I've been to one, most of the party attendees are not upper management. It's part of the Space Flight Awareness award program. To quote the site: SFA Honoree This award is one of the highest presented to NASA and industry and is for first-level management and below. This award is presented to employees for their dedication to quality work and flight safety. To qualify, the individuals must have contributed beyond their normal work requirements to achieve significant impact on attaining a particular human space flight program goal; contributed to a major cost savings; been instrumental in developing modification to hardware, software, or materials that increase reliability, efficiency, or performance; assisted in operational improvements; or been a key player in developing a beneficial process improvement.
Re:Don't you love sensational summaries
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NASA Knows How To Party
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Well stated.
Full disclosure. I'm a low level NASA manager. I also have been a recipient of the award in question (it's called the Space Flight Awareness, or SFA). I won it years ago when I was a line engineer for a contractor (managers usually cannot get these awards).
The article is unfairly one sided. NASA overall has very little "morale money", which is used to reward outstanding employees or significant contributions - things that are commonplace in the private sector. When we have an office party, or I bring in dinner for my guys that have to work on Christmas, it's out of my pocket. All my colleagues do the same. I can assure you that the sum total of this across the agency is a lot more than what the SFAs cost.
They also made it out like some extravagant party - it really isn't. They pay for the flight (you have to cover your spouse, though), get you a hotel at the Day's Inn Cocoa Beach (or similar) for a few days, they drive you around on a tour, and feed you a few nice meals and let you meet some astronauts and agency officials.
The reason why most of the recipients are contractors is that most of NASA employees are contractors. The way most contracts are billed with NASA is cost plus, and employee expenses (including the small awards that are given out) are billed back to the government. The contractors also do spend on some other awards out of their profits (which are relatively small on NASA contracts, in all fairness).
While you may have some negative opinions about how well NASA is doing as an agency, we've got a lot of really outstanding line employees who do great work, and in any enterprise you need to reward that. When I got my SFA, I was 28 years old and had spent a year of 60+ hour weeks getting an avionics package on the Space Station working. I didn't get paid overtime for that...the SFA was a nice token from my management. Another guy on the trip won his for finding a problem that saved the government $12 million dollars. As a percentage of the overall workforce, very few people ever win this award (where I work, maybe 1 out of 50 has gotten this in the last 10 years, you have to do something exceptional). It's definitely worth the tax dollars that are spent on it - and I hope other federal agencies are using my tax dollars in similar ways.
Does any disaster involving space travel and rockets have a 4 minute window for people to escape?
In the accidents this system is designed to protect for, it can. This really is not to help out a crew that is strapped into a launch system during terminal count. In that case, the launch abort system is fired and the whole capsule is carried away rapidly. This is actually what happened during Soyuz T-10-1 when it caught fire (link here).
Where the pad escape system really comes in is those days and hours before launch when ground crews and the maybe the flight crew itself is out at the pad doing launch prep and some sort of accident occurs, such as a fire. I've done work out on the shuttle pads, they are really industrial areas, like a petrochem plant. Getting out in a hurry is tricky business, involving riding elevators, finding your way through the pad structure itself (which has hatches) and making your way to the ground. This system and the current zip line system is designed to get workers off rapidly if there is an emergency, especially before the crew is strapped in but after the upper stage is fueled.
In other words, NASA didn't want to deal with new ideas, and have to deal with the work associated with it, or overseeing the work in others. Everything is risky when you don't want to bother.
That's too bad. I work for NASA...Draper Labs proposed doing the same thing with the International Space Station and we tried it out on the vehicle. Worked like a charm, desaturated the Control Moment Gyros and executed a 90 degree yaw maneuver to boot, no propellant used. Remarkable. It was a great tool to add to our bag of tricks.
Beyond everything that you nicely outline, when it comes to the USAJobs site they won't be able to "shrug it off" because of the connection to the government.
USAJobs was built under federal contract, and the government was slowly moving to requiring every federal position be applied for through USAJobs. That includes internal promotions, executives, new-hires...basically everyone who is not elected or an appointee. A lot of fairly high ranking career civil servants are in that database.
I'm guessing the government is going to be very harsh on this, as they typically are when a contractor screws up IT security.
BTW, most federal employees and managers hate USAJobs, since you are not allowed to interview anyone unless the computer ranks them highly when it runs it's resume search algorithm. I can't interview someone unless the computer spits it out. Potential hires (and internal promotions) have to figure out how to "fake out" the search algorithm so their resume gets through. I'd love to see it go away.
