If most of the mission is making sure that the shuttle they sent up can land safely (at least that's the impression we get from the news coverage)
That's the problem...what the media focuses on and what the purpose of most of the mission is are entirely different things. Sure, many of the goals (and indeed, the highest priority goals) of this particular flight is to help establish on orbit inspection and repair techniques, but there are a lot of other things.
In particular, within NASA I think the most significant part of this mission (besides the tank repairs and the on orbit inspection techniques) is the return of ISS to a three person crew. Even more significant, that third crew member is an European Space Agency astronaut and the orbiter dropped off a major European payload rack (MELFI, which is a giant low temperature freezer).
Unfortunately, that really doesn't come up in the coverage, it's very much geared towards "so, what happened today that could have killed the crew". The spin of "constant danger" the press puts on the mission is what gets people to watch, not the fact that we just dropped off a German guy on the Space Station. The press conferences and coverage are dominated by what is almost excruciatingly detailed discussions of what are in reality very minor problems. It's what gets people to watch.
I've always felt that especially in fields like engineering and computer support or application development, you can get by with very minimal management if you make it a point to try to hire people who are comfortable/capable working with little direction.
I tend to agree with you, but I've definitely seen it fail. I work in government (NASA), and with a pretty crappy budget situation in the 90's, the ratio of engineers/management in an org I used to work for slowly creeped up. The engineers were producing stuff and knew their jobs, so losing them in the short term hurt, but it was easy to consolidate their management.
That is, until a year or two went by. Lower management had so many employees they'd barely know what they were doing. Those engineers were very smart people and kept busy doing brilliant work, but often it was on things that, in the big picture, wasn't something we should have been expending labor on.
Other departments sapped our labor, by asking individuals (instead of their management) if they could "give us some help with this". A few hours here, a few days there, pretty soon we can't map our budget to what we are actually producing but yet everyone seems overworked because of the "extras" that should have been tasked through a request of their management.
Worse yet, it caused a lot of things that need to get done for long term health of an organization to fall by the wayside, like training, career development, and succession planning. Bob the engineer may prefer to work on his new gadget, and could care less that if he were hit by a bus the following morning there's nobody around to support that critical piece of software. He never trained a backup.
Or the hot new engineer that is a workaholic. Sometimes people actually need to be told to go home/take a vacation, lest they burn themselves out in a couple of years (often causing them to quit or transforming them into a bitter employee).
Anyways, it's pretty easy to find management needless because of the bad ones, but good management will always leverage their employees into producing more and being happy while they do it.
In theory you could move the space station, in practice you could not. The space station isn't really designed to be maneuvered in real time by the crew (or the ground, for that matter). Attitude maneuvers can be accomplished fairly quickly (less than an hour if you really had to), but translational maneuvers (which would be required to go grab an astronaut) take in excess of a day to put together and execute. Space station normally bores holes in the sky, so it that capability was never designed in (like it was on the orbiter or Soyuz). The orbiter can't undock quickly enough to go get them, either - at least not without compromising the safety of the rest of the crew and the vehicles themselves.
Which is the whole reason why SAFER was developed. Back in the shuttle-only days, going and grabbing the lost crew member on a double tether failure was a viable option, today it isn't.
Here's your answer (for what's it's worth, I work for NASA).
The shuttle airlock is in the cargo bay at the base of the docking system. It's literally the tunnel between the vehicles. In order to go out the shuttle airlock, the hatches must be closed between the vehicles and both crews have to go back to their "home" spacecraft (since otherwise they'd be isolated from their rides home). Obviously we don't want the entire shuttle crew hanging out all day in the orbiter when there is work to do on ISS. Additionally, the folks doing most of the robotic arm work in ISS are actually shuttle crew members (since they can be trained on flight specific tasks very close to the mission) and they need to be able to go between the vehicles.
Quest doesn't suffer from this problem since it's hanging off the side. Additionally, depressurizing the shuttle airlock sometime introduces some control system challenges because it loses it's rigidity somewhat and it's part of the structural backbone of the vehicle, so that's nice to avoid.
That being said, the capability remains to go out the shuttle airlock if need be.
Even if they didn't have the money to maintain 2 concurrent launch systems, they could have released the plans to private industry, so that these "tried and true" vehicles could be put to commercial use.
A lot of the older systems did make it to private industry (although that's an odd way of putting it, NASA didn't build rockets, they contracted Lockheed, Martin Marietta, etc. to do it for them - private industry already had the plans - they developed them).
