RUNOFF on CTSS (1964) turned the computer into a document preparation tool. From there we got Multics runoff. The UNIX developers justified their early efforts by promising to bring runoff to AT&T without the expense of Multics. And now RUNOFF has many descendents, both in the form of markup languages and document processing applications. These are arguably a more widespread and important use of computers than actual computation.
One famous recent "paradigm shift" is the acceleration of the Hubble expansion, presumed to be caused by "dark energy", and supposedly discovered through high redshift supernovae. But out of the public view, there were other anomalies in cosmology that astrophysicists had noticed years before, such as stars somewhat older than the apparent age of the universe, and the failure of simulations to reproduce the observed patterns of galaxy clustering. I remember several times when colleagues brought up the possibility that these could be resolved by a nonzero "cosmological constant" (a special case of "dark energy"). Finally, the supernova evidence pushed these ideas into our popular articles and textbooks, creating the illusion of a sudden "paradigm shift". I think one reason the supernova results were welcomed rather than disputed was that they confirmed what many of us already suspected privately, based on different lines of evidence.
Musk once alluded to a better manufacturing process for actually building rockets. So, instead of saying that he's taking shortcuts and what not and doesn't have layers of bureacracy, what if he just has a cheaper way to build rockets that are better?
Yes. From the Model T to the Pentium, we see the winning product is the one that has the best manufacturing process behind it. Often, the product itself isn't anything special compared to the competition.
Well, he could always propose sending 1 rocket as the primary and 9 up as backups. Then he could match the price in the database while rationalizing every dollar spent as increased safety.
Nope, that wouldn't work, because the division of labor wouldn't correspond to the basis for the "independent" cost estimate, and the cost "experts" would therefore refuse to endorse it. Then there's the potential cost of lost payloads. In principle, the contractor could insure them, except NASA is forbidden by law to buy insurance.
and then realize that while everything NASA seems to be luxury spending, their software development manages to have at least two orders of magnitude fewer bugs than any commercial software company.
Except that implicit in that is the idea that every bug is a disaster. SpaceX's approach is to have robust engineering rather than perfection. The idea is that small problems should not cascade into mission failures. That's how "real world" engineering works: for example, we don't use chains to hold up suspension bridges any more, because a single crack can cause a collapse. We use multi-strand cables, where cracks don't propagate from strand to strand. The fragile perfection of old-school aerospace is expensive and hazardous.
Not really. NASA generally goes with what appears most "credible" to them within the cost cap. The most important factor in credibility is matching their detailed estimates of costs, created using "parametric" methods. These methods take historical costs into account and then allow for inflation. Imagine estimating the cost of a computer by scaling from an IBM 709, assuming every performance enhancement costs money, and multiplying by inflation. Then, you refuse to try anything cheaper, because it's "risky".
The result? The bidder must propose not only a high price, but must justify that price based on costs. You must demonstrate the ability to put together and manage very inefficient processes. It usually doesn't even help to have done similar jobs efficiently: the cost "experts" don't find actual experience in conflict with their databases to be "credible". Their databases are full of previous examples of projects approved and planned with the same methodology, so the reasoning is almost perfectly circular.
Historically, nobody has been able to develop an orbital launch vehicle without government subsidy, so this credibility problem has been an impenetrable barrier to exploiting real high tech methods, where deflation, not inflation is normal. But Musk has deep enough pockets, and a talent for PR that has made it impossible to dismiss the success of Falcon as an aberration.
A lot of stuff on github is experimental, "quick and dirty" code. The amount of effort to, say, put GPL boilerplate in every file isn't large, but it isn't zero, either. So, *ask*. You send mail to me, volunteer to do this small job, I'll probably give you commit access to the repo.
Whenever I see a company focus on dissing a competitor, I immediately wonder why they're going negative campaigning.
Musk doesn't need to diss Ariane 5: his company is taking business away from them without any negativity. The thing that surprises me here is how positive he is about Ariane 6. Given how rapidly SpaceX is improving their product, I don't see how Arianespace, with its slow expensive processes, could ever get ahead with a new vehicle.