Reading the text of the actual report here the phrase used by the report is "preflight" alcohol use and "flight safety". It's not specific to a shuttle mission.
Keep in mind that astronauts do most of their "flying" in T-38's (two seaters that are often likened to "astronaut taxis"). It's quite possible that the specific incidents revolve around T-38 use. The image of an astronaut strapping into the shuttle after violating alcohol policy (which is much tighter on aircraft than cars) is almost unbelievable. It is not as much of a stretch to image someone who closed down a bar on Cocoa Beach the night before being tossed into the back seat of a T-38 at 8 AM to get them home with a sober pilot up front. Of course, this is still a safety risk (what if you have to eject?) and a violation of policy. There would be fewer people around that would notice as well since now you are talking about a couple of astronauts and maybe some airfield guys instead of the entire world watching.
I'm not saying that was what happened, but probably there has not been enough detail released to make a real judgment on what really went on (other than the local on-scene leadership overruled objections by flight surgeons and other astronauts on safety, which is I believe was the point the report was trying to get to).
I fear however that the innovation and creative problem solving that has defined Scaled to date is no longer going to continue.
I'm not sure it's quite as bad as you fear, it's possible that Northrup-Grumman will continue in that tradition.
The challenge with these very small, innovative space companies is that their model (which is a small group of really smart guys working very hard without a lot of support overhead) can only scale up so far. At some point the products they are creating get complex enough where you hit critical mass and start needing groups to specialize in things like analysis, integration, customer support, systems integration, etc.
This is what large aerospace companies are good at. You might call this a bloated support structure, but it's the only way that the industry has found to develop really big, complex, and profitable aircraft and spacecraft (which is what a passenger ship to LEO would be). They haven't yet found a way to build a high complexity, profitable product like a Boeing 777 airliner or a Boeing 702 satellite with a small shop.
Orbital Sciences, for example, has evolved from a small company with a few neat ideas back in the 80's (in particular, the air launched Pegasus) into a major player in the aerospace world, and it is structured like Boeing, Northrup, and LockMart today.
I consider this a positive evolution of the great ideas Scaled Composites has demonstrated into something that can be built and be a commercial success.
Is he actually looking for employment in aerospace? From reading the article, it appears he left aerospace engineering after bouncing around to go into computer sales. It doesn't say he was forced out of aerospace or laid off - he's currently unemployed after being forced to resign as the director of a community service organization. More info here.
I'm quite sure he could find a position if he wanted one (although he's going to need to get out of Maine). I spent five minutes looking and I found this opening doing flight crew equipment for Hamilton Sundstrand, the contractor that manufactures space suits and other crew aids for NASA. Knowing the industry, my guess would be that the position pays between $70,000-$90,000 (in Houston, which is a fairly cheap place to live).
NASA actually does buy some parts on eBay (although I wouldn't say it's a lot of them). When systems get old, you have a choice between paying to design a replacement board with modern components for a legacy system or digging up older parts. Often times the older parts are going to be the cheaper solution, and the advent of eBay has made them a lot easier to find.
Walk to the subway station, and there are about 5 vendors who will happily sell you pirated version of any music CD, most DVDs, and almost any software for $5.
I actually put that to the test last time I was in Moscow. Was in one of the high end shopping districts near Red Square and walked up to one of the multitudes of CD street vendors. Asked her if she had Borat (which had been released to theaters only a couple of weeks before, and is actually banned in Russia).
Yup, had it. Just under the table. Commanded a premium price though, I seem to remember it was around 300 rubles (about $10).
Now, who do you wanted designing a NASA space vehicle?
As an engineer that is involved in hiring for NASA, I want an element of both. While course content and (to a lesser degree) GPA are important, I really need people who are able to quickly learn new things and work with people. Many of the problems we have are unique and you'd never be exposed to them in school. In a lot of cases even new guys get tasks that require a lot of digging, thinking, and research to solve.
It's challenging to get a new hire to stop thinking in terms of rigid sets of problems on a short (no longer than a semester) timetable which they solve largely by themselves. They need to adjust to understanding how to work on projects that no one person may understand, involve chasing some dead ends, and bring together ideas and work from several people or organizations.
As the article puts it:
"The best way to achieve that goal is to change the classroom from a lecture hall dominated by a "sage on stage" to smaller social groups that allow students to creatively participate in the research themselves, he said."