Most of the commercial American heavy launch vehicles (Boeing Delta, Lockheed-Martin Atlas) have their early roots in the NASA and military space and missile programs in the early 60's. In fact, the government has a vested interest in commerical exploitation of launch vehicles, since the more that are built, the lower the unit cost for government launches.
Now, if you are talking about the Saturn V...there simply was not a commercially viable market for a launcher of that size in the 1970s. If there was one, industry would have been free to exploit it. Even the government (traditionally the customer for very heavy launchers, even today) never used the Saturn V outside of the Apollo and Skylab launches. While many bemoan the fact that the infrastructure for the Saturn V was not maintained, the decision was made that it was not of enough national significance to do so when Congress and the Executive branch (not NASA) made the decision to shut down that program.
Why not simply turn over access to "deep space" to private enterprise? Asteroid belt mining is a staple of SF - is there a real commercial incentive today or do we have to wait till ol' Mother Earth runs out of diggable dirt-based useful stuff first?
If there was a commercial incentive, it would be done. There is no "access" to deep space to turn over to free enterprise - they are free to launch stuff into deep space and mine the asteroids all they want if they choose to. Sure, a license is required, but licensing is essentially demonstrating to the government that you won't endanger the public or cause an international incident. Governments appear to have a monopoly on deep space launches only because there is currently no profit to be made, so they're the only ones doing it.
Well, for what it is worth you can consider me a friend from JSC. While the mission isn't "officially" on, it's considered to be almost certain around here. I'm not sure about the White House, but congressional pressure to fly this mission is considerable.
Ironically enough, the Constellation program manager (Jeff Hanley) cut his teeth on Hubble as a Payloads officer in Mission Control. When the original SM4 mission was cancelled, he posted this to sci.astro.hubble.
NASA has been reallocating a lot of funding from science and aeronautics to "exploration". The official goal is a manned moon landing (by 2018).
That being said, the Hubble servicing mission is still in the cards and long lead work is being performed to support it. It's almost certain it will be flown. In fact, the NASA web page for servicing mission 4 was updated just a little over a week ago.
Officially, Sean O'Keefe (the former NASA admistrator) dropped the last Hubble servicing mission from the Space Shuttle manifest because of the risk involved (Hubble was the only non-ISS mission left, leaving no option to fix the orbiter with the help of ISS assets or possibly "holing up" in the ISS while a rescue mission was processed). I'm really oversimplifying it, but essentially that's the reason.
Of course, I'm fairly certain Sean O'Keefe was the only individual within NASA that thought this was too great of a risk. That includes the astronauts who would actually strap themselves to the orbiter stack. Everyone at NASA loves Hubble. O'Keefe may have been playing politics to get Congress to "order" the mission, thus relieving NASA of the risk decision.
O'Keefe is gone now, however, and the new administrator (Mike Griffin) has been more or less been in favor of servicing Hubble again.
Anyways, while the flight isn't officially on the books it's more or less common knowledge around here there is going to be a servicing mission in 2008 or so. Long lead work is being done on the flight. As long as something drastic doesn't happen to the shuttle program that causes it to shut down, that mission is going to be flown. Hubble is NASA's crown jewel.
Government control of this sort of information can often be very poor, because there are not business or contractual ramifications.
I work for the federal government, and I often travel overseas with a government owned laptop. That laptop usually has export controlled (but unclassified) information on it.
Whenever I do this I have to fill out many forms documenting exactly what is on that laptop. When I asked why, it was "so we know what was on it if you loose it - that would technically be an export, and we need to document it".
OK - so I point out that we ought to encrypt the data (which is quite easy) so we don't even have to bother with that and not worry about it being exported.
Blank stare, and then a "Please just fill out the forms". I could mail the laptop to China and they probably wouldn't care, as long as the SF8574 is on file at the export control office.
Now, on the other hand I know for a fact that if one of our contractors would lose that same data, there would be hell to pay - not from the government directly, but his own company which has been penalized heavily on other contracts for mishandling information. They have built a culture of sensitivity to information that should be protected. In the government, I really only detect that when dealing with classified data (which can have big time personal ramifications if mishandled).
When you pool resources you get things like the ISS. At this point in that project can we really say we haved saved money by doing it the international way? ?
As a NASA employee who has worked on ISS, no.
All the usual criticism of ISS aside, there are a few things that the cooperation with Russia enabled. Politically it made ISS much more viable as a program (frankly, it wouldn't be around without it) and an easier "sell" to congress. The alternate access with Soyuz has had obvious benefits with the orbiter problems. Personally, I enjoy working with my Russian counterparts very much and I love traveling there.