The NAS report addresses this. It's a serious possibility.
The thing to understand here is that *in principle* the net required water input is tiny (it provides the hydrogen in the hydrocarbon output stream, but that's not much compared to the water needed as a solvent), and the net required nitrogen and phosphorus inputs are zero (they aren't in the output stream). One issue is therefore the recycling of the waste stream after hydrocarbon extraction. Another is losses (especially water) from open ponds, if that's the technology of choice. The report tells us that projects to date have not adequately addressed these issues.
The two things I take away from this are:
1. The technology isn't ready yet, but it has future potential.
2. Open freshwater ponds are probably not the winning approach.
This report will undoubtedly help steer future research in this area.
There was certainly a lot of discussion of this among us at the time. I recall we wondered whether NASA would go for free return or be more radical and use more delta-V in cislunar space to get the astronauts home sooner.
But call up NASA? Be serious. Which of the 100,000 phone numbers would you call? The critical people were busy: they weren't going to talk to some random student. This was all elementary orbital mechanics, somewhat difficult to calculate and execute accurately, but not conceptually difficult at all. The flight team certainly knew this stuff. The real question was what the damaged systems could still accomplish, and that required information well beyond what we had access to. So it never occurred to anybody I know to try being a back seat driver.
It's generally not the people who create things, make things, or provide useful services who fear change. They can adapt. But if you've spent your life's effort working your way into control of a particular set of cash registers, change is very threatening indeed.
The problem with this model is that it's very hard to control your usage. There's no practical way to know in advance how much a particular click will cost. Of course, the providers love it for exactly that reason.
There is nothing more "industry unfriendly" than a genuine free market. Despite propaganda, no businessman ever wants to compete in freedom. What you want is to control the customer and the competition, not let them control you.
It costs several dollars a gram to get it up there...
The trouble is that most of that cost isn't lifting it to altitude, but getting it moving at the right velocity for the orbit you want. If you put some sort of recycling device in orbit, almost all of the junk that it encounters will be moving at high velocity relative to your device's orbital velocity. Speed will tend to be similar, but direction will be all over the place. Changing the velocity of either the device or the junk is difficult.
Lead is a reasonably valuable metal, but stationing yourself in no man's land between two armies and recycling the bullets that come at you seems a difficult way to obtain it.
In my experience as a scientist, what has increased is the pressure to publish quickly. So, people publish results that haven't been checked as much as they perhaps should be.
In some sciences there is so-called peer-review process. So it seems to me that scientists you mention who publish not thoroughly checked papers point also to the failure of the journals you don't mention to do at least semi-decent peer-reviewing process.
Peer reviewers can't check everything, especially when the conclusion results from elaborate analysis of data from complex apparatus. Sometimes you detect bonehead mistakes, but usually your focus is more on clarity than correctness: do the authors explain their methods and reasoning in enough detail that someone else can repeat the research?
But this is not fraud, and perhaps it's even healthy. Better to get crazy results out there than bury them in notebooks: sometimes they turn out to be major discoveries.
So for instance, when some not sufficiently checked results for medical treatments get published, you'd say that this is perhaps healthy?
Absolutely yes! It is the physician's responsibility to avoid basing treatments on results that haven't been independently confirmed. It is the researcher's responsibility to publish: how else will you get that independent confirmation? Other researchers need to know what they should attempt to confirm or falsify.
We're talking about the science of the journals here. This is raw "source code", checked to some degree, but not debugged. The debugging takes place in the community: if you don't publish, your results will never get properly debugged.
In my experience as a scientist, what has increased is the pressure to publish quickly. So, people publish results that haven't been checked as much as they perhaps should be. But this is not fraud, and perhaps it's even healthy. Better to get crazy results out there than bury them in notebooks: sometimes they turn out to be major discoveries.
In hockey, the most prolific scorers attempt a *lot* of shots. Many are blocked, many miss, many are saved by the goalie. But a few are goals. Gretzky said it best: "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
And the only place we can actually send people to is the ISS. i.e. nowhere.