Right on. This sort of experience currently isn't a given when someone walks into your office for an interview with a BS in engineering. We end up looking for folks that got this experience in extracurriculars, usually through a leadership role in a project like the solar cars or small satellites that a lot of universities are participating in.
If you've ever seen TV coverage of a Progress or Soyuz docking to the International Space Station, you've probably seen the ubiquitous black and white docking camera video with data overlayed on it as the vehicle approached the docking target.
Unfortunately, this television signal was only within the Russian Segment, and could only be downlinked through Russian communication assets over Russian ground sites. That limited the video to around 10 minutes each orbit, and required the docking to physically occur over Russia.
The US segment downlinks television via the Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS), which have more or less worldwide coverage. But the US segment and Russian Segment systems used incompatible video standards and weren't physically connected.
Yup, two video systems that cost tens of millions to develop, and they can't talk to each other. Classic "square peg, round hole" problem.
So we devised a setup where the crew ran a cable from the Russian Segment TV system into an IBM A31p laptop which converts the Russian SECAM signal to US NTSC video. The output from the laptop is connected to another cable strung down the stack into the US video system and downlinked via TDRS. Voila, greatly increased video coverage thanks to a lowly Thinkpad.
That's been known for years and they haven't dared fix it.
In all fairness that's a software requirement (or lack of one) that the shuttle flight software group does not have control of. As has been rehashed several times on slashdot, the shuttle program early on took the savings from not building that capability into the ground and flight software (it's not quite as simple as it seems). It only became a problem recently when it restricted certain launch windows, and now the shuttle program is paying to add it in.
That sort of rigidity makes their methodology totally useless for software outside NASA.
As you say, it's totally useless for non-life critical systems. However, outside of NASA I know of DOD applications such ballistic missile guidance are equally as rigid.
Give me our full-featured, buggy software over nothing any day
As someone who has depended on NASA flight software, I'd rather sacrifice features for bug free code. That's a basic difference between consumer software and mission critical software.
I suspect it's also useless to the other groups in NASA. Do you actually know that the Mars Rover software was written in this manner?
No other group at NASA writes flight software like this, because Shuttle is the only man rated launch vehicle. Orion will be similar (and it's software is being written by the same people). Other flight software at NASA is not this extreme, but there is a NASA software development standard for all flight software and it's still pretty rigid compared to consumer software.
They did everything they intended to accomplish the rovers and more. I'm just surprised they decided to upload the updates to both of them instead of just one of them.
They may have done it that way because it may not possible for their mission support software on the ground to handle two different versions of flight software on Mars.
In any event, NASA's flight software development process is extremely rigorous, up to and including an Independent Verification and Validation center in West Virginia which independently evaluates all NASA flight software (http://www.ivv.nasa.gov/). It's not like it's a beta version of code being sent to the Rovers - the likelihood of finding a bug in the code that escaped testing was sufficiently low to justify uplinking to both rovers.
Why does Nasa refer to this as "revised flight software" these rovers don't fly
It's just a standard term. At NASA, "flight" software is mission software which executes within a spacecraft computer. "Ground" software usually refers to that which is used for spacecraft control/ground support (the software in the control center on Earth).
Agreed. Number of launches is not necessarily a good indicator of overall health of a nation's space program.
For a variety of reasons (some related to how cheaply and reliably they can launch), Russian satellites tend to be designed for shorter lifetimes than their western counterparts. For example, the article cited Glonass satellites. A Glonass vehicle has a design lifetime of 3 years, while the American GPS system has a satellite lifetime of ~ 10 years. The Russians need to launch more often to maintain the constellation.
Does that mean that either program is healthier than the other? No. It just means the Russians chose to design a constellation with a cheaper satellite that requires replenishment more often instead of one with a more durable (and expensive) spacecraft that doesn't require as many launches. One philosophy isn't better than the other, each side chose the one that best fit their design requirements and the resources they had at their disposal.
Also, wouldn't passengers need to be in really good health to endure such a journey, and would they need to wear flight suits like fighter pilots just to keep from blacking out?
Not really. The space shuttle is in orbit at 5 miles/second about 8 1/2 minutes after liftoff, and it's maximum G forces are limited to 3 G's, something akin to a terrestrial roller coaster. If you listen during a launch, you can hear the commentator mention towards the end of ascent that the main engines are throttling back. They do that to avoid exceeding the 3 G limit when the external tank is almost empty. The Russian Soyuz has an even gentler ride, IIRC.