But cheaper? No way. It takes 10 times as long to solve even the most basic problems. With the Russians, the language barrier is significant (ever try to work out a complex technical problem through an interpreter?). The Europeans and Japanese communicate much faster since they have excellent English skills, but their overall lack of experience with manned spaceflight programs offset that advantage. Time zone differences are significant (all of our meetings must be extremely early in the morning for us and late in the afternoon for them). We spend a ton of money on international travel (there is no substitute for face to face meetings).
There is a lot of overhead associated with export control since anything associated with aerospace may be classified as a munition. Stuff that is classified can't be shared, period.
The Russians are so strapped for cash they generally won't give up documents/engineering support without a contract (and payment).
There is no "chief engineer". Whenever the crap hits the fan, there is no person at the top who can make a final decision (as would be the case in a program managed by, say, the Air Force). Many engineering problems become international negotiations with politics in the mix. When Dennis Tito paid for his Soyuz trip a number of years ago, the US laboratory had a massive systems failure several days before his launch. Some members of Russian management thought (due to the poor way NASA handled his flight) it was some sort of staged event and basically said they were going to launch him no matter what.
I'm sure many of you have international project success stories. For a large aerospace program, however, I think the only model that is really cost effective is having an international partner supply a subsytem as a "black box" and in a role subordinate to a overall integrator. That worked for the FGB module of ISS (which was procured from Krunichev under subcontract, on time, on budget). Partnership is definitely not cheaper.
I don't know if it means anything, but one of my former coworkers left a (very good) NASA engineering position to get his MBA from Columbia. He'd been with NASA for about 10 years, and was looking to shift out of engineering for a change. He certainly came from a background that was a lot different and much more technically oriented than almost all of his classmates.
Google just hired him to do business development. Unlike the stories I hear about how difficult it is to get hired there, he did very little work to get the position except submit a resume - in fact, it was more like they were actively looking for someone like him.
Anyways, perhaps that's some sort of indicator of the MBA types Google is recruiting.
Even better, it's online. A good chunk of the Apollo Guidance Computer documentation (including the assembly source code to Collossus 249, which was the guidance computer program) is available here.
John has been very generous with his code throughout the years and I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this happen (unless he has outside investors that would object)
Or the government. I'm certain the software is classified as a munition under ITAR(International Trade in Arms Regulation). He'd require an export license to make it available. I'm not entirely sure he could even get one, the powers that be have become extremely picky about what they allow.
In general, I agree with everything you've got down except one thing....
and when you add in that everything's going to be insured, it makes finantial sense.
You sure about that? The US government normally does not insure launches. It's self insured and eats the cost of failures.
Even private entities do not always insure launches, since the premium is a good chunk of replacement cost (sometimes as high as 25%). A new launcher may not even be able to secure insurance, which is why I suspect SpaceX pursued government customers initially (DARPA is interested in funding development and swallowing the cost of failure to build national launch assets, while a commercial customer would not be).
Oh, and the Hubble's software won't let it be pointed anywhere near the Moon (or Sun, or Earth) without closing the "lens cap" (sun shield), so as to avoid burning out extremely sensitive instruments.
Splitting hairs here on an informative post, but it can be pointed at the moon. They recently started doing a few lunar observations with Hubble, as reported here.
The resolution isn't great enough to see Apollo artifacts, however.
The parent is right, he's a hack. This kid's email is being blown way out of proportion here. A 24 year old with a degree in journalism would be laughed out of my office had he those comments to me, I don't care who appointed him. That's true of at least 99% of my coworkers.
His email was in regards to a web site for kids being made by a contractor that he must be the government monitor for. My guess that his management gave him that to do because as a new guy, it was something where if he screwed up it wouldn't cause too many problems. Like you do with the new guy anywhere else. Although by landing in the NY times they apparently failed in their objective - I'm certain there were a few heart attacks when this story rolled out.
It's not some systematic, sinister work by the administration - it's a kid who pulled some strings to get his first job, and you are witnessing him screwing up. Big time.
It appears NASA & the shuttle are not the only ways for the government to launch satellites anymore
Ever hear of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, or Orbital Sciences? The government hasn't launched any major satellite besides ISS on the Shuttle for a decade. Satellite launches are contracted out.
Excellent analysis. I agree with you completely - and I would characterize my experience more as an exception than typical of NASA as a whole (I've worked at a couple of centers).
