Theodore Gray has put together a surprisingly interesting site based on his wooden periodic table of the elements (that actually contains samples of the elements - except the ones that would kill the builder and maybe a few of the neighbors).
On the site he has a mathematica based app (he works at Wolfram) which will take a string of characters and attempt to construct it from element sybols.
Interesting, I guess I called it a "failure" because I'm looking at it from the engineering side (I'm a NASA engineer - looking through my paradigm "success" means the spacecraft itself worked as designed).
But overall, the engineering is just a tool to complete the mission, which is science (and clearly there is a lot of good science coming out of Genesis). Sometimes we need to be reminded....
Another variable is the entry angle. Genesis was *targeted* such that it would hit the edge of the earth's atmosphere and utilize it to bleed off almost all of its kinetic energy through friction. The parachutes were only designed to take care of braking it that last 200 mph or so.
Of course, they never deployed, so it essentially hit the ground at terminal velocity - basically the same as if you had just rolled it out of an aircraft at 50,000 feet.
No kidding...especially since they were built by the same contractor (Lockheed Martin Denver).
The failure of Genesis was tied to a badly designed placement of deceleration sensors, a design flaw which Stardust is apparently free from (but I'm sure there will still be some serious hand-wringing on the 15th).
I'm sort of splitting hairs here, but only the command link is secured on most NASA satellites. The telemetry back to the ground isn't necessarily encrypted (it isn't on the shuttle and ISS), although you'd definitely need to have some pretty expensive equipment and know-how to decode the carrier into anything useful (like voice and data). Then again, it's only fun because it's hard...
There's a few more details on how it works for ISS in a NASA training manual here. (It's a 6 Mb pdf, communications is section 4).
It actually can be legally very difficult to share information with foreign entities about how to fly things in space (even friendly ones). Under American law, a lot of space technology is considered "defense articles" and fall under the jurisdiction of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) laws.
Legally, JPL (or an engineer working for them) would need to make sure that they were not violating ITAR (i.e., get the lawyers involved) or get an exception made (which is NOT easy). This usually requires some sort of official collaboration that is in place before the mission begins.
For example, this exists to a limited extent on the International Space Station. I work for NASA on ISS as a federal employee. I have a specific exemption such that I can share information with the European Space Agency on how to design/fly a resupply vehicle to ISS. Some of my contractors do not have this exemption. It's actually a huge pain to work around, and the contractors are extremely protective of their interests (as they ought to be, Hughes was fined an enormous amount of money when they helped the Chinese troubleshoot a problem in the Long March rocket). In the worst case, you can in fact end up in jail for violating ITAR laws.
ITAR has been the subject of a great deal of debate. On one hand, space technology is a keystone of the defense of the United States and protecting it legally sounds like a good idea. On the other hand, ITAR laws have caused many satellite buyers to purchase non-American hardware, which hurts the industry and stifles the very innovation in space technology that gives the US such an upper hand.
TFA states that the only information on the RFID will be the information already in the passport (basically, name, number, photo, place of birth, and age).
As long as that's it (and not a sinister prelude to more data being put in there), I really don't care. That information ceased to be private once I started traveling on a passport. My passport spends 3 or 4 weeks a year in the hands of foreign governments (France and Russia) getting visas renewed, and it gets copied all the time at security checkpoints when I'm working outside of the US.
I guess I'm going to find out soon, I'm a government employee with an official passport and it says we're the first to get them.
What do you mean, "cooperating more with the Russians"? That's exactly what is being done with ISS...half of the thing is Russian. ISS was a mechanism for that cooperation. ISS has been an experiment in what does (and doesn't) work when you try to do an international project, it's a lot more difficult than it seems on the surface.
I think you overestimate the Russian knowledge base...everything there was to know about operating in low earth orbit is not something that the Russians had and the US didn't. Lessons were learned by both sides, and the programs complement each other nicely. For example, Russian resupply via Progress is a well oiled machine, while the American communications via the TDRS network is vastly superior to anything the Russians have.
I work with my Russian counterparts on a daily basis, and they are top notch engineers and some of my best friends. That being said, they'd be the first to tell you that they have learned as much as the Americans have.
I have to ask, why do we need to go back to the moon? Is there any real, scientific reason for it, or is it just our dear president trying to keep people's minds off other things with another moon mission?
Good question.
In my mind, part of the answer is for practical engineering experience. The moon is a less ambitious goal than going to Mars out of the chute, but much of the technology and simple organizational engineering experience can be leveraged towards Mars.
I think folks often overlook the evolutionary nature of aerospace projects. One program provides the building blocks for the next. There are many elements in today's space program which are derived from Apollo. One example is the space shuttle main engines, which are the direct decendants of the old Saturn V J-2 engines in the second and third stage (and these engines have been surfacing as possible powerplants for the shuttle derived heavy lift vehicle that is likely to be used for the Exploration program).