The suits the astronauts are wearing are pressure suits, not G suits. They don't do anything to counter G forces, they are only there for if the cabin has a depressurization. In fact, pre Challenger they stopped wearing the suits for a time and just went up in cloth flight suits.
The days of spaceflight being limited to fighter pilot types who can take 9 G's was over in the 70s. Most modern manned launchers are fairly easy rides to orbit.
Yep, that was it. You get a double boom because of the length of the orbiter (the longest supersonic vehicle there is, with the demise of the Concorde). There's a shock off the nose and one off the tail, and they are sufficiently far apart to hear two booms.
We heard it in Houston at 4:20 CST. A bunch of people at JSC wandered outside looking for it (although we all knew it would be next to impossible to view). Among those craning their necks looking was John Young, who commanded the first shuttle mission (and as an aside, been to the moon a couple of times). I wish I had my camera, it was priceless.
I did the same thing in college over 10 years ago (and by reading your site, it looks like we had the same folks helping us).
I distinctly remember being underneath the payload parachuting down in the countryside after its trip to the edge of space (our base station had gotten quite good at vectoring us to the landing site). When we picked it up, it was still very, very cold.
Pulling the film (no digitals then) camera out of the box, we rushed it to the 1 hour photo place. The pictures were breathtaking, to say the least. How many folks have snapshots showing black sky and the curvature of the earth from 20 miles?
The most amusing part was showing up in a university SUV at some farmer's door to ask permission to go onto the property "uhh, we've got a 25 pound box that parachuted onto your property we need to go get". We were very afraid someone would shoot it, since it made some noise and was covered in antennas.
They continued to refine the balloon projects, and built an entire lab and curriculum around them. While there's no earth shattering science coming out of the projects, the hands on engineering experience with hardware functioning in a real, demanding environment outside of a lab is priceless. Many of the students I worked with went on to careers with NASA and space contractors.
I've done research in academia and industry, and I currently work for the US government.
Having works reviewed by my agency (NASA) is always interesting. In academia, there is usually very little interference from the parent university (one of the basic tenets of tenure). The researchers opinion is never considered that of the university proper.
It doesn't work that way in government, the distinction between the researcher and the parent agency doesn't exist (although if it did we would probably get better research). A paper put out by a government lab is sometimes construed as government policy, with the ensuing political or legal fallout.
The last thing any senior administrator wants to deal with is a call from legislative affairs complaining about the conclusion of what was seemingly an obscure paper, or the lawyers from a company that was badmouthed in an environmental paper. I don't think these rules are active efforts to stifle information, it's simply folks trying to keep their agencies below the political radar (or by extension, department managers trying to keep their name from being attached to some problem that is showing up at agency headquarters). It's a shame really, but it's the way the world works.
Government employees are in an odd gray area - if you worked for a private company, you most definitely would not have a "right" to expressing your opinion in a company paper - they are paying you, and would fire you. Government employees have a bit more freedom, and their management struggles to define what opinions do and do not belong in government works.
If more companies in a set area went to a flexible schedule, I wonder how much that would fix traffic jams
The City of Houston thinks it will help alleviate traffic problems. It's actually city policy to encourage flex time for this reason, and this policy has specifically caused one of the (very large) aerospace contractors I work with to implement a generous flex time policy.
If none of the antannae deployed then how can they destroy it?
The antennas that didn't deploy are part of the payload (direct broadcast television). Most satellites use a different, low bandwidth omnidirectional antenna for commanding and engineering data. So the satellite is basically alive, but without the payload antennas deployed (or the solar arrays, which doesn't leave enough power to run the payload) it's not usable for anything (except maybe for some engineering tests since it's now essentially disposable).
I'd have thought that the worst spacecraft failure would be one that directly resulted in loss of life, like that rocket that veered off course and flew into a town a few years ago.
A few other folks have pointed out that the Long March failure was (obviously) a lot worse. I think the author of the piece was making a distinction between a launch vehicle failure (what you have when a rocket flies into a village) and a spacecraft failure (the satellite is put into orbit by the launcher, but it doesn't work). This piece was in Aviation Week and Space Technology, which is considered the leading publication in the aerospace industry. The normal readership of AvWeek would make that same distinction.
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I've been to one, most of the party attendees are not upper management. It's part of the Space Flight Awareness award program. To quote the site:
SFA Honoree
This award is one of the highest presented to NASA and industry and is for first-level management and below. This award is presented to employees for their dedication to quality work and flight safety. To qualify, the individuals must have contributed beyond their normal work requirements to achieve significant impact on attaining a particular human space flight program goal; contributed to a major cost savings; been instrumental in developing modification to hardware, software, or materials that increase reliability, efficiency, or performance; assisted in operational improvements; or been a key player in developing a beneficial process improvement.
