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NASA Campaigns For Safer Launch Requirements
NASA officials will speak before members of Congress this week in an effort to gain support for more stringent launch safety considerations for the space shuttle's successor. Crew safety remains a major concern for lawmakers while they debate NASA's future and the potential integration of private companies into US space flight plans.
"The demonstrated probability of a shuttle launch disaster is 1 in 129. NASA's 83 astronauts think those odds can be improved to 1 in 1,000. Independent safety experts agree. 'None of us want to repeat the accident history of the shuttle,' said retired Navy Vice Adm. Joseph Dyer, chairman of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, a group organized to oversee NASA programs after three astronauts died in the 1967 Apollo 1 launch pad fire. ... NASA's Astronaut Office began a re-evaluation of next-generation launch vehicle safety after the loss of Columbia's crew. The guiding principles laid out in a May 2004 report remain current, astronauts said. Launching astronauts into low Earth orbit is dangerous. But an order-of-magnitude reduction of risk is achievable 'and should therefore represent a minimum safety benchmark for future systems,' the report says."
I can certainly appreciate that they want to do better, but it still amazes me that we send people into F'ING SPACE with less than 1% failure rate.
Why does NASA have to campaign for greater safety standards? Why can't they implement them without the "politicians" approval?
I realize this view is mighty unpopular, yet I am going to express it. While science is very important, so are social issues. I would like to see the NASA budget considerably shrunk but for only a short period of time, say 12 - 18 months. We have to get our country healthy again and space flight really only effects a small sector of the economy. It will create jobs but only at the most educated levels. A healthy country is a more efficient and productive one. Now, you may feel free to mod me but are you willing to join the censors?
Software processes have their heyday. The design up front strategy of Waterfall. The staged Incremental approach. The cowboy coding Big Bang approach (my personal favorite, if only to see watch the aftermath).
Nowadays, Agile development is the leading process du jour. With its short, incremental approach that relies on immediate feedback and rapid adaptation as well as well-scoped test points, Agile produces high quality software cheaply and quickly.
So to see NASA yearning for the days of design-heavy Waterfall with all risks supposedly identified up front, it's just a little bit disappointing. Years of actual practice have proven that Waterfall is one of the worst processes to follow, since it assumes that you can somehow know all necessary design points and risks at the outset.
Flight wasn't achieved overnight and certainly without tragedies. But we are where we are today because we took those accidents and tragedies and learned from them. NASA seems to think that they can bypass these failures by fiat. They are wrong, and this type of bad planning is going to cause huge budget overruns, delayed flight schedules, a loss of prestige, and worst of all less future funding.
Be Agile, NASA!
Seriously, Rutan had it right when he said that we are not killing enough. The simple fact is, that to be cutting edge WILL involve loss of life. Yet, NASA is talking all about safety rather than designing/building new rockets.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"NASA Campaigns For Safer Lunch Requirements".
No idea what those guys have been eating.
which is totally what she said
Wouldn't NASA administrators have the power to require certain safety levels in any grants or contracts they award?
I sincerely hope that people understand such legislation has its foundations in the fact that launch vehicles are very expensive and nothing to do with the pilots and passengers.
Even taking into account the investment made in people while training astronauts can be sizeable it still pales in comparison to the expense of using a chemical rocket to boost a tiny payload into low earth orbit. $10,000 per pound in 2001 dollars.
Once the price of lobbing things into space becomes reasonable, there will be deaths, once again nobody will care in the same measure nobody other than relatives of the victims bats an eye when a plane crashes today.
What does NASA expect of all of the space programs? To have an unrealistic safety record which would put General Products to shame? Sometimes the tree of science needs to be watered with the blood of the brave and the bold.
OMG NASA call the WAAAAAAMBULANCE!
While the USA frets about crew safety, China will take the risks, spend the money, and colonize the Moon, Mars, Europa, the Lagrange points...
The future of space exploration is Made in China.
Their launches would be much "safer" if they concentrated on useful research instead of the absurd focus on sending people into space.
There is no reason to rush the process, and we need to improve robots (which are expendable and can serve us everywhere) more then we need to send tourists for a ride.