Even the ISS program, which has been criticized extensively for poor science, has provided invaluable engineering experience on how (and maybe how not) to build a vehicle to go to the moon/mars. For example, we've had serious problems with the gyroscopes on ISS, there's something going on in the bearings which only happens in zero-G that causes them to wear out. The opportunity to dissect a broken one after the next shuttle brings it back is going to be invaluable. The spacesuits we are using require a lot of maintenance - somehow we need to improve that. When I discuss this with my colleagues (I'm a NASA engineer, flying people in space is what I do), we often remark that if we had tried going to Mars in the '90s without the experience we gained on ISS, it would have been a mess.
If we do Exploration right, we're going to leverage an aerospace workforce that has learned lessons from Shuttle and ISS, and use the moon as a proving ground. That experience is going to allow us to tackle the greater challenge of going to Mars.
As far as Bush using this for a "distraction", I tend to find that argument pretty weak. The space progam ceased to be a daily headline news item (except for the occasional event) in the early 70's. Nobody realistically believes America is going to forget about Iraq and other major issues for a relatively minor government program.
The runway was specialized in that it's a lot higher quality than typical airport runways (as well as pretty big), but any aircraft can land on it.
The shuttle main tires are replaced every flight because they take a much higher beating than normal aircraft tires. The orbiter lands at 220 miles/hour at a vertical sink rate of 9 feet/second. That's a crash landing for other aircraft that size (which is about that of a DC-9). It's also cheaper to buy a new set than certify the tires for reuse (and theres some weight savings since multiple use tires would need to be thicker).
By the way, you'll notice the shuttle landing gear and that of the B-1 bomber look very similar, they were both developed by Rockwell in the late 70's.
The shuttle never lands (nor was at ever designed to) land in anything but clear weather. Rain would sandblast the very fragle tiles, which would degrade the aerodynamics of the orbiter on the way down and cause handling problems (not to mention tile replacement). Diversion to alternate air bases are what is used to handle weather, primarily Edwards and White Sands in the US as well as a few dozen secondary sites scattered around the world. In a pinch, it can be dropped onto about any 10,000 foot runway and is never more than a couple of hours from ground. Some failures would cause such a lickity split landing, such as a cabin leak or cooling failure.
The T-38s astronauts use to go between Johnson and Kennedy routinely land there on the shuttle strip, as well as the Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA) - a modified Gulfstream business jet that is used to simulate the landing qualities of the orbiter. NASA also has a small number of business aircraft that land there from time to time. There's nothing in the runway that's shredding tires.
Disclaimer: I work for NASA JSC in Houston. On the Shuttle and Station programs.
Now NASA is going with "eh, it seems like an acceptable risk" but you know the folks that say that are thinking "as long as I'm not the one on that shuttle".
I'd like to let everyone know that nobody has this attitude at NASA. The astronauts are not some faceless people we are packing into the orbiter, they are our coworkers, friends, and families.
We eat lunch with these people, we share late nights at labs and in Mission Control with them, we have parties with them, they live next door to us, our kids go to school together. Several of my friends or their spouses are astronauts.
I make decisions at my job that can affect their safety everyday, and I never take it lightly. Just like you would not put your buddy at work into a hazardous situation if you could avoid it (well, spaceflight by definition is hazardous, so let's just say we try to keep the risk as low as humanly possible).
Many years ago I was conducting a training session for a crew member I knew pretty well. During a break, he waved me over to talk with his wife (who just popped in) and a guy in a nice suit, he needed me for something.
It was a NASA attorney. The flight was 4 weeks away, and they needed a witness for his will. It was a very somber moment to hear that being read aloud with his wife there, knowing that he was about to strap himself onto a flying bomb. Of course, the risk to him was just something that was part of the job, just like when he was in the military.
These folks know the risk they are taking (and boy, do they hate it when the press implies that flying is "too dangerous"), willingly accept it, and we all knock ourselves out making sure we do everything we can to keep them safe.
While I do not know for certain in this case (I do not work on Deep Impact), it certainly would not be out of character for NASA engineers to try to make this occur on July 4.
I work on the Shuttle and Station programs. Occasionally, we need to dump water overboard for one reason or another. It's spectacular to see from the ground, and while there are some constraints as to when it needs to occur often times we simply pick an arbitrary time period within a window to actually execute the dump.
You can be darn sure that, given the choice, we schedule it to occur over the continental United States with the proper lighting to see it for ourselves and watch the news pick it up! If the trajectory doesn't work out, we try to give Europe a show. It's not someone at Headquarters directing us to do it that way because it would be good PR, just a bunch of engineers that have found an interesting problem to work on.
It's a beautiful thing to see, might as well let the public enjoy it.
Ironically enough, after I wrote this I checked in with work. They were busy working with the crew restoring a crashed file server onboard that is used for non-critical stuff like email and digital photos.
I work for NASA on the manned programs and my experience is that hard drives are a headache on long term space missions.
The laptops onboard Space Station are primarily IBM laptops (many of which will soon be running Linux - yeah!). While the drives are easy to replace, they fail fairly often (compared to other space hardware) and new ones need to be launched. The software on the drives also becomes corrupted frequently (maybe once every few weeks), requiring the crew to waste time recopying the software from CD. While these COTS laptops and hard drives were cheap up front (almost zero development cost, custom stuff would have been tens of millions of dollars) we are paying for it now because we waste a lot of operational time fixing them.