Well stated.
Full disclosure. I'm a low level NASA manager. I also have been a recipient of the award in question (it's called the Space Flight Awareness, or SFA). I won it years ago when I was a line engineer for a contractor (managers usually cannot get these awards).
The article is unfairly one sided. NASA overall has very little "morale money", which is used to reward outstanding employees or significant contributions - things that are commonplace in the private sector. When we have an office party, or I bring in dinner for my guys that have to work on Christmas, it's out of my pocket. All my colleagues do the same. I can assure you that the sum total of this across the agency is a lot more than what the SFAs cost.
They also made it out like some extravagant party - it really isn't. They pay for the flight (you have to cover your spouse, though), get you a hotel at the Day's Inn Cocoa Beach (or similar) for a few days, they drive you around on a tour, and feed you a few nice meals and let you meet some astronauts and agency officials.
The reason why most of the recipients are contractors is that most of NASA employees are contractors. The way most contracts are billed with NASA is cost plus, and employee expenses (including the small awards that are given out) are billed back to the government. The contractors also do spend on some other awards out of their profits (which are relatively small on NASA contracts, in all fairness).
While you may have some negative opinions about how well NASA is doing as an agency, we've got a lot of really outstanding line employees who do great work, and in any enterprise you need to reward that. When I got my SFA, I was 28 years old and had spent a year of 60+ hour weeks getting an avionics package on the Space Station working. I didn't get paid overtime for that...the SFA was a nice token from my management. Another guy on the trip won his for finding a problem that saved the government $12 million dollars. As a percentage of the overall workforce, very few people ever win this award (where I work, maybe 1 out of 50 has gotten this in the last 10 years, you have to do something exceptional). It's definitely worth the tax dollars that are spent on it - and I hope other federal agencies are using my tax dollars in similar ways.
Does any disaster involving space travel and rockets have a 4 minute window for people to escape?
In the accidents this system is designed to protect for, it can. This really is not to help out a crew that is strapped into a launch system during terminal count. In that case, the launch abort system is fired and the whole capsule is carried away rapidly. This is actually what happened during Soyuz T-10-1 when it caught fire (link here).
Where the pad escape system really comes in is those days and hours before launch when ground crews and the maybe the flight crew itself is out at the pad doing launch prep and some sort of accident occurs, such as a fire. I've done work out on the shuttle pads, they are really industrial areas, like a petrochem plant. Getting out in a hurry is tricky business, involving riding elevators, finding your way through the pad structure itself (which has hatches) and making your way to the ground. This system and the current zip line system is designed to get workers off rapidly if there is an emergency, especially before the crew is strapped in but after the upper stage is fueled.
In other words, NASA didn't want to deal with new ideas, and have to deal with the work associated with it, or overseeing the work in others. Everything is risky when you don't want to bother.
That's too bad. I work for NASA...Draper Labs proposed doing the same thing with the International Space Station and we tried it out on the vehicle. Worked like a charm, desaturated the Control Moment Gyros and executed a 90 degree yaw maneuver to boot, no propellant used. Remarkable. It was a great tool to add to our bag of tricks.
Draper even produced a video of it available here
Beyond everything that you nicely outline, when it comes to the USAJobs site they won't be able to "shrug it off" because of the connection to the government.
USAJobs was built under federal contract, and the government was slowly moving to requiring every federal position be applied for through USAJobs. That includes internal promotions, executives, new-hires...basically everyone who is not elected or an appointee. A lot of fairly high ranking career civil servants are in that database.
I'm guessing the government is going to be very harsh on this, as they typically are when a contractor screws up IT security.
BTW, most federal employees and managers hate USAJobs, since you are not allowed to interview anyone unless the computer ranks them highly when it runs it's resume search algorithm. I can't interview someone unless the computer spits it out. Potential hires (and internal promotions) have to figure out how to "fake out" the search algorithm so their resume gets through. I'd love to see it go away.
Reading the text of the actual report here the phrase used by the report is "preflight" alcohol use and "flight safety". It's not specific to a shuttle mission.
