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NASA Successfully Test Fires J-2X Engine.
tetrahedrassface writes "NASA successfully test fired the J-2X engine Wednesday for 500 seconds at Stennis Space Center. The J2-X is derived from the J2 engine from the Apollo Era, and will power the upper stage of the SLS. From the article: 'We have 500 seconds of good data, and the first look is that everything went great. The J-2X engine team and the SLS program as a whole are extremely happy that we accomplished a good, safe and successful test today,' said Mike Kynard, Space Launch System Engines Element Manager at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. 'This engine test firing gives us critical data to move forward in the engine's development.'"
Yeah, well, give them 1960's funding and then they might actually be able to improve upon it...
I bet you still drive a car with a four-cycle engine, which is 19th century technology. Your car has some improvements, but nothing much original.
If the planet weren't busy with squabbling with each other and getting fat with short-term greed, we'd have at least a habitable station on the moon by now.
The Space Launch System HLV (Heavy Lift Vehicle) as currently designed is fine. However, NASA's human spaceflight program needs a mission.
NASA's proposed SLS-HLV budget of $3 billion per year is much higher than is actually needed to fund an HLV, and appears to be an effort to spend the former Shuttle program funds for political purposes.
NASA needs a deep space mission. From the mission comes the plan; from the plan comes the things necessary for its implementation. NASA needs to fund missions, not things. The mission comes first.
This is exactly right. Apollo was successful because it started with a goal, to land a man on the moon. Kennedy didn't say "Let's build a big Saturn V booster and see what we can do with it later". If he had, it would've almost certainly led to program cancellation later by a Congress asking "What the hell are we spending all this money for?"
The SLS program as it stands now is guaranteed to be cancelled. (but not before many billions are funneled to the well-connected)
NASA today is not the young NASA of the 60's. It's become a bloated bureaucracy.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
Burt Rutan:
NASA's become a jobs program.
In terms of aviation, there have been substantial improvements in many related technologies that can be applied to commercial aircraft since the original 747 made its first test flight. Indeed the 747 itself has changed many times and what is coming off the production line today in some ways doesn't even resemble the aircraft that was originally produced.
To pull this argument completely to pieces, Boeing even has plans to replace the 747 due to some of the changes in aviation technology that essentially require a complete clean-sheet redesign of the aircraft. There have been improvements in the technology, and sometimes when you have a wide swath of technological improvements it can be a good time to look at something new.
This said, as was the case for the 747 and the original J-2 engine, what is being expected out of these devices is precisely what was wanted when they were original built in the 1960's. It shouldn't be surprising that something very similar is able to perform the very same task. I use a toaster to warm my bread with a device that looks very similar to what my grandmother had when I was a little child.
Bring forward through time those same engineers with all of today's advancements and they'll stomp all over today's talent.
Bullshit. Give any group of talented engineers a sense of motivation, a nearly unlimited budget, and clear, specific goals, and they can do wonders.
The Manhattan project reached approximately 1% of all federal spending in its peak year. It had one aim: build an atom bomb. It had one main motivation: keep the bad guys (who had launched a sneak attack on us already) from taking over the world.
The Apollo program touched a massive 2.2% of all federal outlays in its peak year. It had three specifications: Man, Moon, Decade. It had one main motivation: keep the bad guys (who had put a satellite in orbit, and a man in space, first) from taking over the world. (Figuratively or literally, depending on your personal level of paranoia.)
NASA today sees about 0.6% of the federal budget: a proportion which has been shrinking steadily since the early 1990s. That funding is divided across a large number of programs and priorities. Not only do they not have clearly stated goals to guide them, they lack the funding to even maintain continuity in the programs (both scientific and engineering) which already exist.
Today's NASA has some superb engineers that I would readily stack up against those from any era in the agency's history. What NASA lacks is funding and leadership. The problem is political, not technical.
~Idarubicin