The Honeywell Command and Control computers (the primary flight computers onboard, which are triple redundant and manages core systems in the US segment) used to have a 300 megabyte hard drive to store flight software.
In 2001 during a shuttle mission, hard drive problems caused ALL THREE of those computers to crash simultaneously in a massive cascading failure. While it never got a lot of press, recovering from that took several days and an effort reminiscent of Apollo 13. You can read a contemporary article on it here: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/launches/soyu z_iss_010427.html
When we got the things back and did a post-mortem, it turned out that the hard drive had a design flaw where the arm was dragging across the disk during power down and scratching it, which eventually led to failure.
They were replaced with solid state units shortly thereafter (which were already in the development pipeline). No moving parts, and much less problematic.
Actually, you don't sound like an ass at all. It's a good question.
Yes, things are planned to great detail on ISS. However, the devil is always in the details. Assumptions are made (sometimes over a year in advance)on how much the crew eats, when resupply comes up, when the shuttle is going to fly, and how to parcel out limited upmass between food, water, and spare parts, etc. It's tough when you only have Progress for resupply. This time, we got bit.
And yeah, we gotta figure this sort of stuff out before we can go to Mars. Which ISS is useful for. Forgetting about the pure science for a moment (which a lot of folks question), ISS is a great engineering platform for how (or how not) to build things and manage humans in space. And we're learning from it.
As time goes on, NASA is going to try to make ISS more automatic and less dependent on the ground. NASA is going to try to wring out hardware that could be used on the way to Mars in an environment on ISS where a breakdown won't lead to death of the crew. And NASA is going to try to find flaws in logistics and planning (like this) and not allow it to happen where the stakes are higher.
Re:They had bugs...
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Apollo 12 at 35
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The guy in the control room that made the "go" call to the flight director was named Steve Bales at the GUIDO position. IIRC he was about 26 years old. In his back room was Jack Garman, who was the expert on the computer (most of the "front room" guys have several "back room" support engineers).
They were prepared to make the call. In the last few weeks before Apollo 11, the "evil" engineers that ran the training simulators really hammered the flight control team on these program alarms. Bales and Garman were very well prepared to respond to those alarms because of this.
The parent is right about being "gutsy". I happen to be a NASA flight controller - and when you are in Mission Control, you are "it". Sometimes, you must make a decision that is time critical, and there is no asking your boss, waiting until Monday, etc. - only you (and your backroom), your knowledge, and your training. While everyone that works there is used to the pressure, many times after a difficult shift you can almost be shaking from realizing what could happen if you made a bad call.
The Air Force has messing with this stuff for quite some time.
In 1959, they launched a missile nicknamed "King Lofus IV" from a B-58 as an early test of satellite intercept using Explorer V as a target...the test was a miserable failure.
They were more successful in 1985, with a successful intercept and kinetic kill of a satellite with an F-15 launched ASAT prototype. The program was terminated in 1988.
This is a great comment - right on target. I'm a NASA engineer (who currently works on shuttle and space station), and myself and everyone I work with were thrilled to see Rutan and Scaled Composites pull this off.
I don't quite understand a lot of opinions out there that imply that NASA folks think that this is "stepping on their turf". Nothing could be farther from the truth. We'd dearly love (and hope) to see the day where we are able to buy "cargo delivery" to low earth orbit at relatively low cost from private industry, so we can free up NASA to do research and exploration in areas that are (currently!) less profitable (and less appealing to private industry) like deep space probes or manned missions to Mars.
Mike Lembeck is head of the requirements division at the exploration office at NASA headquarters, often referred to as "Code T". He is tasked with being the NASA architect for much of the new "exploration vision".
What is interesting is his background....he is not a career civil servant, He's been at NASA for less than two years. Before that he was with small to medium sized companies trying to break into the space business, including Space Industries (who built Wake Shield, that flying saucer thing that was deployed by the Space Shuttle on three missions) and Orbital Sciences (which is turning a fairly nice profit from some of their projects, notably the Pegasus air launched booster).
And he's a damn smart guy with lots of cool ideas that I've known for about seven years. He very much breaks the mold of the staid NASA manager, I'm sure he'd feel right at home with most/.ers and their ideas on how NASA ought to be changed (and from reading this, he's sure trying).
Sure, provided that you obtain the requisite license from the Department of Transportation if launching from US territory (or if you are an American operating in international territory). You can find some of the US code that governs this here.
Essentially you have to prove you won't kill anyone on the ground, damage property, or act in a manner that is detrimental to national security or foreign policy interests to get a license.
Under international law, the United States government is ultimately responsible for damage from vehicles launched from US territory (even non-government launches by private individuals or companies), and it looks like it will pay out up to $1.5 billion (it's in section 70113 of the above link).
As JPL stated here they think they may get about 250 sols out of these rovers, which is the approved duration of the extended mission (of course, I'm sure they'll keep extending it until they die, but there is a ten day communications blockage from the sun at about that time).