Yeah, get down on your knees and thank God you aren't freakin' NASA.
I work for NASA, and the IT on our office systems (NOT the production/mission critical stuff, thank God) is the worst thing I've ever seen.
My workgroup of 20 engineers has a shared server space of...300 Megabytes (that's Mega, with an "M"). Our actual needs are around 10 Gigabytes.
So...about 20 Gigs of spare drive space on one guys machine has gotten shared out and is now the de-facto server. It gets backed up every week or so to another machine, and maybe monthly DVD backups get burned.
This is a terrible solution, and I know darn well that the 2 or 3 man-hours a week it's taking to maintain this thing costs a hell of a lot more than giving us the correct server space we need. Let's not even mention how much it will cost if we screw up and lose something. But...IT is funded seperately, and they could care less how much labor we waste making up for their inadequate infrastructure (a big problem in any government org is accounting for wasted labor like this).
I won't even talk about the "improvements" to the mail server, which resulted in day long email crash to several thousand users yesterday.
Engineers salaries:management salaries is probably higher on NASA programs than about anywhere.
While working level engineers who work directly for NASA are paid fairly competitively, government rules cap salaries of management. Everything is defined by the federal payscales, available here
An engineer with 10 years of experience is typically a GS-13. In Houston, for example, he's making somewhere around $90,000/year. His immediate manager is probably a GS-14 making around $105k, and that guy's boss is probably a GS-15 who makes around $130k. The numbers vary depending on years in service. Most astronauts are falling into these ranges as well.
Griffin, as the head of NASA, is paid on the SES (Senior Executive Service) scale, which caps out at $162,000. That's here.
Contractor management is a little better (the CEOs of the likes of Boeing and Lockheed can pull in over $10 million annually with bonuses and stock), but it's very unusual to run into a NASA contractor (manager or otherwise) making more than $200,000/year.
I work for NASA, and I guess I somewhat agree with the parent.
I do conferences from time to time (although I'm not a professional researcher like Dr. Hansen), and the restrictions the parent talks about apply to me as well. I cannot present anything without agency approval, because as an employee speaking in a professional capacity, I'm representing NASA and the federal government. The perception of our material seems to be different - our conclusions are often construed to be those of those of NASA itself. The positions of university researchers are almost never construed to be the institutional views of the university proper. The same would apply to mistakes/errors in that research.
Federal employees that do research are in a unique position compared to those that work for corporations or universities. Univerisity researches are protected by tenure, and can essentially voice any opinions they like. Corporate researchers generally can be fired for not towing the company line in public. Federal researchers really cannot be fired, but they certainly do not enjoy the protections of tenure (you may end up being moved to another job).
Also, there may be a deeper story with the comment about being muzzled after saying that he was going to vote for Kerry in 2004 during a speech. There are rules regarding what a federal employee can do during an election (the Hatch Act). If he was on duty (i.e., NASA paid for the trip to the conference or he charged the hours) that comment is definitely a no-no under federal law.
It's a lot easier to toss it overboard and forget about it than hang it outside. If you take it outside and toss it retrograde, it's not going to recontact ISS (which statistically is the satellite in the most danger from SuitSat, since they will be in similar orbits after separation).
There are no dedicated fixtures to attaching this to the outside of ISS, and the suit isn't certified to be outside for a long period of time - we haven't looked to see if something won't blow up, break lose, outgas, or otherwise cause general mayhem to the exterior of the vehicle.
And due to the ballistic coefficient, it's going to reenter fairly quickly (it's basically a balloon, they don't last long in orbit). Much of the uncertainty of orbital lifetime is due to the unknowns over how draggy the suit will be as well as solar effects on the atmosphere, it's not that we can't predict what's going to happen to it.
You are correct that LEO is not a vaccuum, and atmospheric drag is quite important at LEO altitudes. And you are also correct that Mach number is a lot more than just a convenient reference, it is central to many, many aerodynamic calculations.
That being said, the atmosphere at LEO altitudes isn't acting like a fluid...it's not dense enough. You aren't getting transonic/hypersonic effects in normal orbits. That begins to occur after atmospheric interface on the way downhill.
It's being referenced to the speed of sound at sea level of the standard atmosphere.
While you don't want to use that value in real aerodynamic calculations (technically, it's incorrect, which is your point), it's often used as a reference point since "mach 1" is a familiar value to people.