That's true today, but I can remember when we were sending people to the Moon. The only reason we stopped is that the Administration looked at our space effort as nothing more than a way to get bragging rights over the Soviets, and once they'd succeeded, they saw no reason to continue. The Moon has all the raw materials needed to build a colony, and the Sun could provide us with all the power we need, as long as we have two power stations, positioned so that at least one if them is always active. And, once we're there, we're half way to anyplace else in the Solar System, because most of the energy you need is simply to get out of the Earth's gravity well.
The cost of raw materials and energy are largely irrelevant in our present circumstances. 6061 aluminum costs less than $10 per kilogram (and the bauxite it came from is much cheaper), but a kilogram of aluminum parts fabricated and inspected to space flight standards will set you back many thousands of dollars. The cost comes from all of the human effort involved: machinists, inspectors, managers, administrators, etc. Launch vehicles are made of this high-priced stuff, and that's what makes it so expensive to send more of this stuff to space. If you export this inefficiency to space, it won't matter how cheap your resources and energy are (and humans are much more expensive as labor in space than on the ground).
What the advocates of human space flight don't get is that if space travel ever becomes a significant human activity, the infrastructure will bear no resemblance to anything we have today. The massive human ground support activity will have to be eliminated, with 99.99% of the work completely automated.
No. The problem today is that we are lifting everything from the surface of the earth. Its not automation that will significantly reduce the costs, its using "local" resources. Moon, steroids, etc.
Makes no real difference. If we ever create the infrastructure to exploit resources in space, it'll be automated, built by robots not humans. To build this infrastructure in space with human labor requires we first build the necessary infrastructure to support humans in space at reasonable cost. The only way to bootstrap this is with robots: supporting humans in space with human labor on the ground won't ever be efficient enough. And it's unlikely that humans will ever be productive as space laborers: we're very poorly adapted to space environments, although we're getting better all the time at designing robots that are well adapted.
Okay, lets make a deserved comparison to ocean voyages. During the age of European colonization and exploration, the amount of effort required on the shore to equip a sailing expedition for a year at sea was roughly one man year per person making the voyage. At that level, it was still pretty expensive, but it was possible to send a significant number of people across the oceans.
Fast forward to space voyages in the 21st century, and the ratio is about *four orders of magnitude* higher. And the only place we can actually send people to is the ISS. i.e. nowhere. At this level of inefficiency, there is absolutely no possibility of space travel ever becoming a significant human activity.
What the advocates of human space flight don't get is that if space travel ever becomes a significant human activity, the infrastructure will bear no resemblance to anything we have today. The massive human ground support activity will have to be eliminated, with 99.99% of the work completely automated. Money spent on human space flight under present circumstances merely entrenches the extremely low productivity institutions we've constructed to support it.
It is indeed true that code written by scientists often needs polish. But the other truth is that it's often necessary for a scientist to write the code. Too many programmers think that all they have to do is write code to spec. But when you're writing code that supports the needs of a subject that takes a decade to master, only someone with that mastery can understand what the specs mean.
Often, the best results emerge when a scientist writes the code, and a programmer reviews and polishes. But that can cause a lot of friction: scientists don't like criticism, and programmers would rather program than review and polish. It's a challenge for project management.
*Real* space exploration these days is performed by robots. Humans have the wrong senses, the wrong body form, and needs that are very difficult to satisfy in space. But we're very good at building and directing robots, and getting better very fast.
Let's be honest, a trained geologist with a quad-bike type vehicle could have done all the work that the MERs have done in the course of their mission within a couple of days.
But it's impossible for a geologist to survive on Mars. And nobody, especially NASA, has any credible plan to make it possible for a geologist to survive on Mars within a finite budget. But the rovers are well adapted to the job, and are getting it done.
Even sending a human into low Earth orbit takes thousands of man-hours of effort on the ground for every hour somebody spends in space. So the apparent efficiency of humans in space is an illusion. Now, if you look at, say, Magellan's budget back in 1519, the ratio of effort on land to effort at sea was more like 1:1. At that ratio, the European exploration and colonization of the world was possible. At 1000:1 it never could have been. The only way to reduce that ratio and make human activities in space truly practical is to make maximum use of robotic technology, both on the ground and in space.