A lot of the comments on this thread are being critical of NASA for not allowing Chinese participation in ISS.
This is not NASA's decision. Hell, many of us would be thrilled to work with the Chinese (despite what you may see on the news, working with the Russians is very fun, challenging, and exciting to us grunt engineers). NASA takes its marching orders directly from the executive branch, and whether or not to include China in NASA's manned program is decided by the White House, and technical merit is at the very bottom of the evaluation criteria on whether to include them or not.
At the top are probably two considerations...
Political - this is a huge carrot to wave in front of the Chinese, and I don't think the White House is ready to cash in on it yet. I can imagine it coming into play if we wanted something from China with respect to either the North Korean or Taiwan issues.
Technology Transfer - like it or not, the same basic technology that is used to put people in space is also used to defend the United States. Any time you work with an international partner who is "behind" you technically, some of the technology bleeds over (no matter how hard you try to stop it) and the technology gap closes. You need to be very careful about that when you are talking about working with a potential adversary. Is the risk worth the benefit? Right now, I think the answer the national leadership has decided is "no".
Your idea of "privatization" is a little murky...privatize what? If it is turning over money that formerly went to NASA to do specific tasks within the space program - that's being done now. For example, all the processing of the orbiters, the training of the crews, and various other aspects of operations is done by United Space Alliance (jointly owned by Lockheed and Boeing) under the Space Flight Operations Contract. USA is given a chunk of money (actually a pretty significant portion of NASA's overall budget) to perform these tasks more or less autonomously with a little oversight from NASA to ensure safety and quality. USA and the government split whatever money is saved from process improvements and innovation. Since this results in profits for the company (which goes to shareholders and small employee bonuses) there is considerable motivation to do things better for less money.
If, on the other hand, you are proposing private industry take over space exploration entirely - it won't happen without government funding because there isn't a profit to be made. Lockheed Martin isn't going to fund a Pluto mission on their own because they won't get any return on their investment. If there was money to be made in, say, building a manned space station, there really isn't anything standing in their way. As its been for some time, basic research in space must initially be funded by the government. Eventually, if a something profitable is found private industry will eventually exploit it. Good examples of this in the space world are telecommunications and imaging satellites. Originally, the technology for these vehicles was pioneered by NASA (in the '60s) and then companies ran with the idea and improved it to the point that now we can watch live television from around the world courtesy of satellites built and operated by the likes of AT&T and General Electric on a for-profit basis.
I'll argue with your view that the folks that work for NASA (and their contractors, which is really the majority of the workforce) are simply clock punchers who view what they do as just a job. I've worked at two NASA centers, and almost to a person the engineers there are extremely bright and motivated - much more so than in most other industries. If you just wanted to collect a paycheck, there are better places to do that than NASA. Because its a government (or government contracting) job, the pay is significantly less than if you would work at, say, 3Com, Lucent, or some Silicon Valley company. You don't get stock options working for NASA. Additionally, the pressure factor can be pretty significant (one screw up and you've not only blown your job, but possibly caused the loss of billions of dollars of hardware and seeing yourself featured on Nightline). People who do this for a living are motivated by the challenge of what they are doing and the excitement of working on the space program, not money.
I will agree, however, that things would improve somewhat with funding increases and possibly pay increases. What NASA really needs is for people to stick around longer. Because of their skill levels and the training they receive, NASA employees are pretty juicy targets for high technology companies to hire away. The government (or a contractor) can't match a headhunter offering a 30% pay raise and after awhile the adventure of working on the space program fades in comparison to paying for you kid's education or getting a larger house. Having a core of experienced people who've been around for 10, 20 years is very much lacking and increased salaries would remedy this situation. The cost of doing this would probably be short term, because as people stuck around longer they would become more efficient with experience and you could get by with fewer. For example - an engineer with 10 years of experience may have the same output of three engineers with 3 years experience each, but he alone will cost less to employ. You just need to initially pay those people to stay and retain their experience instead of watching them go after one or two missions as is common today.
As a fellow NASA Station contractor, I would have loved to have Zvezda procured under a Boeing contract like Zarya. Zarya was finished on time, and on budget (unlike many of the Boeing built modules), and has been working well other than some minor glitches in the electrical system.
Unfortunately, that just wouldn't cut it politically. Part of the deal with bringing in the Russians is that they would help defray the cost of the Station by contributing Zvezda - if it would have been built under a Boeing contract, it would have been US money, not Russian, paying for it and this was not the arrangement Congress and the Executive Branch was wanting NASA to execute for all modules.
Of course, that was laid out in 1993 and its become pretty obvious that they didn't defray the cost of anything. The cost of the contingency vehicles NASA has/is building ended up costing more than Russia paid for Zvezda.
Whatever. Building things of this magnitude aren't easy - technically and especially politically (does anyone outside of NASA realize just how difficult the political aspect of this program is?). I'm just happy the pace of launches is going to start picking up.
