauts way the hell away from a problem stage would have saved the astronauts in the event that the Saturn V had problems.
I heard of a design not too long ago for a capsule which could use RCS thrusters both for normal landings and for launch escape. The Apollo LES had to be very powerful to get the CM high enough to deploy parachutes. Take them out of the equation and you have a might lighter vehicle.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Why is the parent modded funny?
Maybe somebody thinks it is a Lost In Space joke.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
There are going to be setbacks. Mistakes will be made. For the most part these rocket surgeons do the job, on time.
I think you mean brain scientists.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
They'll just rant angrily about how the US was never really ahead in the space race, the moon landings were hyped up to cover up a genocidal war in Vietnam and in any case the Soviet Union was far ahead in the peaceful use of space and so on.
And then someone will prod them with an AK47 for speaking English instead of Chinese or Arabic and they will get back to work.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Why is the parent modded funny?
I was probably modded funny because someone thought I was making a Jupiter > Saturn joke.
why does parent want to see a rocket built that NASA rates as not worth the effort
I suspect bias is the reason for their opinion. They have about as much incentive to seriously consider Jupiter as MS has to seriously consider *nix.
Man-rate a Delta vehicle and use that to lift our astronauts, and we need to purchase Soyuz spacecraft from Russia. Luckily, Congress has recently authorized the latter.
We also need to do something like what Von Braun did - inflate the specs by 20% and build the rocket for that target instead of what the payload engineers say they need. The payload is going to weigh a lot more than what they think, even if they don't know it yet.
Better to design for a Falcon 9
http://michaelsmith.id.au
One of the most interesting things to note about Soyuz is in fact the Launch Escape System.
It's been used twice, and both times, the cosmonauts were pretty pissed off afterward (nobody likes 21gs), but were able to walk away from the incident.
Both incidents were pretty remarkable. The first occurred after the vehicle caught fire on the pad, with the LES (manually) activating two seconds before the vehicle literally exploded on the pad.
The second occurred mid-way through launch, after one of the stages failed to separate. In this case, the LES activated while the rocket was pointing down toward the earth. The capsule then landed on the side of a snow-covered mountain near the Chinese border, and rolled 500 yards before coming to a halt. (The Russians somehow anticipated this sort of situation, and there was cold-weather gear stored on-board for the cosmonauts).
I stress, once again that despite these "worst case scenario" failures, the crew were relatively unharmed, which is a pretty strong testament to the inherent safety of a very simplistic (by rocket science standards) system such as Soyuz.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
We can't get it back, we can only make a copy and find out the hard way what some of the bits that are undocumented for were really added for. On the other hand we can make a launch vehicle that living designers know backwards based on expertise that is not just limited to NASA and a couple of contractors, and we can repeatedly test the things to destruction like the motors in the Saturn V were. The problem is that it will take time and we need to be able to listen to experts instead of going for headlines. Chasing headlines IMHO is how we ended up with a NASA culture that was so malevolent that the only person untouchable enough to speak the truth was a dying Nobel prize winner. The Russians had major failures too but I think a lot of their success came from announcing things when they were done - in a lot of cases they had less time pressure than US missions (Sputnik was an exeption and had to be launched before the instruments were ready, but we didn't find that out until decades after a launch that was still a huge success).
That can't be right. A 1/6 chance to fail is a 5/6 chance to succeed. Wikipedia indicates 11 manned launches. (5/6)^11=0.13
If 1/6 chance is correct then there was only a 0.13 chance that all those launches succeeded. I find it hard to believe that we were really that lucky. The chance of failure had to have been much lower.
Cow Cube
It might seem unrelated but this "management project" might be easier to experience for most of us. Lord of the Rings Online PvMP. Tactics.
Two sides, uneven numbers and uneven skills. Battles tend to be tank rusk vs tank rush, or zerg vs zerg. Hit the other with all you got and see if you can wipe them out. It is the nature of the game. In the battle area there are keeps to take. First thing a SMART leader who understands KISS does is ask himself. Do I really want to add complexity to the battle by giving myself TWO goals, fighting the enemy AND taking a keep at the same time? Note that taking a keep itself already has two tasks at least, killing NPC's and stopping others on your side "accidently" pulling every NPC in the area.
KISS means, Keep It Simple Stupid. The more complex you make a task, the more trouble you create for yourself. The human brains ain't all that good at dealing with a lot of tasks so it tends to just ignore things it can't handle if overloaded. Overlooking the basics by focussing on to many complex demands at once.
In Lotro PvMP one of the basics is "you need numbers". A complex task is to try stategies like creating a diversion, flanking etc etc. Everyone who thinks they know about war might think these are valid tactics but forget one thing. KISS. Even an attempt at flanking the enemy is FAR to complex to pull off. Sure, it might work once, if you got people who REALLY work together, but 9 times out of 10 it just ends up with the enemy just wiping one part first, then the second. PvMP is Lotro is about numbers vs numbers, so stick together and hit them in force. It works, has been proven to work and is something most people can deal with. Split for instance into two groups and you waste ten minutes getting everyone to follow the right leader, while the enemy looks on and thinks "Yummie, bite sized enemy forces".
So how does this relate to the US space program? The mandate to re-use space shuttle parts. Totally unneeded complexity. Re-using existing stuff SOUNDS smart but goes against KISS because it forces you to work around ALL the problems the existing parts bring. It is in this case BLOODY clear the existing parts have troubles because if they didn't, you would be using the old system.