I'm not trying to discount the work that the rovers and their controllers here on earth have done, but you simply can not equate their capabilities with what a living, breathing human could do in the same location.
Yeah, but that breathing business is an insoluble problem, given the institutions that would have to solve it.
I have to confess to mixed feelings about this. Given the engineering problems they were tasked to solve, I credit the guys working on the shuttle program with some terrific work.
Terrific work that solves the wrong problem is not good engineering.
What I'm saying is that on the one hand, STS is an engineering marvel for things like the thermal tiles
The tiles are a kludge to make up for the fact that the planned superalloy skin didn't work out. They have been an expensive, fragile nightmare. A killer. Competent engineering management would have recognized this as a show-stopper early. But this was NASA.
and the cross-range glider landing of the orbiter, the re-usability and throttle-ability of the SSME, especially for their weight and isp, and the SRBs... ok, well, nevermind about the SRBs.
On the other hand, all those capabilities have almost nothing to do with getting people or cargo into space and safely home efficiently at low cost. The tiles, for instance, were used in response to a requirement for a reusable winged spaceplane, which itself was driven by other requirements for the Air Force. The shuttle engines are great if you need them to work in a vacuum, but are really pretty lousy for engines running at sea level that can't be restarted.
So, in short, congratulations to the engineers over the years in the shuttle program for solving some huge problems, but apologies for making you work on crap that was tangential to real goal.
Exactly. All of these things failed to serve the top level requirements: safety and affordability. Indeed, together they comprehensibly prevented safety and affordability.
Some years ago, I was in a meeting at a NASA center, and a manager got up and tried to sell a particularly nonsensical solution to a problem. I stood up and picked it apart. Afterward, a couple of engineers called me aside.
First NASA engineer: "Thanks for saying those things. They needed to be said, but we can't say them."
Second NASA engineer: "Yeah, there's too much retribution around here."
Slashdot Mirror
...when you can pay your taxes with them.
RUNOFF on CTSS (1964) turned the computer into a document preparation tool. From there we got Multics runoff. The UNIX developers justified their early efforts by promising to bring runoff to AT&T without the expense of Multics. And now RUNOFF has many descendents, both in the form of markup languages and document processing applications. These are arguably a more widespread and important use of computers than actual computation.
One famous recent "paradigm shift" is the acceleration of the Hubble expansion, presumed to be caused by "dark energy", and supposedly discovered through high redshift supernovae. But out of the public view, there were other anomalies in cosmology that astrophysicists had noticed years before, such as stars somewhat older than the apparent age of the universe, and the failure of simulations to reproduce the observed patterns of galaxy clustering. I remember several times when colleagues brought up the possibility that these could be resolved by a nonzero "cosmological constant" (a special case of "dark energy"). Finally, the supernova evidence pushed these ideas into our popular articles and textbooks, creating the illusion of a sudden "paradigm shift". I think one reason the supernova results were welcomed rather than disputed was that they confirmed what many of us already suspected privately, based on different lines of evidence.
Musk once alluded to a better manufacturing process for actually building rockets. So, instead of saying that he's taking shortcuts and what not and doesn't have layers of bureacracy, what if he just has a cheaper way to build rockets that are better?
Yes. From the Model T to the Pentium, we see the winning product is the one that has the best manufacturing process behind it. Often, the product itself isn't anything special compared to the competition.
Well, he could always propose sending 1 rocket as the primary and 9 up as backups. Then he could match the price in the database while rationalizing every dollar spent as increased safety.
Nope, that wouldn't work, because the division of labor wouldn't correspond to the basis for the "independent" cost estimate, and the cost "experts" would therefore refuse to endorse it. Then there's the potential cost of lost payloads. In principle, the contractor could insure them, except NASA is forbidden by law to buy insurance.
Read this: http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
and then realize that while everything NASA seems to be luxury spending, their software development manages to have at least two orders of magnitude fewer bugs than any commercial software company.