Keep in mind that astronauts do most of their "flying" in T-38's (two seaters that are often likened to "astronaut taxis"). It's quite possible that the specific incidents revolve around T-38 use. The image of an astronaut strapping into the shuttle after violating alcohol policy (which is much tighter on aircraft than cars) is almost unbelievable. It is not as much of a stretch to image someone who closed down a bar on Cocoa Beach the night before being tossed into the back seat of a T-38 at 8 AM to get them home with a sober pilot up front. Of course, this is still a safety risk (what if you have to eject?) and a violation of policy. There would be fewer people around that would notice as well since now you are talking about a couple of astronauts and maybe some airfield guys instead of the entire world watching.
I'm not saying that was what happened, but probably there has not been enough detail released to make a real judgment on what really went on (other than the local on-scene leadership overruled objections by flight surgeons and other astronauts on safety, which is I believe was the point the report was trying to get to).
I fear however that the innovation and creative problem solving that has defined Scaled to date is no longer going to continue.
I'm not sure it's quite as bad as you fear, it's possible that Northrup-Grumman will continue in that tradition.
The challenge with these very small, innovative space companies is that their model (which is a small group of really smart guys working very hard without a lot of support overhead) can only scale up so far. At some point the products they are creating get complex enough where you hit critical mass and start needing groups to specialize in things like analysis, integration, customer support, systems integration, etc.
This is what large aerospace companies are good at. You might call this a bloated support structure, but it's the only way that the industry has found to develop really big, complex, and profitable aircraft and spacecraft (which is what a passenger ship to LEO would be). They haven't yet found a way to build a high complexity, profitable product like a Boeing 777 airliner or a Boeing 702 satellite with a small shop.
Orbital Sciences, for example, has evolved from a small company with a few neat ideas back in the 80's (in particular, the air launched Pegasus) into a major player in the aerospace world, and it is structured like Boeing, Northrup, and LockMart today.
I consider this a positive evolution of the great ideas Scaled Composites has demonstrated into something that can be built and be a commercial success.
Why is he not still an aerospace engineer?
Is he actually looking for employment in aerospace? From reading the article, it appears he left aerospace engineering after bouncing around to go into computer sales. It doesn't say he was forced out of aerospace or laid off - he's currently unemployed after being forced to resign as the director of a community service organization. More info here.
I'm quite sure he could find a position if he wanted one (although he's going to need to get out of Maine). I spent five minutes looking and I found this opening doing flight crew equipment for Hamilton Sundstrand, the contractor that manufactures space suits and other crew aids for NASA. Knowing the industry, my guess would be that the position pays between $70,000-$90,000 (in Houston, which is a fairly cheap place to live).
NASA actually does buy some parts on eBay (although I wouldn't say it's a lot of them). When systems get old, you have a choice between paying to design a replacement board with modern components for a legacy system or digging up older parts. Often times the older parts are going to be the cheaper solution, and the advent of eBay has made them a lot easier to find.
0 CE2DF1739F931A25756C0A9649C8B63
The NY Times had an article on this a few years ago: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A
Walk to the subway station, and there are about 5 vendors who will happily sell you pirated version of any music CD, most DVDs, and almost any software for $5.
I actually put that to the test last time I was in Moscow. Was in one of the high end shopping districts near Red Square and walked up to one of the multitudes of CD street vendors. Asked her if she had Borat (which had been released to theaters only a couple of weeks before, and is actually banned in Russia).
Yup, had it. Just under the table. Commanded a premium price though, I seem to remember it was around 300 rubles (about $10).
Now, who do you wanted designing a NASA space vehicle?
As an engineer that is involved in hiring for NASA, I want an element of both. While course content and (to a lesser degree) GPA are important, I really need people who are able to quickly learn new things and work with people. Many of the problems we have are unique and you'd never be exposed to them in school. In a lot of cases even new guys get tasks that require a lot of digging, thinking, and research to solve.
It's challenging to get a new hire to stop thinking in terms of rigid sets of problems on a short (no longer than a semester) timetable which they solve largely by themselves. They need to adjust to understanding how to work on projects that no one person may understand, involve chasing some dead ends, and bring together ideas and work from several people or organizations.
As the article puts it:
"The best way to achieve that goal is to change the classroom from a lecture hall dominated by a "sage on stage" to smaller social groups that allow students to creatively participate in the research themselves, he said."
Right on. This sort of experience currently isn't a given when someone walks into your office for an interview with a BS in engineering. We end up looking for folks that got this experience in extracurriculars, usually through a leadership role in a project like the solar cars or small satellites that a lot of universities are participating in.
Actually filmed on the Space Station. Between this ad and the steaming cup in Times Square, I'm guessing that their ad budget is pretty hefty...