If you want a rocket to take you to the moon with a manned module then THAT is the design requirement. Nothing more. Rocket+manned+moon. Not +cheap. Not +beforedateX. Not +reuseparts. Not +somebodiespetproject. Everything requirement you add makes things far more complex and that is BOUND to go wrong.
People in software are of course familiar with the idea of re-usability. Re-use your code. C++ was build around the idea. The idea has its meritcs. I certainly wouldn't recommend that the next moon rocket seeks to re-invent the screw BUT there is a HUGE difference between using existing parts if it happens to be convenient and putting re-using parts as a design requirement.
Think of it like this. Using GD in your website software vs GD must be used in your website software. Using OS/2 for your desktop vs your desktop MUST use OS/2.
As a software engineer you probably seen this countless time. Software requiring the use of Oracle database to store 1 column because we use oracle in this company. Demands to have servers run windows because that is what the boss has on his desktop.
Ares has to many design requirements that have nothing to do with getting the US back on the moon and that is the reason it failed. If they had gone for a new design, re-using only if it happened naturally, then they would already have had a rocket, it would have been cheaper and it might even have been flying already. But no, it had to re-use by design to be cheaper and faster and voila, as everyone could predict, it is more expansive and slower. re-use as part of the design spec != KISS. If someone mentions re-use of code as a goal during development I have long since learned to get the hell out of the project. I suggest NASA hires me so that I can stand by with a clue-bat during their brainstorming sessions and whack anyone adding needless complexity to their projects. Seeing how much money it wastes, I would say 10 million a year would be nice starting salary. Where do I apply?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
There were mistakes made with Apollo 1 that should never have happened, and the fixes to the Apollo spacecraft did substantially improve astronaut safety for future missions.
One of the most insane mistakes made on the Apollo 1 vehicle: There was no method for astronauts, once mounted inside of the spacecraft, to be able to get themselves out (shy of grabbing a hammer and pounding through the side of the vehicle). It was anticipated that even on landing that the recovery vehicles would open the door for the astronauts (so as to not repeat Virgil Grissom's perceived mistake on Liberty Bell 7, the Mercury flight).
There were many others, including the 100% pure oxygen environment @ sealevel pressure that also caused some huge problems.
To my admittedly outsider's eye, NASA looks and acts exactly like your classic dysfunctional monopoly bureaucracy. These things are common and seem unavoidable - everything that I've read about the Ares debacle is right in line with a sclerotic, mismanaged, change-averse (and risk-averse .. just not the right type of risk) fiefdom-addled government clusterfuck we see time and time again. Hell, not just government - occasionally we see this in the private sector too, when a trenchant monopoly manages to establish itself somewhere and then proceeds to lose sight of everything that got it there in the first place and rots from within. Microsoft of 5 years ago, by all accounts, got pretty close to that, but there are many others, especially in defense.
What kills this is competition, genuine competition, that forces the organisation to adapt or perish. Nothing other than imminent risk of complete death will force such organisations to subject themselves to the kind of creative destruction needed to re-invent themselves.
I personally believe that NASA in its present form is lost, but forms can change. The key element is the competition now arising from other countries' space agencies. NASA no longer has a monopoly; it will not take long before the results from other agencies - done better, faster, cheaper - will force radical change at NASA.
It's not the 1960s again yet, but when China and India announce dates for their moon landings, you can bet the clock will start spinning backwards within days.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. I love America, but it desperately needs competition. The same could go for NASA. Well, it'll get it soon enough.
Funny how NASA - and America in general - needs foreigners to keep itself in line. Back in the day it was Von Braun. Now it's Hu Jintao who will provide the electric shock necessary to revive this intransigent patient.
America isn't a country, it's a team. It needs to fight, it needs to compete, it needs constant challenge. If there's no "enemy", it gets lazy and tears itself apart. Just like every other empire in history. I use that word without any perjorative intention, by the way - there is simply no other way to describe a country with so many overseas military bases. Of course America is an empire, and there's nothing wrong with that.
But god, it needs competition. The good news is - competition is on the way. In space, and everywhere else, America now faces its first real competition in generations.
I for one am on the edge of my seat, waiting for the games to begin, and looking forward to what the "real america" - the one that competes, and wins - can come up with. USA!
Let my new 7-digit UID be a lesson to all - write down your passwords.
What's the problem now? Are our engineers less smart? Do we have fewer materials? Are we under a budget that's too strict? There has to be something that's keeping us from being able to do this.
Well, we've got all these neat new development processes and guidelines to ensure that our development activities comply fully with the imposed development processes, whether they are sensible or not. In other words, we have process compliance at the expense of results, and many of the processes are complete pigs which are often inflexible (think of Six Sigma, for instance). The main problem in recent decades has been the succession of Fad-of-the-year dogmas excreted by business schools and accumulating in R&D departments.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
That part of the problem is that the US had a very successful manned space program with many firsts (including the moon landing). In fact the US continues to have a very successful unmanned space program. The recent Mars missions, the rovers and the Phoenix Mars mission, have been very successful.
Well those two things help lead to being lazy about future manned space missions. After all that's not the competitive "We've got to do it first," thing going on. Then there's the fact that the unmanned missions are much, much cheaper and seem to produce plenty good data.
You have to remember that sending people in to space has thus far not been all that necessary, nor is there a real economic reason (beyond tourism). If it was a case that there was a lot of money to be made, like say you sent someone to the moon and they brought back billions of dollars of valuable resources, well then sure, there'd be plenty of motivation to keep a modern manned mission going. However as it stands, there's no economic benefit. So the benefit is entirely scientific. Well, that's sure as hell not worthless, but unmanned missions seem to do the job brilliantly.