If there is something that an automaton cannnot currently do, it is better to improve the machine than send humans. Humans are delicate, burdensome to support, require excessive safety precautions because society overvalues them (compare to the vigorous level of Terran exploration that used expendable ships and crews) and are a limiting factor rather than an enhancement.
We should dump tourism on the for-profit commercial space community and on foreign countries. We don't have to lead to benefit from technology any more than did the current beneficiaries of OUR technology. The Cold War is over and the penis-waving that drove manned missions can end.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Interesting that we're not counting Columbia as a "launch" disaster. The foam that broke off and hit the orbiter wing happened on launch, so in my mind we're at 2/129, not 1/129. That particular failure mode is directly attributable to the questionable decision to mount the orbiter to the side of the stack, rather than on top: switching back to the "astronauts at the top of the stack" seems like a clear way to remove a bunch of that type of failure modes.
Just switching from a fragile tile-covered aircraft strapped to the side of a flaking-foam-covered hydrogen tank to an inherently ballistically stable capsule placed as far from the flaming end of the rocket as possible (i.e., on top of it) will achieve the desired 10x safety factor improvement. NASA has been tied to its delta-winged boondoggle for several decades too long. If they would eliminate the segmented, non-throttleable solid rocket boosters (currently still in the plan thanks to Morton Thiokol's lobbyists) they could improve safety another 10x. And if they want to do all this at minimum cost, they could just buy Soyuz vehicles, the world's safest, most reliable manned space transportation system. Of course, national pride would allow this to happen only sometime after Putin declares his undying love for country music and Harley-Davidsons.
How do you show that your launcher has a 1/1000 failure rate? Launch it thousands of times without failures. Anything less and you risk fooling yourself. Recall Feynman's discussions with Shuttle management, who predicted a 1/100000 failure rate until events proved otherwise.
So how will NASA show that their own launcher has a 1/1000 failure rate? The same way they showed that the NASP and VentureStar were great ideas: viewgraphs. Although reality has a nasty habit of disagreeing with viewgraphs, that doesn't matter if you don't give reality a chance to have its say - and how can we justify buying thousands of launches on a commercial launcher when their viewgraphs clearly aren't up to spec?
It's worth noting here that safer space flight is counterproductive. The reason Ares I won back in 2005 on safety grounds is because it was a paper rocket. Nobody ever died on a paper rocket because nobody ever got to space on a paper rocket. NASA has not demonstrated that it can build or purchase a rocket safer than the Shuttle. Odds are very good that any increased safety requirements will have to be loosened when NASA finally gets (if it does) a manned space vehicle again.
As an aside, will these safety rules apply to contracted launches through other countries? Will NASA stop flying people to the ISS because the only vehicles (namely, Soyuz) can't and won't bother to meet stringent safety requirements? I doubt it.
My view is that the safety requirements are solely intended to cull rivals to the Ares I. These rules will in turn be dispensed with (this is called a "bait and switch" BTW) when it is no longer convenient for the Ares I program.
if the managers had listened to the engineers and not had an attack of press-on-itis... in fact, if I'm not mistaken the other disaster was avoidable as well... they had evidence of serious tile damage on previous flights and should have re-engineered the critical areas so that hot gas ingress could not do so much damage.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
The whole history of launching stuff into space in basically strapping something onto a bomb, and trying to control the way it explodes.
Comparing the earliest manmade flights, basically using ICBMs, to... to....
I was going to say today's tech, but the shuttle is almost 30 years old, so it really isn't today's tech.
Soyuz? Proton? Ariane?
It's all still focusing a huge amount of volatile explosives to a constricted area, hoping it doesn't all go pear shaped.
Add to that environmental concerns (this bug that's 10,000 miles away won't fuck if it so much as smells rocket exhaust, so use something else),
it's a wonder we get up there as safely as we do.
The real problem is the need for excessive weight reduction. This makes big spacecraft too fragile. If the Shuttle could afford the weight of a titanium skin, instead of fragile foam and tiles, it would be far less troublesome.
The best US spacecraft was probably the Gemini, which was Gus Grissom's baby, the Gusmobile. He designed the fighter pilot's spacecraft, the most maneuverable spacecraft to date. A Big Gemini, a 9-passenger version, made it to the mockup stage. If that had been built, the US would have had something comparable to Soyuz. Better, probably. It's striking that the US hasn't had a little spacecraft to send to orbit since the 1960s.
