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Japan Controls Rocket Launch With Just 8 People and 2 Laptops
SpaceGhost writes "Sky News reports that the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) has launched an orbital telescope on a new generation rocket from the Uchinoura Space Centre in Kagoshima, in southwestern Japan. The Epsilon rocket uses an onboard AI for autonomous launch checks by the rocket itself (launch video). A product of renewed focus on reducing costs, the new vehicle required two laptops and a launch team of eight, compared to the 150 people needed to launch the previous platform, the M-5. Because of the reduced launch team and ease of construction, production and launch costs of the Epsilon are roughly half that of the M-5. The payload, a SPRINT-A telescope, is designed for planetary observation."
...to control Fukushima.
Japanese efficiency wins again.
..the launches will be controlled by a repurposed Senior Care Autonomous Robotic Employee (SCARE) built by Hitachi Heavy Industries, that simply requires a ROM to be reflashed with its launch program, taking only two minutes and a WiFi connection.
It will look glorious, hooked into the launch control board, with its vacuum nozzle attachment and pill dispenser hanging off the side, as it guides the majestic rocket through the night sky.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
Meanwhile in America... 45%? Please... Don't make me laugh!
From 150 people to 8! That's almost 94.7% gone. See that, America? That's how you do it...
It now takes less people to launch a Japanese rocket than to maintain a Windows server in the data center....
The USN boomer force was launching sixteen missiles with just twenty odd people as far back as 1960. (Yes, there were other people on the boat, but they were no more part of the launch crew than the crane operators at Uchinoura.) Today, it's twenty four missiles with the same crew.
M-5 got unplugged, again? Daystrom is really going to wig out this time...
#DeleteChrome
The epsilon rocket is a) tiny and b) entirely solid fueled. This kind of high level of automation might not translate well to more complex and larger rockets. Bear in mind also that this is just the launch crew. Manufacturing the rocket is likely still labour intensive.
The Epsilon rocket is three stages of solid rocket booster, like an ICBM. So there's no fueling on the pad, no plumbing, no cryogenics, and no turbopumps. The launch team has a lot less to do than with liquid-fueled rockets.
Not very optimal.
Great. How many people does it take them to (try to) control a crippled nuclear plant ? :)
I can fart without loose control of my missiles too. Its not science rocket
...you see a huge hoard of people launching a spacecraft, or massive ground support infrastructure, you are looking at obsolete technology.
A step in the right direction.
Anybody knows how the new commercial space launchers do in comparison?
I guess they are extreme programming fans.
No biggie. I controlled both of Japan's rocket-launching laptops with my TRS-80 and Sinclair computers, and programs written in LogoLisp.
is that the rocket was designed using kerbal space progam
I've put a probe on every planet in the solar system (except Jool, eff you!) and built a space station for 15 with only me at the helm.
I applaud them on bringing down the launch crew requirements. Space travel is never going to open up for the masses if you need thousands of personnel to launch 7 individuals every few months. But while this rocket is bringing down the requirements on one front its severely limiting the spacecraft capabilities on another. At least according to the info I can pull up the Epsilon rocket uses solid rocket fuel for pretty much every stage (except maybe the fourth optional stage). While I am sure that massively simplifies ground crew work it also limits payload size and orbital insertion options. Switching to/utilizing liquid fuel may be a bit more complicated, but it would significantly increase capabilities. The DC-X is a pretty good example, it was liquid hydrogen/oxygen fueled (one of the more difficult fuels to work with) but it only required a crew of 14. Going full LOX/LH2 wouldn't be necessary either, Methane or kerosene would provide much of the advantages and few of the difficulties of LH2.
In a regular launch, most of the people "do" nothing. They are just there to say go or no go, by looking at values. Which can usually be simple to automatize, at least for the "go" part. But in the no go case, people like to have some feedback like "let me check that, call me back in 2 minutes" or "that's a real problem, we will not launch today, start the cancellation procedure."