Slashdot Mirror
If most of the mission is making sure that the shuttle they sent up can land safely (at least that's the impression we get from the news coverage)
That's the problem...what the media focuses on and what the purpose of most of the mission is are entirely different things. Sure, many of the goals (and indeed, the highest priority goals) of this particular flight is to help establish on orbit inspection and repair techniques, but there are a lot of other things.
In particular, within NASA I think the most significant part of this mission (besides the tank repairs and the on orbit inspection techniques) is the return of ISS to a three person crew. Even more significant, that third crew member is an European Space Agency astronaut and the orbiter dropped off a major European payload rack (MELFI, which is a giant low temperature freezer).
Unfortunately, that really doesn't come up in the coverage, it's very much geared towards "so, what happened today that could have killed the crew". The spin of "constant danger" the press puts on the mission is what gets people to watch, not the fact that we just dropped off a German guy on the Space Station. The press conferences and coverage are dominated by what is almost excruciatingly detailed discussions of what are in reality very minor problems. It's what gets people to watch.
I've always felt that especially in fields like engineering and computer support or application development, you can get by with very minimal management if you make it a point to try to hire people who are comfortable/capable working with little direction.
I tend to agree with you, but I've definitely seen it fail. I work in government (NASA), and with a pretty crappy budget situation in the 90's, the ratio of engineers/management in an org I used to work for slowly creeped up. The engineers were producing stuff and knew their jobs, so losing them in the short term hurt, but it was easy to consolidate their management.
That is, until a year or two went by. Lower management had so many employees they'd barely know what they were doing. Those engineers were very smart people and kept busy doing brilliant work, but often it was on things that, in the big picture, wasn't something we should have been expending labor on.
Other departments sapped our labor, by asking individuals (instead of their management) if they could "give us some help with this". A few hours here, a few days there, pretty soon we can't map our budget to what we are actually producing but yet everyone seems overworked because of the "extras" that should have been tasked through a request of their management.
Worse yet, it caused a lot of things that need to get done for long term health of an organization to fall by the wayside, like training, career development, and succession planning. Bob the engineer may prefer to work on his new gadget, and could care less that if he were hit by a bus the following morning there's nobody around to support that critical piece of software. He never trained a backup.
Or the hot new engineer that is a workaholic. Sometimes people actually need to be told to go home/take a vacation, lest they burn themselves out in a couple of years (often causing them to quit or transforming them into a bitter employee).
Anyways, it's pretty easy to find management needless because of the bad ones, but good management will always leverage their employees into producing more and being happy while they do it.
In theory you could move the space station, in practice you could not. The space station isn't really designed to be maneuvered in real time by the crew (or the ground, for that matter). Attitude maneuvers can be accomplished fairly quickly (less than an hour if you really had to), but translational maneuvers (which would be required to go grab an astronaut) take in excess of a day to put together and execute. Space station normally bores holes in the sky, so it that capability was never designed in (like it was on the orbiter or Soyuz). The orbiter can't undock quickly enough to go get them, either - at least not without compromising the safety of the rest of the crew and the vehicles themselves.
Which is the whole reason why SAFER was developed. Back in the shuttle-only days, going and grabbing the lost crew member on a double tether failure was a viable option, today it isn't.
Here's your answer (for what's it's worth, I work for NASA).
The shuttle airlock is in the cargo bay at the base of the docking system. It's literally the tunnel between the vehicles. In order to go out the shuttle airlock, the hatches must be closed between the vehicles and both crews have to go back to their "home" spacecraft (since otherwise they'd be isolated from their rides home). Obviously we don't want the entire shuttle crew hanging out all day in the orbiter when there is work to do on ISS. Additionally, the folks doing most of the robotic arm work in ISS are actually shuttle crew members (since they can be trained on flight specific tasks very close to the mission) and they need to be able to go between the vehicles.
Quest doesn't suffer from this problem since it's hanging off the side. Additionally, depressurizing the shuttle airlock sometime introduces some control system challenges because it loses it's rigidity somewhat and it's part of the structural backbone of the vehicle, so that's nice to avoid.
That being said, the capability remains to go out the shuttle airlock if need be.
Even if they didn't have the money to maintain 2 concurrent launch systems, they could have released the plans to private industry, so that these "tried and true" vehicles could be put to commercial use.
A lot of the older systems did make it to private industry (although that's an odd way of putting it, NASA didn't build rockets, they contracted Lockheed, Martin Marietta, etc. to do it for them - private industry already had the plans - they developed them).