Except that implicit in that is the idea that every bug is a disaster. SpaceX's approach is to have robust engineering rather than perfection. The idea is that small problems should not cascade into mission failures. That's how "real world" engineering works: for example, we don't use chains to hold up suspension bridges any more, because a single crack can cause a collapse. We use multi-strand cables, where cracks don't propagate from strand to strand. The fragile perfection of old-school aerospace is expensive and hazardous.
Not really. NASA generally goes with what appears most "credible" to them within the cost cap. The most important factor in credibility is matching their detailed estimates of costs, created using "parametric" methods. These methods take historical costs into account and then allow for inflation. Imagine estimating the cost of a computer by scaling from an IBM 709, assuming every performance enhancement costs money, and multiplying by inflation. Then, you refuse to try anything cheaper, because it's "risky".
The result? The bidder must propose not only a high price, but must justify that price based on costs. You must demonstrate the ability to put together and manage very inefficient processes. It usually doesn't even help to have done similar jobs efficiently: the cost "experts" don't find actual experience in conflict with their databases to be "credible". Their databases are full of previous examples of projects approved and planned with the same methodology, so the reasoning is almost perfectly circular.
Historically, nobody has been able to develop an orbital launch vehicle without government subsidy, so this credibility problem has been an impenetrable barrier to exploiting real high tech methods, where deflation, not inflation is normal. But Musk has deep enough pockets, and a talent for PR that has made it impossible to dismiss the success of Falcon as an aberration.
A lot of stuff on github is experimental, "quick and dirty" code. The amount of effort to, say, put GPL boilerplate in every file isn't large, but it isn't zero, either. So, *ask*. You send mail to me, volunteer to do this small job, I'll probably give you commit access to the repo.
Whenever I see a company focus on dissing a competitor, I immediately wonder why they're going negative campaigning.
Musk doesn't need to diss Ariane 5: his company is taking business away from them without any negativity. The thing that surprises me here is how positive he is about Ariane 6. Given how rapidly SpaceX is improving their product, I don't see how Arianespace, with its slow expensive processes, could ever get ahead with a new vehicle.
The NAS report addresses this. It's a serious possibility.
The thing to understand here is that *in principle* the net required water input is tiny (it provides the hydrogen in the hydrocarbon output stream, but that's not much compared to the water needed as a solvent), and the net required nitrogen and phosphorus inputs are zero (they aren't in the output stream). One issue is therefore the recycling of the waste stream after hydrocarbon extraction. Another is losses (especially water) from open ponds, if that's the technology of choice. The report tells us that projects to date have not adequately addressed these issues.
The two things I take away from this are:
1. The technology isn't ready yet, but it has future potential.
2. Open freshwater ponds are probably not the winning approach.
This report will undoubtedly help steer future research in this area.
There was certainly a lot of discussion of this among us at the time. I recall we wondered whether NASA would go for free return or be more radical and use more delta-V in cislunar space to get the astronauts home sooner.
But call up NASA? Be serious. Which of the 100,000 phone numbers would you call? The critical people were busy: they weren't going to talk to some random student. This was all elementary orbital mechanics, somewhat difficult to calculate and execute accurately, but not conceptually difficult at all. The flight team certainly knew this stuff. The real question was what the damaged systems could still accomplish, and that required information well beyond what we had access to. So it never occurred to anybody I know to try being a back seat driver.
It's generally not the people who create things, make things, or provide useful services who fear change. They can adapt. But if you've spent your life's effort working your way into control of a particular set of cash registers, change is very threatening indeed.
The problem with this model is that it's very hard to control your usage. There's no practical way to know in advance how much a particular click will cost. Of course, the providers love it for exactly that reason.
Some broken clouds, but they weren't much of a problem.
There is nothing more "industry unfriendly" than a genuine free market. Despite propaganda, no businessman ever wants to compete in freedom. What you want is to control the customer and the competition, not let them control you.
It costs several dollars a gram to get it up there...
The trouble is that most of that cost isn't lifting it to altitude, but getting it moving at the right velocity for the orbit you want. If you put some sort of recycling device in orbit, almost all of the junk that it encounters will be moving at high velocity relative to your device's orbital velocity. Speed will tend to be similar, but direction will be all over the place. Changing the velocity of either the device or the junk is difficult.