Slashdot Mirror
Theodore Gray has put together a surprisingly interesting site based on his wooden periodic table of the elements (that actually contains samples of the elements - except the ones that would kill the builder and maybe a few of the neighbors).
On the site he has a mathematica based app (he works at Wolfram) which will take a string of characters and attempt to construct it from element sybols.
Thanks, that's a well appreciated clarification.
Interesting, I guess I called it a "failure" because I'm looking at it from the engineering side (I'm a NASA engineer - looking through my paradigm "success" means the spacecraft itself worked as designed).
But overall, the engineering is just a tool to complete the mission, which is science (and clearly there is a lot of good science coming out of Genesis). Sometimes we need to be reminded....
Another variable is the entry angle. Genesis was *targeted* such that it would hit the edge of the earth's atmosphere and utilize it to bleed off almost all of its kinetic energy through friction. The parachutes were only designed to take care of braking it that last 200 mph or so.
Of course, they never deployed, so it essentially hit the ground at terminal velocity - basically the same as if you had just rolled it out of an aircraft at 50,000 feet.
No kidding...especially since they were built by the same contractor (Lockheed Martin Denver).
The failure of Genesis was tied to a badly designed placement of deceleration sensors, a design flaw which Stardust is apparently free from (but I'm sure there will still be some serious hand-wringing on the 15th).
More details here.
I'm sort of splitting hairs here, but only the command link is secured on most NASA satellites. The telemetry back to the ground isn't necessarily encrypted (it isn't on the shuttle and ISS), although you'd definitely need to have some pretty expensive equipment and know-how to decode the carrier into anything useful (like voice and data). Then again, it's only fun because it's hard...
There's a few more details on how it works for ISS in a NASA training manual here. (It's a 6 Mb pdf, communications is section 4).
It actually can be legally very difficult to share information with foreign entities about how to fly things in space (even friendly ones). Under American law, a lot of space technology is considered "defense articles" and fall under the jurisdiction of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) laws.
Legally, JPL (or an engineer working for them) would need to make sure that they were not violating ITAR (i.e., get the lawyers involved) or get an exception made (which is NOT easy). This usually requires some sort of official collaboration that is in place before the mission begins.
For example, this exists to a limited extent on the International Space Station. I work for NASA on ISS as a federal employee. I have a specific exemption such that I can share information with the European Space Agency on how to design/fly a resupply vehicle to ISS. Some of my contractors do not have this exemption. It's actually a huge pain to work around, and the contractors are extremely protective of their interests (as they ought to be, Hughes was fined an enormous amount of money when they helped the Chinese troubleshoot a problem in the Long March rocket). In the worst case, you can in fact end up in jail for violating ITAR laws.
ITAR has been the subject of a great deal of debate. On one hand, space technology is a keystone of the defense of the United States and protecting it legally sounds like a good idea. On the other hand, ITAR laws have caused many satellite buyers to purchase non-American hardware, which hurts the industry and stifles the very innovation in space technology that gives the US such an upper hand.
TFA states that the only information on the RFID will be the information already in the passport (basically, name, number, photo, place of birth, and age).
As long as that's it (and not a sinister prelude to more data being put in there), I really don't care. That information ceased to be private once I started traveling on a passport. My passport spends 3 or 4 weeks a year in the hands of foreign governments (France and Russia) getting visas renewed, and it gets copied all the time at security checkpoints when I'm working outside of the US.
I guess I'm going to find out soon, I'm a government employee with an official passport and it says we're the first to get them.
What do you mean, "cooperating more with the Russians"? That's exactly what is being done with ISS...half of the thing is Russian. ISS was a mechanism for that cooperation. ISS has been an experiment in what does (and doesn't) work when you try to do an international project, it's a lot more difficult than it seems on the surface.
I think you overestimate the Russian knowledge base...everything there was to know about operating in low earth orbit is not something that the Russians had and the US didn't. Lessons were learned by both sides, and the programs complement each other nicely. For example, Russian resupply via Progress is a well oiled machine, while the American communications via the TDRS network is vastly superior to anything the Russians have.
I work with my Russian counterparts on a daily basis, and they are top notch engineers and some of my best friends. That being said, they'd be the first to tell you that they have learned as much as the Americans have.
I have to ask, why do we need to go back to the moon? Is there any real, scientific reason for it, or is it just our dear president trying to keep people's minds off other things with another moon mission?
Good question.
In my mind, part of the answer is for practical engineering experience. The moon is a less ambitious goal than going to Mars out of the chute, but much of the technology and simple organizational engineering experience can be leveraged towards Mars.
I think folks often overlook the evolutionary nature of aerospace projects. One program provides the building blocks for the next. There are many elements in today's space program which are derived from Apollo. One example is the space shuttle main engines, which are the direct decendants of the old Saturn V J-2 engines in the second and third stage (and these engines have been surfacing as possible powerplants for the shuttle derived heavy lift vehicle that is likely to be used for the Exploration program).