= cup%20noodle%20noodles%20nissin%20CM%20commercial% 20japan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntg2D4vUil8&search
If you've ever seen TV coverage of a Progress or Soyuz docking to the International Space Station, you've probably seen the ubiquitous black and white docking camera video with data overlayed on it as the vehicle approached the docking target.
1
Unfortunately, this television signal was only within the Russian Segment, and could only be downlinked through Russian communication assets over Russian ground sites. That limited the video to around 10 minutes each orbit, and required the docking to physically occur over Russia.
The US segment downlinks television via the Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS), which have more or less worldwide coverage. But the US segment and Russian Segment systems used incompatible video standards and weren't physically connected.
Yup, two video systems that cost tens of millions to develop, and they can't talk to each other. Classic "square peg, round hole" problem.
So we devised a setup where the crew ran a cable from the Russian Segment TV system into an IBM A31p laptop which converts the Russian SECAM signal to US NTSC video. The output from the laptop is connected to another cable strung down the stack into the US video system and downlinked via TDRS. Voila, greatly increased video coverage thanks to a lowly Thinkpad.
Details of this being tested can be found here: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=1879
That's been known for years and they haven't dared fix it.
In all fairness that's a software requirement (or lack of one) that the shuttle flight software group does not have control of. As has been rehashed several times on slashdot, the shuttle program early on took the savings from not building that capability into the ground and flight software (it's not quite as simple as it seems). It only became a problem recently when it restricted certain launch windows, and now the shuttle program is paying to add it in.
That sort of rigidity makes their methodology totally useless for software outside NASA.
As you say, it's totally useless for non-life critical systems. However, outside of NASA I know of DOD applications such ballistic missile guidance are equally as rigid.
Give me our full-featured, buggy software over nothing any day
As someone who has depended on NASA flight software, I'd rather sacrifice features for bug free code. That's a basic difference between consumer software and mission critical software.
I suspect it's also useless to the other groups in NASA. Do you actually know that the Mars Rover software was written in this manner?
No other group at NASA writes flight software like this, because Shuttle is the only man rated launch vehicle. Orion will be similar (and it's software is being written by the same people). Other flight software at NASA is not this extreme, but there is a NASA software development standard for all flight software and it's still pretty rigid compared to consumer software.
They did everything they intended to accomplish the rovers and more. I'm just surprised they decided to upload the updates to both of them instead of just one of them.
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They may have done it that way because it may not possible for their mission support software on the ground to handle two different versions of flight software on Mars.
In any event, NASA's flight software development process is extremely rigorous, up to and including an Independent Verification and Validation center in West Virginia which independently evaluates all NASA flight software (http://www.ivv.nasa.gov/). It's not like it's a beta version of code being sent to the Rovers - the likelihood of finding a bug in the code that escaped testing was sufficiently low to justify uplinking to both rovers.
If anyone wants some light holiday reading, you can check out NASA's software engineering requirements at: http://nodis3.gsfc.nasa.gov/displayDir.cfm?t=NPR&
Why does Nasa refer to this as "revised flight software" these rovers don't fly
It's just a standard term. At NASA, "flight" software is mission software which executes within a spacecraft computer. "Ground" software usually refers to that which is used for spacecraft control/ground support (the software in the control center on Earth).
More launches != more effective
Agreed. Number of launches is not necessarily a good indicator of overall health of a nation's space program.
For a variety of reasons (some related to how cheaply and reliably they can launch), Russian satellites tend to be designed for shorter lifetimes than their western counterparts. For example, the article cited Glonass satellites. A Glonass vehicle has a design lifetime of 3 years, while the American GPS system has a satellite lifetime of ~ 10 years. The Russians need to launch more often to maintain the constellation.
Does that mean that either program is healthier than the other? No. It just means the Russians chose to design a constellation with a cheaper satellite that requires replenishment more often instead of one with a more durable (and expensive) spacecraft that doesn't require as many launches. One philosophy isn't better than the other, each side chose the one that best fit their design requirements and the resources they had at their disposal.
Also, wouldn't passengers need to be in really good health to endure such a journey, and would they need to wear flight suits like fighter pilots just to keep from blacking out?
Not really. The space shuttle is in orbit at 5 miles/second about 8 1/2 minutes after liftoff, and it's maximum G forces are limited to 3 G's, something akin to a terrestrial roller coaster. If you listen during a launch, you can hear the commentator mention towards the end of ascent that the main engines are throttling back. They do that to avoid exceeding the 3 G limit when the external tank is almost empty. The Russian Soyuz has an even gentler ride, IIRC.