Grissom died in the 1967 pad fire, and nobody else had the clout to push the Gemini program forward after that.
The demonstrated failure rate is ABSOLUTELY meaningless with such a low rate of loss. The actual failure rate could be 1 in 10 or 1 in 10,000, but with only 129 samples and 1 failure, you've got no idea which one it really is. Maybe we're already at 1 in 1000.
I hate this probabilistic view anyway. If you know that the failure rate should be 1 in 1000, then you must know what will fail .1% of the time. Fix those flaws and now you should have a perfect vehicle. Of course, you don't have a perfect vehicle, because there are problems you don't know about. So when you think that you have a 1 in 1000 rate, you actually will have a lower one. So, if the goal is to get to a rate that is 1 in 1000, once we're there the unknowns might lower it to 1 in 129, which is where we are (demonstratively) at.
Put another way, think about how safe the space shuttle is now. In its service lifetime, we've seen two fatal flaws demonstrated: foam and O-rings. The O-rings have been fixed and the foam has been mitigated. Over 129 launches, every dangerous problem has been fixed, minimized, or mitigated. Now we're going to dump a vehicle that has had 30 years of improvements built in and hope to do better with a new design.
It would be like if we did a "rm -rdf ." on the kernel archives, stuck Linus and the kernel developers in a room, and let them start over. How long would it take to redevelop an OS that is as secure as Linux? Linux has 20 years of development and security fixes. Even with a better design plan and all of the combined experience, would it take them a year to duplicate the safety? Two years? Five? Ten?
Dirty Jobs just aired a special episode that I think is on point. The episode introduced the mantra, "Safety third." This is not to say that Safety is unimportant, but that in every case, the safest course is to not engage in an activity with risk. If you put safety first, you won't get anything done at all.
Now, the reason Mike Rowe had safety 3rd was that first was getting the job done (or at least, making a decent attempt) and second was making entertaining television. In most cases, I dare say the 2nd qualification doesn't apply, so Safety coming in second is a better expectation. I actually think Mike was being cavalier by suggesting that Safety is always in the top ten and often the top five. I'd hesitate to keep it out of the top 3 on any occasion, but life wouldn't be worth living if safety truly always came first.
It's doubly ironic that I bring up Dirty Jobs in combination with a discussion about NASA. One of the segments in this very episode lambasted NASA for putting the Dirty Jobs crew through a safety briefing about confined space safety concerns that they were in no way going to actually encounter doing the work that they were going to film. Your tax dollars at work.
This is just political theater to
1) Stay the course on Ares I
2) Kill any other crew transfer methods (SpaceX, Orbital, EELVs...)
Of course, Ares I is quite unsafe since it uses a huge solid rocket that can explode very quickly AND that accelerates quickly low in the atmosphere, meaning escape is hard at places (you need a huge launch escape rocket). It also lacks performance and hence some safety features like redundancy have been removed in some places in Orion (the spacecraft) or Ares I. But most importantly, it doesn't have a demonstrated flight record, unlike the EELV:s which have been flying succesfully since 2002.
No launcher/spacecraft system probably fills all the demands from 2004. NASA can use the "man rating" to mean whatever it wants. It's not a defined or accepted science or engineering term
They just finished Shuttle flight #129, and they've had two disasters. I think that would work out to "1 in 64.5"
The demonstrated failure rate is 2 in 129. Does no one remember Challenger?
The CAIB report directly pointed it's finger at management "converting a memory of failure into a memory of success" and that Nasa management had learned nothing from the Challenger accident where poor management decisions led to the loss of both launch vehicles.
The U.S Navy criticised Nasa heavily, citing that it had assigned 5000 Navy staff to study the loss of the Challenger so it could improve practices in it Nuclear submarine fleet, Nasa assigned none. 14 of the 17 astronauts lost were due to management failure. Seems to me that to increase launch safety Nasa Management is a fairly obvious place to start.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
We are stuck in two middle eastern countries, costing hundreds of billions, because of the PR from a major terrorist attack 8 years ago, even though only 20 days worth of car crash victims died.