Even the ISS program, which has been criticized extensively for poor science, has provided invaluable engineering experience on how (and maybe how not) to build a vehicle to go to the moon/mars. For example, we've had serious problems with the gyroscopes on ISS, there's something going on in the bearings which only happens in zero-G that causes them to wear out. The opportunity to dissect a broken one after the next shuttle brings it back is going to be invaluable. The spacesuits we are using require a lot of maintenance - somehow we need to improve that. When I discuss this with my colleagues (I'm a NASA engineer, flying people in space is what I do), we often remark that if we had tried going to Mars in the '90s without the experience we gained on ISS, it would have been a mess.
If we do Exploration right, we're going to leverage an aerospace workforce that has learned lessons from Shuttle and ISS, and use the moon as a proving ground. That experience is going to allow us to tackle the greater challenge of going to Mars.
As far as Bush using this for a "distraction", I tend to find that argument pretty weak. The space progam ceased to be a daily headline news item (except for the occasional event) in the early 70's. Nobody realistically believes America is going to forget about Iraq and other major issues for a relatively minor government program.
The runway was specialized in that it's a lot higher quality than typical airport runways (as well as pretty big), but any aircraft can land on it.
The shuttle main tires are replaced every flight because they take a much higher beating than normal aircraft tires. The orbiter lands at 220 miles/hour at a vertical sink rate of 9 feet/second. That's a crash landing for other aircraft that size (which is about that of a DC-9). It's also cheaper to buy a new set than certify the tires for reuse (and theres some weight savings since multiple use tires would need to be thicker).
By the way, you'll notice the shuttle landing gear and that of the B-1 bomber look very similar, they were both developed by Rockwell in the late 70's.
The shuttle never lands (nor was at ever designed to) land in anything but clear weather. Rain would sandblast the very fragle tiles, which would degrade the aerodynamics of the orbiter on the way down and cause handling problems (not to mention tile replacement). Diversion to alternate air bases are what is used to handle weather, primarily Edwards and White Sands in the US as well as a few dozen secondary sites scattered around the world. In a pinch, it can be dropped onto about any 10,000 foot runway and is never more than a couple of hours from ground. Some failures would cause such a lickity split landing, such as a cabin leak or cooling failure.
The T-38s astronauts use to go between Johnson and Kennedy routinely land there on the shuttle strip, as well as the Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA) - a modified Gulfstream business jet that is used to simulate the landing qualities of the orbiter. NASA also has a small number of business aircraft that land there from time to time. There's nothing in the runway that's shredding tires.
Disclaimer: I work for NASA JSC in Houston. On the Shuttle and Station programs.
Now NASA is going with "eh, it seems like an acceptable risk" but you know the folks that say that are thinking "as long as I'm not the one on that shuttle".
I'd like to let everyone know that nobody has this attitude at NASA. The astronauts are not some faceless people we are packing into the orbiter, they are our coworkers, friends, and families.
We eat lunch with these people, we share late nights at labs and in Mission Control with them, we have parties with them, they live next door to us, our kids go to school together. Several of my friends or their spouses are astronauts.
I make decisions at my job that can affect their safety everyday, and I never take it lightly. Just like you would not put your buddy at work into a hazardous situation if you could avoid it (well, spaceflight by definition is hazardous, so let's just say we try to keep the risk as low as humanly possible).
Many years ago I was conducting a training session for a crew member I knew pretty well. During a break, he waved me over to talk with his wife (who just popped in) and a guy in a nice suit, he needed me for something.
It was a NASA attorney. The flight was 4 weeks away, and they needed a witness for his will. It was a very somber moment to hear that being read aloud with his wife there, knowing that he was about to strap himself onto a flying bomb. Of course, the risk to him was just something that was part of the job, just like when he was in the military.
These folks know the risk they are taking (and boy, do they hate it when the press implies that flying is "too dangerous"), willingly accept it, and we all knock ourselves out making sure we do everything we can to keep them safe.
While I do not know for certain in this case (I do not work on Deep Impact), it certainly would not be out of character for NASA engineers to try to make this occur on July 4.
I work on the Shuttle and Station programs. Occasionally, we need to dump water overboard for one reason or another. It's spectacular to see from the ground, and while there are some constraints as to when it needs to occur often times we simply pick an arbitrary time period within a window to actually execute the dump.
You can be darn sure that, given the choice, we schedule it to occur over the continental United States with the proper lighting to see it for ourselves and watch the news pick it up! If the trajectory doesn't work out, we try to give Europe a show. It's not someone at Headquarters directing us to do it that way because it would be good PR, just a bunch of engineers that have found an interesting problem to work on.
It's a beautiful thing to see, might as well let the public enjoy it.
Ironically enough, after I wrote this I checked in with work. They were busy working with the crew restoring a crashed file server onboard that is used for non-critical stuff like email and digital photos.
What happened? Corrupted hard drive.
I work for NASA on the manned programs and my experience is that hard drives are a headache on long term space missions.
u z_iss_010427.html
The laptops onboard Space Station are primarily IBM laptops (many of which will soon be running Linux - yeah!). While the drives are easy to replace, they fail fairly often (compared to other space hardware) and new ones need to be launched. The software on the drives also becomes corrupted frequently (maybe once every few weeks), requiring the crew to waste time recopying the software from CD. While these COTS laptops and hard drives were cheap up front (almost zero development cost, custom stuff would have been tens of millions of dollars) we are paying for it now because we waste a lot of operational time fixing them.