The suits the astronauts are wearing are pressure suits, not G suits. They don't do anything to counter G forces, they are only there for if the cabin has a depressurization. In fact, pre Challenger they stopped wearing the suits for a time and just went up in cloth flight suits.
The days of spaceflight being limited to fighter pilot types who can take 9 G's was over in the 70s. Most modern manned launchers are fairly easy rides to orbit.
Aha, I stand corrected. And built by the same company (Rockwell) no less.
Yep, that was it. You get a double boom because of the length of the orbiter (the longest supersonic vehicle there is, with the demise of the Concorde). There's a shock off the nose and one off the tail, and they are sufficiently far apart to hear two booms.
We heard it in Houston at 4:20 CST. A bunch of people at JSC wandered outside looking for it (although we all knew it would be next to impossible to view). Among those craning their necks looking was John Young, who commanded the first shuttle mission (and as an aside, been to the moon a couple of times). I wish I had my camera, it was priceless.
I did the same thing in college over 10 years ago (and by reading your site, it looks like we had the same folks helping us).
I distinctly remember being underneath the payload parachuting down in the countryside after its trip to the edge of space (our base station had gotten quite good at vectoring us to the landing site). When we picked it up, it was still very, very cold.
Pulling the film (no digitals then) camera out of the box, we rushed it to the 1 hour photo place. The pictures were breathtaking, to say the least. How many folks have snapshots showing black sky and the curvature of the earth from 20 miles?
The most amusing part was showing up in a university SUV at some farmer's door to ask permission to go onto the property "uhh, we've got a 25 pound box that parachuted onto your property we need to go get". We were very afraid someone would shoot it, since it made some noise and was covered in antennas.
They continued to refine the balloon projects, and built an entire lab and curriculum around them. While there's no earth shattering science coming out of the projects, the hands on engineering experience with hardware functioning in a real, demanding environment outside of a lab is priceless. Many of the students I worked with went on to careers with NASA and space contractors.
I've done research in academia and industry, and I currently work for the US government.
Having works reviewed by my agency (NASA) is always interesting. In academia, there is usually very little interference from the parent university (one of the basic tenets of tenure). The researchers opinion is never considered that of the university proper.
It doesn't work that way in government, the distinction between the researcher and the parent agency doesn't exist (although if it did we would probably get better research). A paper put out by a government lab is sometimes construed as government policy, with the ensuing political or legal fallout.
The last thing any senior administrator wants to deal with is a call from legislative affairs complaining about the conclusion of what was seemingly an obscure paper, or the lawyers from a company that was badmouthed in an environmental paper. I don't think these rules are active efforts to stifle information, it's simply folks trying to keep their agencies below the political radar (or by extension, department managers trying to keep their name from being attached to some problem that is showing up at agency headquarters). It's a shame really, but it's the way the world works.
Government employees are in an odd gray area - if you worked for a private company, you most definitely would not have a "right" to expressing your opinion in a company paper - they are paying you, and would fire you. Government employees have a bit more freedom, and their management struggles to define what opinions do and do not belong in government works.
If more companies in a set area went to a flexible schedule, I wonder how much that would fix traffic jams
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The City of Houston thinks it will help alleviate traffic problems. It's actually city policy to encourage flex time for this reason, and this policy has specifically caused one of the (very large) aerospace contractors I work with to implement a generous flex time policy.
http://www.houstontx.gov/flexworks/flexinthecity/
If none of the antannae deployed then how can they destroy it?
The antennas that didn't deploy are part of the payload (direct broadcast television). Most satellites use a different, low bandwidth omnidirectional antenna for commanding and engineering data. So the satellite is basically alive, but without the payload antennas deployed (or the solar arrays, which doesn't leave enough power to run the payload) it's not usable for anything (except maybe for some engineering tests since it's now essentially disposable).
I'd have thought that the worst spacecraft failure would be one that directly resulted in loss of life, like that rocket that veered off course and flew into a town a few years ago.
A few other folks have pointed out that the Long March failure was (obviously) a lot worse. I think the author of the piece was making a distinction between a launch vehicle failure (what you have when a rocket flies into a village) and a spacecraft failure (the satellite is put into orbit by the launcher, but it doesn't work). This piece was in Aviation Week and Space Technology, which is considered the leading publication in the aerospace industry. The normal readership of AvWeek would make that same distinction.