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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?
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
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?
I don't have an opinion one way or another, but I am quite sure that it is infeasible to cut NASA's budget in half for 18 months and then expect them to continue as if nothing happened...
What does a "shrunk budget" mean? Firing reseachers, firing engineers, cancelling projects with industry... And if you as an engineer got fired, you would presumably look for another job with more security and better pay in the private sector and not come back after 18 months into a shitty job where they will eliminate your position at a whim... In short, they can't just mothball manpower, because it won't come back.
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.
NASA's budget is already pretty small, 17.2 billion. The current stimulus plan is valued at 135.15 billion. In other terms, NASA's budget would have covered 12.7% of the economic stimulus if allocated in that way. The type of reform you're talking about would require more than the entirety of NASA's budget. What is amazing to me is the number of jobs for our educated persons that are created with that 17.2 billion dollars and also the amount of technology we get back out of it. I understand you believe that we need to pump more into economic recovery but please look somewhere with deeper pockets than NASA for the money.
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.
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.
Unpopular? No, it's simply idiotic.
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.
Social issues? You're dreaming. Supposing that you solved every single social issue that mankind faces today. Just suppose. You get praises, and hossanahs, not to mention all the peace prizes for the next 50 years. Big deal. You will have gained nothing. Why, you ask?
Simple. Mankind thrives on issues. With all of today's issues solved, he will run right out to create yet more issues tomorrow. We WILL find a reason to fight, at any cost. We WILL disagree, even if we must take an obviously wrong position to do so. We WILL oppress the underprivileged, even if we have to CREATE an underprivileged class to do so.
Since we're going to piss the money away, no matter what, we might as well piss it away on something that MIGHT do mankind some good. Let NASA go on, until they are superseded by something better. That something may very well be SpaceX, or it might be a United Nations (don't hold your breath, the UN never accomplishes anything) Space Administration. Something will come along, that gives us more bang for the buck, I'm sure.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Yes, and anyway we've already run that experiment. Right after Apollo ended. So we got the Shuttle. And we know how that worked out.
NASA needs long term, consistent, reasonable funding. No dollar yo-yo games. However, since funding is a decision of Congress, and Congress is political and thinks in 4 year cycles (at best), this won't happen.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
Nope. India put a satellite in Lunar orbit a year ago and has a mission planned to Mars. My money's on them.
The problem with this is
A) We have such a large investment in space already (ISS anyone?) if we stop working on it for a few months it could become unusuable and all the money we spent on it would be for nothing
B) Private space flight is struggling because of dumping large amounts of money into classified government projects to improve government space flight (yes, the money that you and me spent on research is unavaliable to the average citizen)
C) Space flight creates new private industries. Space flight has goals, and new things need to made to meet these goals, so until we have good private space flight, government space flight is a good way to discover new things.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Which are both dwarfed by the money spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Not trying to start a fight, I'm just sayin'...
According to this report (pdf) by the Congressional Research Service, the "official" expenditures to date are listed as about $944 Billion, the UK Times estimated (in Feb 08) that including other things, like the cost of veteran's benefits, it has/will cost the US closer to $3 Trillion.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
Cutting NASA's budget in half will do nothing to solve the numerous social issues faced by this country. Government spending needs to be adjusted, but there are many places spending much, MUCH more than NASA does on an annual basis.
Let's do some quick Googling to compare some annual budget figures here:
Of special note are the Procurement and RDT&E budgets for FY09 totalling around $183.8 billion dollars. This is how much money the military spends buying and testing new equipment. Within those figures, you see a FY09 budget of $6.9 billion for the F-35 program, and $4.1 billion for the F-22. $11 billion dollars for two aircraft programs. The military spends 62% of what NASA uses to run its entire operation on TWO AIRCRAFT PROGRAMS.
To put it another way, for less than twice what the military spends on the next generation of combat aircraft, NASA has to fund; the remainder of the Space Shuttle Program, the Orion/Ares program, the ISS, Ames Research Center, JPL, The Goddard Institute, Dryden Flight Research Center, KSC, Johnson Space Center, White Sands Test Facility, Deep Space Network, and the United States Space & Rocket Center. This includes research on ozone depletion, energy management, and medicine, along with several Earth-science projects dedicated to improving severe weather prediction and environmental conservation. They do this on less than 1/4 of what the military spends on buying new equipment. As another poster said, cutting their budget would cost them manpower that they may never get back. You don't want to do that when you're operating on what is essentially a shoestring budget.
Finally, we come to the reason I included the welfare spending figures above. If you slash the budget for NASA (say by the 50% I threw around earlier), you're saving a grand total of $8.8 to $13.2 billion for the 12-18 months you suggested. That adds 2.2 to 3.3% to the bottom line for welfare spending, which is almost nothing in the grand scheme of things. And what happens at the end of that period? Do you take the money away from welfare? That puts us right back where we started. So no, cutting NASA's budget is NOT the answer. Honestly, I believe that NASA's mission is one of the places where we should INCREASE spending, along with better oversight into ALL areas of government. The more NASA is able to do (and remember, they do more than just send people into space), the better off we will ALL be in the long run.
And no, I'm not going to mod you down (I can't since I'm replying, obviously). But I also won't discourage anyone else from doing so. Modding you down for having a misguided and frankly wrong idea is NOT the same as censorship. If your argument carried any weight whatsoever, it would stand on its own merits. Suggesting that those who disagree with you are censoring your views is a myopic attempt to give them credibility where they would otherwise have none.
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
Fine. Let them pay for it.
If they do it first that doesn't mean we won't eventually benefit.
The US has paid dearly for the burden of prideful leadership while others profit from our effort. Why not flip the situation and
let someone else foot the bill?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
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.
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.
How about we start paying down that debt of ours so that China doesn't have a club to beat us with?
Uncle Sam's biggest bill in the future is going to be interest if he doesn't go on a diet. Interest that won't be going anywhere except the pockets of the wealthy investors.
Okay, but doesn't that strike you as a bit shortsighted ?
By focusing on improving just one aspect of "safety", i.e. launch, it simply means they have a better chance of getting into space, but the same lousy odds of exploding on re-entry ?
Shooting people into space in a glorified tin can should be a science they have mastered after 100+ missions ... they managed to get a man on the moon in 11 tries back in the 70s.
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.