I mean suppose you are running the program and I come to you and say I have some research I want to do. I can do it two ways: I can either design and build an automated system, which has a chance of failing, or I can send people, who based on past experience have about a 1% chance of dying (that's roughly NASA's record at this point, about 1 in 100). Also, the automated system is much cheaper to do, and can potentially work for longer, though perhaps not quite as flexible.
Which do you choose?
I'm certainly not against NASA modernizing it's manned space program I think it's worthwhile. But let's maintain a realistic assessment of how useful it is and how priority it is. The US has already sent people to the moon, a number of times in fact. Doing it just for bragging rights isn't useful at this point.
Cloning? You think IP law is bad now. Try cloning a super-model.
has involved reinventing the wheel? I know too many engineers that like to start from scratch and simply ignore tried and true existing ideas/code/technology/what have you.
Here is the video of both of them
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyFF4cpMVag
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyoBHBOnscY&feature=related
Hehe, you could see the Russian general pull on his collar when they aborted probably thinking "Gorbachev is gonna have my balls pinned to the walls for this on".
I wonder how effective this system really is when you are breaking the sound barrier, if it is safe to do.
Computer simulations... in the mean time, an Indian rocket it's on the way to the Moon!
Your idea to replace a 70's tech rocket, is to go back to 50's tech rocket? Is that what I am hearing?
There are about to be a number of private companies with different space crafts. That will include spaceX, Orbital, and possibly Planet Space. Two of these will have new launchers. The third will simply use what exists today. A 4th possibility (probability?) is that scaled is working on their system. They currently have the mother ship nearly ready to test. Of course, they are building a sub orbital craft. And ppl like to point out that an orbital craft will be different, while ignoring the fact that Scaled actually did the bulk of the work on the X-38; the craft DESIGNED to go to the ISS.
Now, why do I bring this up? Because we are about to have a NUMBER of crafts that will replace Ares I. So what is needed is either Ares IV or Ares V. The Ares V would be nice, but I doubt that congress will fund it. The ares IV will be more expensive to launch than Ares V and carry a fraction of the weight, but quicker and cheaper to build.
Of course, the odd thing is that NASA is missing the easiest answer of all. COTS was an XPrize for getting cargo to ISS. Why not develop a COTs for heavy lifters as well? Seriously, the Ares I will most likely be killed. Congress will probably shoot for Ares IV or Direct, while blaming NASA for this.
Either way, we are going to get a fraction of the capacity that we wanted. So, why not create an X-Prize of 2 Billion for a heavy lifter that will lift at least as much as the saturn V or perhaps Ares V? That would be our moon and mars rocket. My guess is that we would see several heavy lifters developed.
BTW, would you really want to travel to the moon or mars in Orion, or in a Bigelow system? ME? I will take the roomy idea. Have water around for radiation, as well as more shielding on the capsule.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Pigs will fly!
Ah, economies of scale - we can transport lots more pigs with a bigger rocket!
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
Hehe, you could see the Russian general pull on his collar when they aborted probably thinking "Gorbachev is gonna have my balls pinned to the walls for this on".
I don't think he had anything to fear from Gorbachev back then. Khrushchev, on the other hand...
Nice clips though, good find.
Is it comfortable sleeping on those laurel so many decades afterward ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
... and we can repeatedly test the things to destruction like the motors in the Saturn V were.
How many do you think can be blown up before there is a public outcry about the tax-payers' money being wasted on those damn rocket scientists and their expensive toys? The world is a different place now than it was in the fifties.
Would you feel happy "riding" into space using "strap ons"?
Are you insane? every single bit,part, bolt and screw is well documented. as well as the documentation for every revision change made after each launch. they have full documentation to build all they need. I'm 40 and I still have a huge crate of documentation for that launch system. And I have the parts that are not classified, there is at least another 500 pages I was not allowed to have copies of. I even have copies of the memos from the engineering teams. all of these were purchased from NASA.
Problem is you typically dont want to build and launch 40 year old tech. you want to redesign it to use the current stuff and add your new sensors and fight gear that let's you do more with it and increase safety and monitoring. that will take time.
If you think that any part of the Apollo program was undocumented and some greasy jumpsuit mechanic climbed inside to make a undocumented tweak before launch then you've been watching WAY too many movies.
No, that's not actually a difference at all...
The shuttle HAD an escape system, with ejection seats for the astronauts. IIRC, it was in place for the first few test launches, when there were only a few crew members aboard. It was removed when the Shuttle became operational... more or less to make way for the compliment of 7 astronauts the shuttle can now carry. NASA engineers have said (some time after the Challenger disaster) that the escape system was just not possible (no room for it) with a full crew.
For problems on the pad, as described with the Soyuz in another post, the Emergency Egress Slide should allow the crew to escape the launch vehicle.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"We were told by a person directly involved [in looking at the problem] that as they incorporate more variables into the liftoff-drift-curve model, the worse the curve becomes"
Yes captain obvious, when that Seagull poop builds up on the nose cone of the inboard solid rocket booster it increase the chances
of striking the tower during liftoff...
Got Code?
With the effective end of the shuttle program already (we're down to what, one launch a year now?) it's clear that the end of manned spaceflight is in view. The Russians will continue for a few years more as they work down their inventory of ex-ICBM boosters to get people into near earth orbit. The Chinese and the Indians will have a few launches for national pride and zero engineering and scientific benefit. But by 2020 the era of manned spaceflight will be over and out. And in case you haven't been watching, unmanned spaceflight for purely research reasons will end around 2040 or so.