The Honeywell Command and Control computers (the primary flight computers onboard, which are triple redundant and manages core systems in the US segment) used to have a 300 megabyte hard drive to store flight software.
In 2001 during a shuttle mission, hard drive problems caused ALL THREE of those computers to crash simultaneously in a massive cascading failure. While it never got a lot of press, recovering from that took several days and an effort reminiscent of Apollo 13. You can read a contemporary article on it here: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/launches/soy
When we got the things back and did a post-mortem, it turned out that the hard drive had a design flaw where the arm was dragging across the disk during power down and scratching it, which eventually led to failure.
They were replaced with solid state units shortly thereafter (which were already in the development pipeline). No moving parts, and much less problematic.
Caveat: I work for NASA.
Actually, you don't sound like an ass at all. It's a good question.
Yes, things are planned to great detail on ISS. However, the devil is always in the details. Assumptions are made (sometimes over a year in advance)on how much the crew eats, when resupply comes up, when the shuttle is going to fly, and how to parcel out limited upmass between food, water, and spare parts, etc. It's tough when you only have Progress for resupply. This time, we got bit.
And yeah, we gotta figure this sort of stuff out before we can go to Mars. Which ISS is useful for. Forgetting about the pure science for a moment (which a lot of folks question), ISS is a great engineering platform for how (or how not) to build things and manage humans in space. And we're learning from it.
As time goes on, NASA is going to try to make ISS more automatic and less dependent on the ground. NASA is going to try to wring out hardware that could be used on the way to Mars in an environment on ISS where a breakdown won't lead to death of the crew. And NASA is going to try to find flaws in logistics and planning (like this) and not allow it to happen where the stakes are higher.
The guy in the control room that made the "go" call to the flight director was named Steve Bales at the GUIDO position. IIRC he was about 26 years old. In his back room was Jack Garman, who was the expert on the computer (most of the "front room" guys have several "back room" support engineers).
Here's a link to the flight loop audio of the decision.
They were prepared to make the call. In the last few weeks before Apollo 11, the "evil" engineers that ran the training simulators really hammered the flight control team on these program alarms. Bales and Garman were very well prepared to respond to those alarms because of this.
The parent is right about being "gutsy". I happen to be a NASA flight controller - and when you are in Mission Control, you are "it". Sometimes, you must make a decision that is time critical, and there is no asking your boss, waiting until Monday, etc. - only you (and your backroom), your knowledge, and your training. While everyone that works there is used to the pressure, many times after a difficult shift you can almost be shaking from realizing what could happen if you made a bad call.
The Air Force has messing with this stuff for quite some time.
In 1959, they launched a missile nicknamed "King Lofus IV" from a B-58 as an early test of satellite intercept using Explorer V as a target...the test was a miserable failure.
They were more successful in 1985, with a successful intercept and kinetic kill of a satellite with an F-15 launched ASAT prototype. The program was terminated in 1988.
This is a great comment - right on target. I'm a NASA engineer (who currently works on shuttle and space station), and myself and everyone I work with were thrilled to see Rutan and Scaled Composites pull this off.
I don't quite understand a lot of opinions out there that imply that NASA folks think that this is "stepping on their turf". Nothing could be farther from the truth. We'd dearly love (and hope) to see the day where we are able to buy "cargo delivery" to low earth orbit at relatively low cost from private industry, so we can free up NASA to do research and exploration in areas that are (currently!) less profitable (and less appealing to private industry) like deep space probes or manned missions to Mars.
Mike Lembeck is head of the requirements division at the exploration office at NASA headquarters, often referred to as "Code T". He is tasked with being the NASA architect for much of the new "exploration vision".
/.ers and their ideas on how NASA ought to be changed (and from reading this, he's sure trying).
What is interesting is his background....he is not a career civil servant, He's been at NASA for less than two years. Before that he was with small to medium sized companies trying to break into the space business, including Space Industries (who built Wake Shield, that flying saucer thing that was deployed by the Space Shuttle on three missions) and Orbital Sciences (which is turning a fairly nice profit from some of their projects, notably the Pegasus air launched booster).
And he's a damn smart guy with lots of cool ideas that I've known for about seven years. He very much breaks the mold of the staid NASA manager, I'm sure he'd feel right at home with most
Sure, provided that you obtain the requisite license from the Department of Transportation if launching from US territory (or if you are an American operating in international territory). You can find some of the US code that governs this here.
Essentially you have to prove you won't kill anyone on the ground, damage property, or act in a manner that is detrimental to national security or foreign policy interests to get a license.
Under international law, the United States government is ultimately responsible for damage from vehicles launched from US territory (even non-government launches by private individuals or companies), and it looks like it will pay out up to $1.5 billion (it's in section 70113 of the above link).