Most of the commercial American heavy launch vehicles (Boeing Delta, Lockheed-Martin Atlas) have their early roots in the NASA and military space and missile programs in the early 60's. In fact, the government has a vested interest in commerical exploitation of launch vehicles, since the more that are built, the lower the unit cost for government launches.
Now, if you are talking about the Saturn V...there simply was not a commercially viable market for a launcher of that size in the 1970s. If there was one, industry would have been free to exploit it. Even the government (traditionally the customer for very heavy launchers, even today) never used the Saturn V outside of the Apollo and Skylab launches. While many bemoan the fact that the infrastructure for the Saturn V was not maintained, the decision was made that it was not of enough national significance to do so when Congress and the Executive branch (not NASA) made the decision to shut down that program.
Why not simply turn over access to "deep space" to private enterprise? Asteroid belt mining is a staple of SF - is there a real commercial incentive today or do we have to wait till ol' Mother Earth runs out of diggable dirt-based useful stuff first?
If there was a commercial incentive, it would be done. There is no "access" to deep space to turn over to free enterprise - they are free to launch stuff into deep space and mine the asteroids all they want if they choose to. Sure, a license is required, but licensing is essentially demonstrating to the government that you won't endanger the public or cause an international incident. Governments appear to have a monopoly on deep space launches only because there is currently no profit to be made, so they're the only ones doing it.
Well, for what it is worth you can consider me a friend from JSC. While the mission isn't "officially" on, it's considered to be almost certain around here. I'm not sure about the White House, but congressional pressure to fly this mission is considerable.
Ironically enough, the Constellation program manager (Jeff Hanley) cut his teeth on Hubble as a Payloads officer in Mission Control. When the original SM4 mission was cancelled, he posted this
to sci.astro.hubble.
NASA has been reallocating a lot of funding from science and aeronautics to "exploration". The official goal is a manned moon landing (by 2018).
That being said, the Hubble servicing mission is still in the cards and long lead work is being performed to support it. It's almost certain it will be flown. In fact, the NASA web page for servicing mission 4 was updated just a little over a week ago.
I work for NASA on the manned programs.
Officially, Sean O'Keefe (the former NASA admistrator) dropped the last Hubble servicing mission from the Space Shuttle manifest because of the risk involved (Hubble was the only non-ISS mission left, leaving no option to fix the orbiter with the help of ISS assets or possibly "holing up" in the ISS while a rescue mission was processed). I'm really oversimplifying it, but essentially that's the reason.
Of course, I'm fairly certain Sean O'Keefe was the only individual within NASA that thought this was too great of a risk. That includes the astronauts who would actually strap themselves to the orbiter stack. Everyone at NASA loves Hubble. O'Keefe may have been playing politics to get Congress to "order" the mission, thus relieving NASA of the risk decision.
O'Keefe is gone now, however, and the new administrator (Mike Griffin) has been more or less been in favor of servicing Hubble again.
Anyways, while the flight isn't officially on the books it's more or less common knowledge around here there is going to be a servicing mission in 2008 or so. Long lead work is being done on the flight. As long as something drastic doesn't happen to the shuttle program that causes it to shut down, that mission is going to be flown. Hubble is NASA's crown jewel.
Government control of this sort of information can often be very poor, because there are not business or contractual ramifications.
I work for the federal government, and I often travel overseas with a government owned laptop. That laptop usually has export controlled (but unclassified) information on it.
Whenever I do this I have to fill out many forms documenting exactly what is on that laptop. When I asked why, it was "so we know what was on it if you loose it - that would technically be an export, and we need to document it".
OK - so I point out that we ought to encrypt the data (which is quite easy) so we don't even have to bother with that and not worry about it being exported.
Blank stare, and then a "Please just fill out the forms". I could mail the laptop to China and they probably wouldn't care, as long as the SF8574 is on file at the export control office.
Now, on the other hand I know for a fact that if one of our contractors would lose that same data, there would be hell to pay - not from the government directly, but his own company which has been penalized heavily on other contracts for mishandling information. They have built a culture of sensitivity to information that should be protected. In the government, I really only detect that when dealing with classified data (which can have big time personal ramifications if mishandled).
When you pool resources you get things like the ISS. At this point in that project can we really say we haved saved money by doing it the international way? ?
As a NASA employee who has worked on ISS, no.
All the usual criticism of ISS aside, there are a few things that the cooperation with Russia enabled. Politically it made ISS much more viable as a program (frankly, it wouldn't be around without it) and an easier "sell" to congress. The alternate access with Soyuz has had obvious benefits with the orbiter problems. Personally, I enjoy working with my Russian counterparts very much and I love traveling there.