NASA should get out of the manned rocket business, turn that over to private developers, who can most likely do it better, faster and cheaper. NASA has become an overbloated government agency.
Actually, most of ones involved with the space system were born in the 70's, and raised during reagan's time. These are republicans at work on this. Sadly, the same kinds that did the iraqi invasion. You know, the one that would be over in weeks, and all because Sadaam was close to obtaining Nukes and had loads of WMD.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The prizes would be graduated, with a goal of creating a sustainable infrastructure [but it is possible that a given prize could entice a 'one shot' effort like Lindbergh's ocean crossing. The prize list [and discussion] was posted at Getting to Space:Prizes
Also relevant is another paper from 1995 called Why Have NASA
Caution: Do not stare into laser with remaining eye.
.... as are all efforts on the edge of understanding and capability. Going into space still takes a long time, costs lots of money and requires working through many things that don't work to get to one way that does. Don't get distracted by those who have more opinion and bandwidth to blair than common sense or wisdom.
I'm not entirely sure that the crew ejection seats that were originally on the Columbia would have worked with what happened on the Challenger when the SRBs failed.
Basically, the ejection seats were something akin to what you find in military aircraft. It should be noted that these sort of ejection seats are hardly foolproof either, and that they can and do cause damage to those being ejected... sometime fatally. Assuming that they were re-installed back into the Shuttle, it doesn't cover nearly so many contingency plans for escape as the launch escape mechanism did for Apollo.
More to the point, the ESC system was much more reliable and had a greater chance of having crew survival than the marginal help the ejection seats in the Shuttle would provide for... which is precisely why they were removed. It didn't do any good.
As for the Egress Slide.... I would have loved to have seen that being used in an actual emergency. It was an interesting concept and there were a few situations where it could have been used, but it wouldn't have saved the Challenger or Columbia astronauts either. Even so, I love the fact that this slide, together with the "bunker" they drop into, requires astronauts to be certified for driving armored tracked vehicles. I would also LOVE to get the chance to slide down that wire, if only for a demonstration and/or training exercise.
I also don't think the egress slide would have protected the Cosmonauts in the Soyuz explosion where the escape tower was used. The situation came up so fast that I don't think they would have been able to unstrap themselves, open the capsule door, get out, jump into the baskets, fall to the ground, and escape the damage in the short period of time that the explosion took place. The escape tower simply took the cosmonauts and threw them four miles away, deploying the parachutes that they needed anyway for re-entry.
The Apollo system was designed to launch the command module into the Atlantic ocean on an abort in the same circumstances. All the astronauts had to do was turn a single lever inside the capsule to fire the tower, or somebody at ground control at KSC to do the same thing.
That is what is confusing me, why don't they just update Saturn? They know it works, it has a decent track record, it can carry the load. After all, we are talking about the rocket, not actual capsule. At the very least, (as you state) it would have made more sense to START with the Saturn V and move forward.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I certainly would trust the Saturn V and its safety record over the Shuttle.
Saturn V, zero failures in the first (and only) 13 flights.
Space shuttle, zero failures in the first 24 flights, one failure, then zero failures for the next 87 flights.
If you "trust" the safety record of the Saturn as better than shuttle, this is only by an artifact of low statistics-- the Saturn V does not have a long enough flight record to say it has a better record than shuttle.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Two wrongs don't make a right, you know? Yes, some engineers are incompetent, and some are as out of touch with reality as to design an engine block with the spark plugs underneath. (To pick an example of something a mechanic would dislike thoroughly.)
1. Adding an incompetent manager on the next layer doesn't fix it. It just makes the total problem even worse. You can't say it's ok to add an incompetent boss, just because a lot of those under him will be incompetent too.
2. Yes, an engineer will not know everything. E.g., the ones doing physical engineering may not know much about industrial design, or programmers usually don't know much about GUI design. That's why we have a whole organization, not a lone maverick designing it all. You have to mix and match the skills of several people, to have a good design. From the guy designing the engine, to the one designing a pleasing dashboard, to the marketer doing a study in which colour should it have to be attractive to buyers. It's a _team_ effort.
And guess what? The role of a manager is precisely to organize such a heterogenous team, and make sure it has the right mix of skills and that they're used right.
Basically if you can notice the shortcomings of an individual there (e.g., "damn engineers who put the spark plugs there"), you're actually noticing a management failure too. The guy who should have had the missing skill, wasn't there or wasn't listened to. Even if you want to expect that engineers should have had <insert extra skill> in the first place, then someone should have taken that into account when hiring them. If a whole team ended up with _all_ members missing that skill that everyone should have had... why did they get hired then? Or, again, then why wasn't an extra guy hired who has that extra skill needed, and whose job is to apply it.
That's the job of management: to manage it all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It is a common misconception that Ares is made up of components reused from previous programs. It's not. That's how it was sold, but then engineering began and now very little is being reused.
that ppl are calling for restarting Saturn, when it really was not anywhere near as tested as the shuttle's. Given the choice of Saturn or Direct, I would take Direct. MUCH faster to get off the ground. While I like the lift capacity of the Ares V, I wonder if it will survive Congress and our budget hits that we are about to take.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This is the vehicle that ATK Thiokol tried to sell as "Safe, Simple and Soon"
Oh, well.
(I started writing this comment and got a strange feeling of deja-vu. It turns out that my last slashdot comment 67 days ago was virtually identical. This is getting scary.)
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Back in the late '70s I bought a book, published by NASA, that described the planned followons to the shuttle... based on using the Shuttle engines and launch system in other configurations, including a heavy lifter. This scheme was never followed through, but it should be.