Lead is a reasonably valuable metal, but stationing yourself in no man's land between two armies and recycling the bullets that come at you seems a difficult way to obtain it.
In my experience as a scientist, what has increased is the pressure to publish quickly. So, people publish results that haven't been checked as much as they perhaps should be.
In some sciences there is so-called peer-review process. So it seems to me that scientists you mention who publish not thoroughly checked papers point also to the failure of the journals you don't mention to do at least semi-decent peer-reviewing process.
Peer reviewers can't check everything, especially when the conclusion results from elaborate analysis of data from complex apparatus. Sometimes you detect bonehead mistakes, but usually your focus is more on clarity than correctness: do the authors explain their methods and reasoning in enough detail that someone else can repeat the research?
But this is not fraud, and perhaps it's even healthy. Better to get crazy results out there than bury them in notebooks: sometimes they turn out to be major discoveries.
So for instance, when some not sufficiently checked results for medical treatments get published, you'd say that this is perhaps healthy?
Absolutely yes! It is the physician's responsibility to avoid basing treatments on results that haven't been independently confirmed. It is the researcher's responsibility to publish: how else will you get that independent confirmation? Other researchers need to know what they should attempt to confirm or falsify.
We're talking about the science of the journals here. This is raw "source code", checked to some degree, but not debugged. The debugging takes place in the community: if you don't publish, your results will never get properly debugged.
In my experience as a scientist, what has increased is the pressure to publish quickly. So, people publish results that haven't been checked as much as they perhaps should be. But this is not fraud, and perhaps it's even healthy. Better to get crazy results out there than bury them in notebooks: sometimes they turn out to be major discoveries.
In hockey, the most prolific scorers attempt a *lot* of shots. Many are blocked, many miss, many are saved by the goalie. But a few are goals. Gretzky said it best: "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
And the only place we can actually send people to is the ISS. i.e. nowhere. That's true today, but I can remember when we were sending people to the Moon. The only reason we stopped is that the Administration looked at our space effort as nothing more than a way to get bragging rights over the Soviets, and once they'd succeeded, they saw no reason to continue. The Moon has all the raw materials needed to build a colony, and the Sun could provide us with all the power we need, as long as we have two power stations, positioned so that at least one if them is always active. And, once we're there, we're half way to anyplace else in the Solar System, because most of the energy you need is simply to get out of the Earth's gravity well.
The cost of raw materials and energy are largely irrelevant in our present circumstances. 6061 aluminum costs less than $10 per kilogram (and the bauxite it came from is much cheaper), but a kilogram of aluminum parts fabricated and inspected to space flight standards will set you back many thousands of dollars. The cost comes from all of the human effort involved: machinists, inspectors, managers, administrators, etc. Launch vehicles are made of this high-priced stuff, and that's what makes it so expensive to send more of this stuff to space. If you export this inefficiency to space, it won't matter how cheap your resources and energy are (and humans are much more expensive as labor in space than on the ground).
What the advocates of human space flight don't get is that if space travel ever becomes a significant human activity, the infrastructure will bear no resemblance to anything we have today. The massive human ground support activity will have to be eliminated, with 99.99% of the work completely automated.
No. The problem today is that we are lifting everything from the surface of the earth. Its not automation that will significantly reduce the costs, its using "local" resources. Moon, steroids, etc.
Makes no real difference. If we ever create the infrastructure to exploit resources in space, it'll be automated, built by robots not humans. To build this infrastructure in space with human labor requires we first build the necessary infrastructure to support humans in space at reasonable cost. The only way to bootstrap this is with robots: supporting humans in space with human labor on the ground won't ever be efficient enough. And it's unlikely that humans will ever be productive as space laborers: we're very poorly adapted to space environments, although we're getting better all the time at designing robots that are well adapted.
Okay, lets make a deserved comparison to ocean voyages. During the age of European colonization and exploration, the amount of effort required on the shore to equip a sailing expedition for a year at sea was roughly one man year per person making the voyage. At that level, it was still pretty expensive, but it was possible to send a significant number of people across the oceans.