But cheaper? No way. It takes 10 times as long to solve even the most basic problems. With the Russians, the language barrier is significant (ever try to work out a complex technical problem through an interpreter?). The Europeans and Japanese communicate much faster since they have excellent English skills, but their overall lack of experience with manned spaceflight programs offset that advantage. Time zone differences are significant (all of our meetings must be extremely early in the morning for us and late in the afternoon for them). We spend a ton of money on international travel (there is no substitute for face to face meetings).
There is a lot of overhead associated with export control since anything associated with aerospace may be classified as a munition. Stuff that is classified can't be shared, period.
The Russians are so strapped for cash they generally won't give up documents/engineering support without a contract (and payment).
There is no "chief engineer". Whenever the crap hits the fan, there is no person at the top who can make a final decision (as would be the case in a program managed by, say, the Air Force). Many engineering problems become international negotiations with politics in the mix. When Dennis Tito paid for his Soyuz trip a number of years ago, the US laboratory had a massive systems failure several days before his launch. Some members of Russian management thought (due to the poor way NASA handled his flight) it was some sort of staged event and basically said they were going to launch him no matter what.
I'm sure many of you have international project success stories. For a large aerospace program, however, I think the only model that is really cost effective is having an international partner supply a subsytem as a "black box" and in a role subordinate to a overall integrator. That worked for the FGB module of ISS (which was procured from Krunichev under subcontract, on time, on budget). Partnership is definitely not cheaper.
I don't know if it means anything, but one of my former coworkers left a (very good) NASA engineering position to get his MBA from Columbia. He'd been with NASA for about 10 years, and was looking to shift out of engineering for a change. He certainly came from a background that was a lot different and much more technically oriented than almost all of his classmates.
Google just hired him to do business development. Unlike the stories I hear about how difficult it is to get hired there, he did very little work to get the position except submit a resume - in fact, it was more like they were actively looking for someone like him.
Anyways, perhaps that's some sort of indicator of the MBA types Google is recruiting.
Even better, it's online. A good chunk of the Apollo Guidance Computer documentation (including the assembly source code to Collossus 249, which was the guidance computer program) is available here.
Fascinating stuff.
John has been very generous with his code throughout the years and I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this happen (unless he has outside investors that would object)
Or the government. I'm certain the software is classified as a munition under ITAR(International Trade in Arms Regulation). He'd require an export license to make it available. I'm not entirely sure he could even get one, the powers that be have become extremely picky about what they allow.
In general, I agree with everything you've got down except one thing....
and when you add in that everything's going to be insured, it makes finantial sense.
You sure about that? The US government normally does not insure launches. It's self insured and eats the cost of failures.
Even private entities do not always insure launches, since the premium is a good chunk of replacement cost (sometimes as high as 25%). A new launcher may not even be able to secure insurance, which is why I suspect SpaceX pursued government customers initially (DARPA is interested in funding development and swallowing the cost of failure to build national launch assets, while a commercial customer would not be).
Oh, and the Hubble's software won't let it be pointed anywhere near the Moon (or Sun, or Earth) without closing the "lens cap" (sun shield), so as to avoid burning out extremely sensitive instruments.
Splitting hairs here on an informative post, but it can be pointed at the moon. They recently started doing a few lunar observations with Hubble, as reported here.
The resolution isn't great enough to see Apollo artifacts, however.
Disclaimer: I work for NASA.
The parent is right, he's a hack. This kid's email is being blown way out of proportion here. A 24 year old with a degree in journalism would be laughed out of my office had he those comments to me, I don't care who appointed him. That's true of at least 99% of my coworkers.
His email was in regards to a web site for kids being made by a contractor that he must be the government monitor for. My guess that his management gave him that to do because as a new guy, it was something where if he screwed up it wouldn't cause too many problems. Like you do with the new guy anywhere else. Although by landing in the NY times they apparently failed in their objective - I'm certain there were a few heart attacks when this story rolled out.
It's not some systematic, sinister work by the administration - it's a kid who pulled some strings to get his first job, and you are witnessing him screwing up. Big time.
It appears NASA & the shuttle are not the only ways for the government to launch satellites anymore
Ever hear of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, or Orbital Sciences? The government hasn't launched any major satellite besides ISS on the Shuttle for a decade. Satellite launches are contracted out.