There's a group of NASA engineers working on it again. They call it DIRECT 2.0.
Secondly, an air launch allows for far safer escape. You are already at some velocity and height. If the thing doesn't blow up (a distinct possibility), you can still jettison the capsule and re-enter or parachute down. On a launch pad, you're right on top of the fireball with nowhere to go but up.
Bottom line: it's time to reign in manned spaceflight and support the Rise of the Machines. Explore the solar system with them and let them set up the Moon and Mars for us. When they are both terraformed, comfy and warm, that would be the time for the Machines to harvest us and take us there.
*** Don't be dull.***
The first video says 1983 so the premier would have been Yuri Andropov. The second video says 1969 -- that premier would have been Leonid Brezhnev. Khrushchev got the boot in 1964.
Here is an interesting story about the Saturn V blueprints and why NASA doesn't want to rebuild from them.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Well, there are a few problems which greatly reduce the effectiveness of the saturn 5 in todays world. First you need to compare requirements to understand what will work and what won't. Then you need to hope that you can modify the sat 5 to accomodate, which may or may not be possible or cost effective. If it isn't then you've wasted a few years of time. If it is you now have to go back to a supply chain that has long been dead, half of which is probably out of business, and try to actually get the parts made. Of course nobody will work with your hand drawings anymore, so we need to redo all of them in unigraphics/proe/whatever down to the nut and bolt. Along the way we need to reengineer a bunch of stuff because vacuum tubes are so passe. The cost savings become questionable at best for what will be an outdated design. And lets face it, ORION is government employment project. And from scratch maximizes that. Aerospace engineers build terrible roads and would hurt themselves with a shovel, so you have to keep them employed.
The current incarnation of the J2 has very little to do with the original J2, except for the general design.
I think they need to go back to Project Orion and build a Michael .
Eat hot gamma rays!
I drank what? -- Socrates
What happened to this organisation that managed to put people on the moon, that managed to build a huge telescope in orbit around the earth, that even built a permanently manned space station?
They became another large corporation with managers and fiefdoms and a culture where it's safer to aim low and marginally succeed than to aim high and risk failure.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
We just need to get american idol to do the contest on the moon next year! We'd be there in a heartbeat.
My advanced statistics prof would have your nards for a post-hoc analysis. The probability of something that has already happen occurring is, well, 100%. There's no predicting the past.
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
Umm, yeah, about that.
Hubble was horribly mismanaged. Perkin-Elmer was given no oversight whatsoever on the mirror and proceeded to grind it incorrectly. The error was not small- any amateur telescope maker with a razor blade and a pen laser would have found it in five minutes. The solar panels were an awful design that flapped when the scope crossed the day/night terminator and required replacement with a better set. The gyroscopes used were ancient and near the end of their life.
Worse, many of these problems were already known- the Hubble is basically a KH-11 spy satellite that points the other way- same mirror, same size, even the same shipping container. According to the guy who ran the Space Telescope Science Institute, Hubble managers had a couple of meetings with various black agencies *after* all the problems came to light that indicated all of these had been seen in the spy satellite program before.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Of course flanking is a GOOD real world strategy and might well be in other games. But it doesn't work in Lotro because the game mechanics just don't work for it. Communication between different groups is hard and distances are VERY small and if out numbered fights are over very small.
Say both sides got 48 players (2 raids). 1 side splits into 2 raids. The other side attacks one of the raids. They can then cause a wipe of that raid in a couple of seconds (or at least cripple it fataly) if the other raid is not reacting INSTANTLY, they will flank into an enemy just finishing off the last remnants.
To translate to the space program. The US got plenty of cash. it is not as if they HAVE to re-use shuttle parts or that shuttle parts are that cheap to begin with. Space development is already complex enough with you having to make many compromises between what you would like to use and what you can actually get. To deliberatly limit what you can use right from the start for the sake of some dubious cost savings is making things to complex. It would be like saying "this next program MUST be build in C, because then we can re-use some math libraries we got lying around".
Or "we must flank because that is what real armies does even if this game only emulates a VERY small amount of the real world".
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think this is all moot, as Barney Frank recently stated he wanted huge budget cuts at the Pentagon, a 25 percent across the board cut. "We don't need all those fancy new weapons", Mr Frank said.
With that kind of attitude in the coming adminstration and Congress, what makes you think something like a new moon shot is going to survive? The attitude is going to be "we've been to the moon... been there, done that". Congress and a President Obama are likely going to see manned spaceflight... especially expensive projects like moonshots... as a waste of money better spent elsewhere.
Like it or not, get ready for the return of "better, faster, cheaper". As before, only the last two will really be true. But manned spaceflight outside of ISS support missions is about to take a long hiatus.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I did not think they really cost $10 B per flight... but on the other hand, I don't think the prize should really have to be $10 B either. I was just trying to make a point.
Actually, from my experience in software, the absolute worst PHB's I've ever seen, were ex-programmers. Some of them _brilliant_ ex-programmers. But they were crap at dealing with people, even worse at organizing things, hated being in meetings half the time now, and most of them also expected their employees to meet and exceed some standards that they themselves actually failed. (Except maybe in their own mind.)
A rough breakdown, off the top of my head, is somewhat like this:
- two ended up obnoxious control freaks, and convinced that nothing ever gets done unless they pester someone to death. One of them used to click on Netscape's title bar to show it that he's watching. He genuinely believed that it loaded pages faster if it knew the boss is watching . (Freaking hillarious or freaking sad, for someone who had been a brilliant programmer before. You decide which.)