Fast forward to space voyages in the 21st century, and the ratio is about *four orders of magnitude* higher. And the only place we can actually send people to is the ISS. i.e. nowhere. At this level of inefficiency, there is absolutely no possibility of space travel ever becoming a significant human activity.
What the advocates of human space flight don't get is that if space travel ever becomes a significant human activity, the infrastructure will bear no resemblance to anything we have today. The massive human ground support activity will have to be eliminated, with 99.99% of the work completely automated. Money spent on human space flight under present circumstances merely entrenches the extremely low productivity institutions we've constructed to support it.
It is indeed true that code written by scientists often needs polish. But the other truth is that it's often necessary for a scientist to write the code. Too many programmers think that all they have to do is write code to spec. But when you're writing code that supports the needs of a subject that takes a decade to master, only someone with that mastery can understand what the specs mean.
Often, the best results emerge when a scientist writes the code, and a programmer reviews and polishes. But that can cause a lot of friction: scientists don't like criticism, and programmers would rather program than review and polish. It's a challenge for project management.
*Real* space exploration these days is performed by robots. Humans have the wrong senses, the wrong body form, and needs that are very difficult to satisfy in space. But we're very good at building and directing robots, and getting better very fast.
Let's be honest, a trained geologist with a quad-bike type vehicle could have done all the work that the MERs have done in the course of their mission within a couple of days.
But it's impossible for a geologist to survive on Mars. And nobody, especially NASA, has any credible plan to make it possible for a geologist to survive on Mars within a finite budget. But the rovers are well adapted to the job, and are getting it done.
Even sending a human into low Earth orbit takes thousands of man-hours of effort on the ground for every hour somebody spends in space. So the apparent efficiency of humans in space is an illusion. Now, if you look at, say, Magellan's budget back in 1519, the ratio of effort on land to effort at sea was more like 1:1. At that ratio, the European exploration and colonization of the world was possible. At 1000:1 it never could have been. The only way to reduce that ratio and make human activities in space truly practical is to make maximum use of robotic technology, both on the ground and in space.
I'm not trying to discount the work that the rovers and their controllers here on earth have done, but you simply can not equate their capabilities with what a living, breathing human could do in the same location.
Yeah, but that breathing business is an insoluble problem, given the institutions that would have to solve it.
I have to confess to mixed feelings about this. Given the engineering problems they were tasked to solve, I credit the guys working on the shuttle program with some terrific work.
Terrific work that solves the wrong problem is not good engineering.
What I'm saying is that on the one hand, STS is an engineering marvel for things like the thermal tiles
The tiles are a kludge to make up for the fact that the planned superalloy skin didn't work out. They have been an expensive, fragile nightmare. A killer. Competent engineering management would have recognized this as a show-stopper early. But this was NASA.
and the cross-range glider landing of the orbiter, the re-usability and throttle-ability of the SSME, especially for their weight and isp, and the SRBs... ok, well, nevermind about the SRBs.
On the other hand, all those capabilities have almost nothing to do with getting people or cargo into space and safely home efficiently at low cost. The tiles, for instance, were used in response to a requirement for a reusable winged spaceplane, which itself was driven by other requirements for the Air Force. The shuttle engines are great if you need them to work in a vacuum, but are really pretty lousy for engines running at sea level that can't be restarted.
So, in short, congratulations to the engineers over the years in the shuttle program for solving some huge problems, but apologies for making you work on crap that was tangential to real goal.
Exactly. All of these things failed to serve the top level requirements: safety and affordability. Indeed, together they comprehensibly prevented safety and affordability.
Some years ago, I was in a meeting at a NASA center, and a manager got up and tried to sell a particularly nonsensical solution to a problem. I stood up and picked it apart. Afterward, a couple of engineers called me aside.
First NASA engineer: "Thanks for saying those things. They needed to be said, but we can't say them."
Second NASA engineer: "Yeah, there's too much retribution around here."
And that's the *real* source of NASA's troubles.