According to the almighty Google, there have been 134 missions, 2 of which have resulted in fatal explosions (one on take off and one on re-entry).
2:134 = 1:67 ... or are they "tweaking" the figures based on number of astronauts dead / alive over the whole shuttle history ?
You know, of course, that the AIG bailout alone would pay for 10 years of running NASA at current budget levels?
That the Iraq war would pay for 41 years, and the Afghanistan one for an additional 17?
The 17.6 billion NASA got this year wouldn't pay for much, much less the 9 billion you want to take.
Removing NASA (as a halving of the budget effectively would do, as written by posters above) would reduce US prestige quite a bit, though.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
The NASA budget for 2009 was %0.55 of the full USA budget. The proposed size for 2010 is %0.52. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget Do you think that we can make a meaningful dent in our social problems by reallocating %0.23 of the total budget?
For 2008, the percent of the budget for Social Security was %21, Medicare was %23 and the DOD was %21. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Federal_Spending_-_FY_2007.png That totals 65% of the total budget. Most people have no idea how small the NASA funding is compared to other programs. It just shows that NASA has a high profile for it's size.
Here is an idea.
Build a cheaper more dangerous shuttle. Accept the fact that 5% of launches will result in failure. Publicise this. Let the astronauts know. I guarantee there will still be plenty of volunteers to go into space.
So, you end up with say 50 dead astronauts. The training is pretty expensive - but way less than what you saved by building a cheaper shuttle.
Now take those billions that you saved. Spend them on better healthcare for army veterans and poor children. Save tens of thousands of lives.
Wouldn't that be a better way to spend your cash?
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Maybe, but it raises the question as to why focus on launch safety, when a failure at any stage of spaceflight can lead to death.
Also, I think it should be considered that the failure rate for a Space Shuttle mission may currently be greater than 2/129 if vulnerabilities are increasing with age (esp. unknown vulnerabilities that cannot be anticipated).
Congress consists of both the House and the Senate, and Senators have a term of six years.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
I'm all in favor of increased spending on domestic priorities, but NASA's budget is not the place to look. The real money is in the defense/homeland security budgets, which combined are pushing a trillion dollars a year (when you include costs for various wars, VA costs, and actual DOD/DHS budgets). Why is it, exactly, that we're spending more on the DOD alone than the entire rest of the world - combined - spends on defense?
Deaths on space shuttle flights: 14. Deaths on Soyuz flights: 4. Deaths on most recent version of Soyuz flights: 0. So, NASA could buy a safer rocket: Soyuz. Of course, that would make Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, et. al, very angry, so that'll never happen.
I also have to say that the general feeling around here that astronauts are expendable is pretty fucking reprehensible. Launching people into space onboard a system that we damn well KNOW has a terrible safety record is not ok, people. We have an obligation to provide a system with reasonable levels of safety for our astronauts, and if we can't, then we damn well better not go until we can. The American people are hardly being irrational to insist upon this.
... on one of my ships (where they actually thought things through) the motto was "readiness through safety". The idea being that, yes, if you put safety uber alles, you couldn't get anything done. But reasonable levels of safety actually help you accomplish your mission by eliminating unnecessary injuries and equipment damage. I think that the space shuttle program has a long, long way to go before they've achieved "reasonable levels of safety". The monetary cost alone of the two failures to date was pretty freakin' high, to say nothing of the opportunity costs (lost missions, etc), and of course, the loss of human life.
... by just not going at all. The point is that we have an obligation to provide a launch system for our astronauts that provides reasonable levels of safety for them. It is just plain unethical even to ask people to volunteer for what amounts to a game of Russian roulette without a much better reason than messing around with the ISS.
There haven't been 2 failures of the launch system. There have been 2 instances of arrogant management pushing the system beyond its design specs. For all intents and purposes, STS launches have been flawless.
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Okay, so the odds of dying are 1 in 129 and there are only 83 astronauts. As long as they never get more than 128 astronauts I don't see what the big deal is.
I think that might be the most insightful safety related commentary I have ever heard of.
Good point.
Anyway, I'd still ride the Shuttle even if the failure rate was 1/10.