- one ended up personally doing the programs of his whole team, because it was less stress than trying to organize and manage that team. He'd make up by lashing out with random acts of mis-management, presumably more to show himself that he's still the boss, than to show it to his underlings.
- two ended up what I can only describe as yes-men in both directions. They basically avoided managing, by pretending to be on everyone's side, both from above and from below.
- one ended up, basically a depressed whiner.
Etc.
As for Dilbert... here's something worth wondering about: several comic strips paint the PHB as being unable to read people's reactions. In one, he can't tell if Wally is sleeping or working, when looking at him from the front. Several make sense only if he isn't even aware of the harm he does. That guy has Asperger's Syndrome. He's a nerd. A complete nerd, in fact.
And if I'm allowed to run amok with analyzing a cartoon character too far: while it is possible that his narrow focus of interest (practically a given for an aspie) was management from the start, it's very _unusual_ for that disorder. Asperger's Syndrome is a bit like being colour blind, only it's about human reactions instead of about colours. The typical way is to end up fascinated with numbers, technology or the like, not with the people that you can't even understand much. My money is that such a person started from engineering, CS or some other such field.
And, yes, I know that it is just a cartoon character, and I'm not pretending that it's real or anything. I _am_ however guessing that it might be based on one or more managers that Scott Adams worked with before.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
True. And I think everyone in the country should be thankful they're discovering all these problems during the computer simulation phase. In the past, they would've had to do live tests to uncover a lot of these issues. We'd have a lot of new videos like the old Werner von Braun videos from the 1950s and '60s.
We are the 198 proof..
Anyone else thought it said NASA Arse Project?
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Well, actually, taking a guess at what period you mean by "as a kid", by your description: nobody wanted to pay for that shuttle.
The original Shuttle concept was a small, reusable craft, mostly for getting a couple of people into orbit, and at most some minimal cargo. It was a space car. Or, ok, maybe pickup truck.
Also, very importantly: only in some orbits. Getting anything in an equatorial LEO is cheap because the Earth's rotation helps you a bit. Getting something in a polar orbit is more expensive. Not only you have to supply the whole orbital speed yourself, you have to _lose_ the speed you started with because of Earth's rotation. Otherwise it would be merely a very inclined orbit, not a polar one.
But what happened was that NASA didn't actually get a budget for it. So they started looking at which other agency they can swindle out of its budget. And there was the Air Force, which used these huge rockets to put spy sats into orbit. And they had a budget for those.
So NASA goes to them and says, basically, "hey, if you give us your lunch money, we can build a reusable launch vehicle for you, and put your sats up there for peanuts ever after. Better yet: we can also go pack one up and bring it down." The Air Force liked both ideas. Lots.
But their spy sats were freaking huge, and they had to go into polar orbits. The Shuttle had to be inflated to accomodate that. Instead of a pickup truck, it became a freakin' huge 18 wheeler truck.
Now funnily enough, this made the Shuttle a failure on both counts:
A) It failed to keep its promise to the Air Force, and those guys still ended up using their own rockets, because the Shuttle was too unreliable and made a trip once in a blue moon. And about bringing them back down, remember that news where they shot one down with a missile shot off a cruiser? Yeah. That's not what NASA had promised them.
B) The original idea was that the space shuttle will be so cheap per launch, that even for TV or telecom sats, it'll be cheaper to just pack it on the shuttle and put it up that way, than use a normal rocket. Even skipping past the unavailability for such things, here's a thought: now it was too big for economics to work that way. If you have a 1 ton sat to put up there, you don't pack it on a 2000 ton shuttle, because just the fuel alone costs more than a traditional rocket. Just as you wouldn't pack it on a 2000 ton truck to ship it across the country. Some jobs _are_ better suited for a small pickup truck, which the shuttle no longer was.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Until now, I honestly didn't think there was a chance of survival or escape options when shit went bad on launch or during lift-off. I thought your options were make it or blow up.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Having worked at NASA, the answer to your question is simple.
The engineers are fine, if not still some of the world's best. The problem is management, national politics (earmarks), and political in fighting between centers.
Perhaps another thing for you to consider is that much of NASA (I've heard as high as 2/3) is eligible to retire in the next five years. NASA also hasn't really had open hiring, that I'm aware of, since the early 80s. Contractors have been hired, and a lot of NASA's technical talent became contractors, but not civil servants. All of the budget shake ups over the last few years have decimated programs and often cause the contractors to go find someplace more stable to work.
Quite frankly, while there is some good management at NASA, a lot is too beholden to their political goals rather than the mission.
Before I get started: I _am_ a reserve sergeant, though not that it means much. I also do have a bit of a hobby about history.
So based on that, it seems to me that:
1. Pin-and-flank is the basic maneuver that all armies use and are trained to use nowadays. Ideally, you pin with two units and try to flank with a third. Whether it's at platoon level (pin with 2 squads, flank with a third) or done at whole army level with divisions (pin with 2, flank with the third), you pin and try to flank, while the enemy tries to do the same to you.
And everyone is trained so they do work together. From recruits doing basic drills to military academies training generals, _everyone_ is trained to pin and flank. Any modern war is pins-and-flanks _within_ pins-and-flanks.
2. Any army is not your average PUG (Pick-Up Group) in a MMO, and not even your average guild group. We're talking people who've been drilled into working together until that stuff becomes a reflex and you do it without thinking. When it's your turn to lay the suppression fire while that other guy dashes forward, you don't even think "it's my turn", you just do it.