Excellent analysis. I agree with you completely - and I would characterize my experience more as an exception than typical of NASA as a whole (I've worked at a couple of centers).
Yeah, get down on your knees and thank God you aren't freakin' NASA.
I work for NASA, and the IT on our office systems (NOT the production/mission critical stuff, thank God) is the worst thing I've ever seen.
My workgroup of 20 engineers has a shared server space of...300 Megabytes (that's Mega, with an "M"). Our actual needs are around 10 Gigabytes.
So...about 20 Gigs of spare drive space on one guys machine has gotten shared out and is now the de-facto server. It gets backed up every week or so to another machine, and maybe monthly DVD backups get burned.
This is a terrible solution, and I know darn well that the 2 or 3 man-hours a week it's taking to maintain this thing costs a hell of a lot more than giving us the correct server space we need. Let's not even mention how much it will cost if we screw up and lose something. But...IT is funded seperately, and they could care less how much labor we waste making up for their inadequate infrastructure (a big problem in any government org is accounting for wasted labor like this).
I won't even talk about the "improvements" to the mail server, which resulted in day long email crash to several thousand users yesterday.
Engineers salaries:management salaries is probably higher on NASA programs than about anywhere.
While working level engineers who work directly for NASA are paid fairly competitively, government rules cap salaries of management. Everything is defined by the federal payscales, available here
An engineer with 10 years of experience is typically a GS-13. In Houston, for example, he's making somewhere around $90,000/year. His immediate manager is probably a GS-14 making around $105k, and that guy's boss is probably a GS-15 who makes around $130k. The numbers vary depending on years in service. Most astronauts are falling into these ranges as well.
Griffin, as the head of NASA, is paid on the SES (Senior Executive Service) scale, which caps out at $162,000. That's here.
Contractor management is a little better (the CEOs of the likes of Boeing and Lockheed can pull in over $10 million annually with bonuses and stock), but it's very unusual to run into a NASA contractor (manager or otherwise) making more than $200,000/year.
I work for NASA, and I guess I somewhat agree with the parent.
I do conferences from time to time (although I'm not a professional researcher like Dr. Hansen), and the restrictions the parent talks about apply to me as well. I cannot present anything without agency approval, because as an employee speaking in a professional capacity, I'm representing NASA and the federal government. The perception of our material seems to be different - our conclusions are often construed to be those of those of NASA itself. The positions of university researchers are almost never construed to be the institutional views of the university proper. The same would apply to mistakes/errors in that research.
Federal employees that do research are in a unique position compared to those that work for corporations or universities. Univerisity researches are protected by tenure, and can essentially voice any opinions they like. Corporate researchers generally can be fired for not towing the company line in public. Federal researchers really cannot be fired, but they certainly do not enjoy the protections of tenure (you may end up being moved to another job).
Also, there may be a deeper story with the comment about being muzzled after saying that he was going to vote for Kerry in 2004 during a speech. There are rules regarding what a federal employee can do during an election (the Hatch Act). If he was on duty (i.e., NASA paid for the trip to the conference or he charged the hours) that comment is definitely a no-no under federal law.
It's a lot easier to toss it overboard and forget about it than hang it outside. If you take it outside and toss it retrograde, it's not going to recontact ISS (which statistically is the satellite in the most danger from SuitSat, since they will be in similar orbits after separation).
There are no dedicated fixtures to attaching this to the outside of ISS, and the suit isn't certified to be outside for a long period of time - we haven't looked to see if something won't blow up, break lose, outgas, or otherwise cause general mayhem to the exterior of the vehicle.
And due to the ballistic coefficient, it's going to reenter fairly quickly (it's basically a balloon, they don't last long in orbit). Much of the uncertainty of orbital lifetime is due to the unknowns over how draggy the suit will be as well as solar effects on the atmosphere, it's not that we can't predict what's going to happen to it.
You are correct that LEO is not a vaccuum, and atmospheric drag is quite important at LEO altitudes. And you are also correct that Mach number is a lot more than just a convenient reference, it is central to many, many aerodynamic calculations.
That being said, the atmosphere at LEO altitudes isn't acting like a fluid...it's not dense enough. You aren't getting transonic/hypersonic effects in normal orbits. That begins to occur after atmospheric interface on the way downhill.
It's being referenced to the speed of sound at sea level of the standard atmosphere.
While you don't want to use that value in real aerodynamic calculations (technically, it's incorrect, which is your point), it's often used as a reference point since "mach 1" is a familiar value to people.