Can the "AI" rocket do the same, or do these 8 people need to call someone in an office somewhere else to verify ? (I would say the latter)
Anyway, 8 people for 1 launcher, not very impressive. We are 5 here in the room and we flight (approximatively) 33 satellites, the ratio is better ;-)
The first one failed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGM-133_Trident_II
Take a look at the number of people in the MSL control room during the Mars Landing. It's about 20 actual workers, and probably the same number of "observers & managers".
You typically have 2 people for each major subsystem/function (e.g. a couple to handle Telecom, a couple to worry about the flight computer, a couple to do guidance/navigation, etc.)
In the case of the Mars landing, it's all automated (after all, you're watching it 20 minutes after it happened), but you still have the people there. So why?
1) If something does go wrong, you've got a subject matter expert there who might notice something unusual early enough to do something about it: they do lots of rehearsals; and even if you can't do something about it, in the event of a "bad day", you want someone there to answer questions quickly. Sure, you could wake the person up and they could VPN and look at the logs and maybe figure something out. For a launch, there's a LOT of things that can go wrong, and everyone there is looking for one and ready to push the "abort" button to avert a disaster.
2) Because it's frikkin' exciting to be there. You've spent the last 3 years or more, working 100 hour weeks, to make the launch date. You've been doing dry runs, standing up in reviews to explain to someone who's nervous, yeah, we thought of that, and this is what we'll do. This is a reward: you get to be the VERY FIRST person in the world to know what happened, and the rest of us get to see your goofy shouts and jumping up and down. You'd have to be pretty pathological to go "oh, yeah, another landing/launch.. pass me those budget requests for next year so I can work on them"
3) Because you're a senior manager, and you've spent the last 3 years of your life reading financial reports and schedules, and you really, really, really miss actually doing engineering, and this is as close as you can get. You also have been defending your mission or activities against whiners in government and Congress who are saying, "why can't you spend less" and "shouldn't we use this money to fund X, or Y, or Z instead of wasting it on space flight"
6 watching.
Team reduced from 150 to 8. The unlucky 142 remaining PhD will line up to become scientific journalists, producing rounds of papers about the latest molecule that will make us live longer, treat cancer, and/or obesity.
My PS2 is considered a supercomputer, because it's powerful enough to do the calculations to make atomic bombs. Nevermind my PS3. Nevermind the upcoming PS4.
Also, I rarely actually use it as a phone.
Err... your country have capability to launch rockets with only 2 people for a long time:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeZYe_Fj-78
Right now, you don't even need to manned it through. Just send a command from that briefcase that you president aides carries around..
Anybody knows how the new commercial space launchers do in comparison?
Don't know about the current crop. But back in the late '80s AMROC controlled their launches without the classic room-full-of-custom-consoles. Instead they hacked up their "consoles" as a GUI on one instance of the state-of-the-art windowing interface computer of the time - a Macintosh (what they'd now call a "Macintosh Classic").
I hear that, when they showed up at Goddard for their test shot, the usual control room crew was standing around with their jaws dropped as the whole thing was run from the little screen on the little box on the single desk. B-)
If you never heard of AMROC: They were the ones that were working with the hybrid rocket: Solid fuel (synthetic tire rubber), liquid oxidizer (liquid oxygen). Controllability of a liquid fuel, complexity halfway between solid and liquid fuel (only ONE set of plumbing, not too that must be synchronized), safety better than either (turn off the LOX and the fuel just smolders and goes out.
They lost their mover-and-shaker founding-team member days before their first flight attempt. Then, though the engines had many successful tests, the actual flight attempt failed in about the worst possible failure modes for a hybrid: The LOX valve iced up (due to ambient moisture) and stuck at about 30% open: Not enough thrust to get off the pad, but enough slow burn energy to destroy much of the rocket and pad equipment, and they couldn't either launch or shut down. Then they went bankrupt, so there wasn't a second shot. (Their tech was sold and some of it is used in space ship one.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
SPRINT-A telescope, is designed for planetary observation
Perhaps recent revelations have made me cynical, but would the planet happen to be earth?
Glad they used 2 laptops, you know for redundancy and all.
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.nosig