In fact, _the_ one stat that would be best used to describe any unit in a RL army, wouldn't be "hp" or "dps", but cohesion. An army is only as good as its ability to act together as a single entity. When that breaks down, it wipes out.
It's not even a modern thing. From the Greek phalanx, to the british squares at Waterloo, to any modern war, the unit that stays cohesive a second longer wins. The Phalanx that broke into individual soldiers, got owned. The musket square that lost cohesion, got _rolled_ _over_ by cavalry from a corner. Etc.
So, yes, you _have_ to have people who _really_ work together, or you've lost before you even started. If that group doesn't work together, before the first bullet has been shot, before the artillery duel even started, you've already lost. Heck, if you're even in a situation to wonder, like you do, if the team will actually act together, you have already lost. You just don't know it yet.
3. To get back to flanking, it's again not just modern stuff, it's been a basic thing for millenia. Those cavalry wings ("ala") of a roman legion were there to, at the very least, stop the enemy cavalry from flanking. If a general did nothing smarter at all, he would at the very least try to use his most mobile units to flank. It's been used with chariots, it's been done with cavalry, it's been done with tanks, heck even ship classes have been designed for the sole role of "crossing the T", which was the naval version of flanking.
4. War is complicated shit, and always was complex shit. Again, it's not your average MMO group.
If you look at most known wars from the last few thousand years, they invariably involved more than just rows of soldiers facing each other. There were feints, flankings, ambushes, trops kept in reserve so the enemy would face fresh troops when it's tired, creative use of terrains, etc. Almost invariably the guy who won was the guy who pulled some unexpected stunt and caught the other unprepared. Far larger armies have been wiped by smaller ones whose general pulled some inventive stunt.
The guys who applied the KISS principle... well, the graveyards and historical lists of losers are full of them. 'Nuff said.
Heck, even combined arms tactics, are inherently more complex, but it's what wins wars. The guys who keep it simple, get owned by those who don't. Almost every single time.
Basically: don't judge real wars by the untrained kids who play a MMO. Flanking, cover, complex tactics, etc, don't even work on MMOs, and neither the code nor the design are there to even sense them happening. But they are what wins or loses a real fight.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What happened to this organisation that managed to put people on the moon, that managed to build a huge telescope in orbit around the earth, that even built a permanently manned space station? How is it possible they can't even design a rocket to take us to the moon?
IMHO a lot of the problems can be traced back to bad management by current NASA administrator Michael Griffin. Back in 2005, prior to Griffin's arrival, NASA's original plan for a new manned launch vehicle, two competing teams of companies would have been selected, and they would be running unpiloted test launches this year. Based on those test launches and what was learned about their designs, the best vehicle design would have been selected. My suspicion is that at least one of the rockets would have been a modified version of an already-proven design, such as the Boeing Delta IV or Lockheed Martin Atlas V.
Then midway through 2005 Mike Griffin came in. He had his own pet design from a paper he had written, and had the requirements for the US's new manned launcher redone. Coincidentally, under the new requirements Griffin's design was the only one which satisfied. The engineers at NASA have been doing what they can, but it seems that Griffin's design has some pretty severe inherent flaws. The engineers have been trying to issue their concerns, but ignored or silenced by management.
I think this farewell message by one of the engineers working on Ares sums things up well:
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2008/08/a_farewell_mess.html
At the highest levels, there seems to be a belief that you can mandate reality, followed by a refusal to accept any information that runs counter to that mandate. I'm sure you can all think of multiple examples (having nothing to do with CAD) without trying very hard. This reminds me of Clark's law: "Sufficiently advanced cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice". I've heard others use terms like "arrogance combined with ignorance". ... Then between us workers and the highest levels of management another problem exists. As one person put it: "Where does the bad news stop going up?" Again, I'm sure you all know of situations where people are trying to raise red flags, but somehow they never get addressed.
Come on now. Obviously, at the time of those launches there was a non-zero chance of those rockets failing. The OP claimed that the chance was 1/6 for every rocket. I'd like to know where that number came from because, as I said, it seems like it should be lower given 11 successful manned launches and no manned launch failures.
Cow Cube
And the Challanger failure source was fixed. So you should not factor it in when evaluating failure probability of the current Shuttle. Additionally improvements in the foam to prevent it from coming off and damaging the Shuttle wings have also been implemented. The problem with the Shuttle is we don't have enough of the kind of payloads that justify the cost of maintaining it. Or the need for its ability to return large payloads from space.
"Gavin wastes an hour on Slashdot"
The error was not small- any amateur telescope maker with a razor blade and a pen laser would have found it in five minutes.
Hmm, from what I remember of that, the problem wasn't detectable until it was in zero G. It was ground perfectly flat in earth gravity, but then bubbled slightly once put into space. I think it'd require a quite a bit more than a razor blade and a pen laser (of which were really really expensive at the time and not many people had them) to detect the problem.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
"Worse, many of these problems were already known- the Hubble is basically a KH-11 spy satellite that points the other way- same mirror, same size, even the same shipping container."
And I imagine a large chunk of the problems NASA had with the Hubble might have been due to that very fact: that since it was partially classified technology, getting information to the right people without telling 'the wrong people' would have been fraught with complications.
Not that I know for sure, but it seems likely to me. The problem with doing all this neat technology stuff in black programs is how do you transfer that information and experience to the civilian world when the whole black system is set up specifically to *stop* such transfers?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
It has already been proven that Gus did NOT cause the accident. Had he hit the switch that blows the door open, there would have been a nasty bruise on his hand, but none was found. See also, this Wikipedia article.