As JPL stated here they think they may get about 250 sols out of these rovers, which is the approved duration of the extended mission (of course, I'm sure they'll keep extending it until they die, but there is a ten day communications blockage from the sun at about that time).
Disclaimer: I work for NASA.
A lot of the comments on this thread are being critical of NASA for not allowing Chinese participation in ISS.
This is not NASA's decision. Hell, many of us would be thrilled to work with the Chinese (despite what you may see on the news, working with the Russians is very fun, challenging, and exciting to us grunt engineers). NASA takes its marching orders directly from the executive branch, and whether or not to include China in NASA's manned program is decided by the White House, and technical merit is at the very bottom of the evaluation criteria on whether to include them or not.
At the top are probably two considerations...
Political - this is a huge carrot to wave in front of the Chinese, and I don't think the White House is ready to cash in on it yet. I can imagine it coming into play if we wanted something from China with respect to either the North Korean or Taiwan issues.
Technology Transfer - like it or not, the same basic technology that is used to put people in space is also used to defend the United States. Any time you work with an international partner who is "behind" you technically, some of the technology bleeds over (no matter how hard you try to stop it) and the technology gap closes. You need to be very careful about that when you are talking about working with a potential adversary. Is the risk worth the benefit? Right now, I think the answer the national leadership has decided is "no".
Your idea of "privatization" is a little murky...privatize what? If it is turning over money that formerly went to NASA to do specific tasks within the space program - that's being done now. For example, all the processing of the orbiters, the training of the crews, and various other aspects of operations is done by United Space Alliance (jointly owned by Lockheed and Boeing) under the Space Flight Operations Contract. USA is given a chunk of money (actually a pretty significant portion of NASA's overall budget) to perform these tasks more or less autonomously with a little oversight from NASA to ensure safety and quality. USA and the government split whatever money is saved from process improvements and innovation. Since this results in profits for the company (which goes to shareholders and small employee bonuses) there is considerable motivation to do things better for less money.
If, on the other hand, you are proposing private industry take over space exploration entirely - it won't happen without government funding because there isn't a profit to be made. Lockheed Martin isn't going to fund a Pluto mission on their own because they won't get any return on their investment. If there was money to be made in, say, building a manned space station, there really isn't anything standing in their way. As its been for some time, basic research in space must initially be funded by the government. Eventually, if a something profitable is found private industry will eventually exploit it. Good examples of this in the space world are telecommunications and imaging satellites. Originally, the technology for these vehicles was pioneered by NASA (in the '60s) and then companies ran with the idea and improved it to the point that now we can watch live television from around the world courtesy of satellites built and operated by the likes of AT&T and General Electric on a for-profit basis.
I'll argue with your view that the folks that work for NASA (and their contractors, which is really the majority of the workforce) are simply clock punchers who view what they do as just a job. I've worked at two NASA centers, and almost to a person the engineers there are extremely bright and motivated - much more so than in most other industries. If you just wanted to collect a paycheck, there are better places to do that than NASA. Because its a government (or government contracting) job, the pay is significantly less than if you would work at, say, 3Com, Lucent, or some Silicon Valley company. You don't get stock options working for NASA. Additionally, the pressure factor can be pretty significant (one screw up and you've not only blown your job, but possibly caused the loss of billions of dollars of hardware and seeing yourself featured on Nightline). People who do this for a living are motivated by the challenge of what they are doing and the excitement of working on the space program, not money.
I will agree, however, that things would improve somewhat with funding increases and possibly pay increases. What NASA really needs is for people to stick around longer. Because of their skill levels and the training they receive, NASA employees are pretty juicy targets for high technology companies to hire away. The government (or a contractor) can't match a headhunter offering a 30% pay raise and after awhile the adventure of working on the space program fades in comparison to paying for you kid's education or getting a larger house. Having a core of experienced people who've been around for 10, 20 years is very much lacking and increased salaries would remedy this situation. The cost of doing this would probably be short term, because as people stuck around longer they would become more efficient with experience and you could get by with fewer. For example - an engineer with 10 years of experience may have the same output of three engineers with 3 years experience each, but he alone will cost less to employ. You just need to initially pay those people to stay and retain their experience instead of watching them go after one or two missions as is common today.
As a fellow NASA Station contractor, I would have loved to have Zvezda procured under a Boeing contract like Zarya. Zarya was finished on time, and on budget (unlike many of the Boeing built modules), and has been working well other than some minor glitches in the electrical system.
Unfortunately, that just wouldn't cut it politically. Part of the deal with bringing in the Russians is that they would help defray the cost of the Station by contributing Zvezda - if it would have been built under a Boeing contract, it would have been US money, not Russian, paying for it and this was not the arrangement Congress and the Executive Branch was wanting NASA to execute for all modules.
Of course, that was laid out in 1993 and its become pretty obvious that they didn't defray the cost of anything. The cost of the contingency vehicles NASA has/is building ended up costing more than Russia paid for Zvezda.
Whatever. Building things of this magnitude aren't easy - technically and especially politically (does anyone outside of NASA realize just how difficult the political aspect of this program is?). I'm just happy the pace of launches is going to start picking up.