Since you've studied advanced statistics, you know that there's always a chance something could occur -- according to the math. Because it did occur, you can always say that the math allowed for it to occur a certain percentage of the time and this may just have been one of those unlikely occurrences. This would be true whether it was 13% or 0.000009% likely to happen.
My point is that what we would have expected to happen according to the statistics didn't happen. We expect that out of 11 rocket launches, 1 or 2 should be fatal, given the statistics. That didn't happen... and that means that either something unlikely happened (they got really lucky) or the statistics that tell us what was likely to happen were simply wrong. We can't really tell from this trial, but if we had say... 20 or 30 consecutive flawless launches with 2.5% and 0.4% chances of occurrence, respectively; We'd really have a case for the stats on failure rates being incorrect.
You're absolutely correct, I just wanted to throw the caution flag concerning "What are the odds against what just happened?" It contaminates the dialogue.
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
That wasn't known at the time he was going into Apollo 1, and it was something that he did dodge his whole life.
It wasn't conclusively proven that he didn't cause the incident until, unfortunately, after he died.
I'm just suggesting one of the motivations behind keeping the astronauts locked into their capsule and a bunch of technicians that think they know better than highly trained test pilots on how to operate spacecraft. There were a whole bunch of things that went wrong with Apollo 1, and the astronaut corp is justifiably holding up this crew for the good that they did while they were alive... and how their deaths likely saved other astronauts down the road by forcing NASA to take safety issues seriously in the Apollo project.
Actually, no, this is not true. The error was in fact detectable on the ground, and in fact was detected on the ground, but the measurement that showed the error was ignored -- the assumption was that the dissenting measurement must surely itself be an error. You can find out more from Wikipedia, or from Time Magazine's article.
Some blame goes to Perkin-Elmer for assuming that the obviously (in hindsight) flawed null corrector was more accurate than the other two null correctors employed, and should be trusted.
Didn't NASA learn anything from history? Two men (von Brawn and Korolyov) had less technology and could do way more. Plus the test pilots back in those days had bigger balls.
We really have hit the space wall haven't we. No hope of getting to the moon, forget anything to Mars.
I may be stating the obvious, but I don't expect Orion or any of these new launch vehicles to be completed, but that may be a good thing. The idea of placing highly skilled, highly trained volunteers on top of a giant firecracker is ridiculous. Solid propellents are accidents waiting to happen and that's why military weapon systems drop or boost rocket powered munitions away from the delivery vehicle before they ignite. That's also why those "solid rocket engines" are manufactured in desolate area's of the Southwest and shipped in secure containers. In stark contrast the proposed heavy lift booster continues to be a liquid core vehicle. I personally take issue with the philosophy of placing equipment, not humans on the safer of the two vehicles. These kind of decisions are also indicative of political "grand standing." First lay out a "grand plan for glory," then set a time-table for shutting down a working system, while only "starting" work on the means to achieve the goal. The current administration will not be in office when NASA comes asking for financing to build hardware, so these actions will likely play out as a politically correct method for shutting down the Shuttle program. At some future date I am sure a politician will step forward and claim this action as proof of there effort at "reducing government waste." What's that you say? They already built the Orion capsule... NOT. A "mockup" is not a finished and tested product. That thing is not even an alpha build, it's a Powerpoint show at best. This whole process compares to Microsoft being contracted by the US government to investigate replicating the IBM360. They may get a workable device out of the exercise but the world will have moved on and past glory will be forgotten. The ingenious exploitation of available resources to meet human needs has been a major driver of all know civilizations. The exploitation of space resources has payed for our current level of space exploration, so I don't expect this trend to change. Progress will only happen at a greater level than we currently know when we can routinely travel to space, work there and come back. That means building the equivalent to the DC-3 or B727, because disposable vehicles are a huge waste of funds and resources. There is plenty of documentation to show how and where mistakes were made in creating the Shuttle and that documentation indicates that under-funding and politics were key to it's failure. Engineers and program manager must learn the lessons of economics, finance and politics in order to change the world. Repeating pst mistakes and basing decisions on cheapness will only guarantee failure.
...that's why military weapon systems drop or boost rocket powered munitions away from the delivery vehicle before they ignite.
Some munitions with solid fuel rocket motors are dropped from the aircraft, others aren't and it's mostly due to airstream issues rather than safety with the solid rocket motors. AIM-9s are launched from rails under wing and wingtip, and the rocket motor is ignited on the rail. AIM-120s are also rail carried and ignite the rocket motor on the rail. AIM-7s were carried next to the airframe and were "pushed" away so air pressure would not slam the missile back into the aircraft before the rocket motor ignited. (Same thing with bombs--if not shoved away, the airstream can bring it back up into the wing)
As for safety, solid propellants are generally safer than liquid--they store well, transport well, and withstand rugged handling. That's the primary reason the USAF eliminated liquid fueled ICBMs from the inventory. That's also why Rutan used solid fuel for SpaceShipOne and will for SpaceShipTwo. One of the plusses for solid fuel is "instant on" power, but a drawback for solid fuel is the inability to throttle the exhaust, unlike liquid propellant engines, which is why there is a mix of the two on various launchers. The Challenger disaster was a failed o-ring/design/safety culture problem, not the solid propellant.
As for dropping satellite launchers (and now sub-orbital vehicles) before ignition, the boosters on those are much more powerful and can easily damage a wing or the fuselage (depending on where its carried) if ignited too close, so they are dropped and the lifting vehicle pulls away before ignition. Plus, it's just smart to stay back from something that's going to be departing at multiple G's and avoid any messy entanglements.
Impetuous! Homeric!