I think it's particularly bad taste to be blogging about how resistant you are to earthquakes when many people are dead and suffering just a short distance away due to an earthquake.
I didn't mean that in it's form when it was canceled it was perfect. I am aware of some of the same problems that have been brought up.
Yet you failed to mention them, implying that canceling it was some form of a mistake.
I have also heard from many aerospace engineers that putting the craft on the top instead of be strapped right next to the rockets was a far safer launch method.
It's safer, but orders of magnitude more complex and expensive and difficult,
We should have kept up the technology and jigs to continue to develop our Saturn boosters.
The Saturn V is one of the few boosters to make the Shuttle look like a bargain. The Ib had such abysmal performance that no rational reason exists to continue it's production.
I think the Space Shuttle was a huge cluster-BLEEP designed by a committee of compromisers.
Every engineering project is a huge bundle of compromises.
Project Dynasoar was nearly complete when they canceled it.
And one of the reasons they canceled it was because in the form it was nearly complete in - it wouldn't have worked. The shock wave coming off the nose tended to impinge on the wings, burning the wingtip rudders off. This is one of the reasons the Shuttle 'bellyflops' through reentry rather than flying the entry entirely nose first. (That and it avoids the heavy and complicated jettisonable heatshield the Dyna-Soar required over it's cockpit windows.)
Then there is the issue of it's booster, significant work on which had just begun. It has started out just needing a Titan - but by the time is was done it was heavy enough to require uprating the Titan core and adding solid fueled boosters. (Not to mention the huge question of the effects of the massive fins required on the first stage to counteract the aerodynamic effects of the Dyna-Soar and maintain stability during launch.)
It is probably they way we should have been going into LEO.
No, no, a thousand times just fucking no. The Dyna-Soar was a prototype of the mistakes NASA would make with the Shuttle just a few years later - trying to leap too far too fast in a single bound coupled with an unwillingness/inability to stop and rethink the design when the numbers started going south.
I agree we should have stayed with aerodynamic craft rather than spam-in-a-can, but the way to go was to extend from what we knew (I.E. the X-15) rather than trying to leap from the DC-3 to the Concorde in one fell swoop. We keep trying that in space, and it just doesn't fucking work.
Yes, obviously it's those evil people who are ill who are just draining resources, obviously they should be paying for those who have a sense of entitlement to go travelling in space.
It's funny that you believe that people with a sense of entitlement to health care are somehow 'better' than those with a sense of entitlement to go traveling in space.
1. Inertial guidance systems more than accurate enough to find a given block in a specified city have been around since the 1950's. A retarded calculator could do the job, much less a half-decent P4 chip.
And as late as the 1990's inertial guidance systems that accurate costs tens of thousands of dollars and took up several cubic feet of space - and that's just for the inertial platform. You can buy cheaper and smaller platforms nowadays, but you're still talking in the low four figures range for a fully functional system. Reliably and automatically hitting a given city block is going to be right at the bleeding edge in that cost range.
2. Shape templates are also childishly easy. You aren't talking about anything sophisticated or error-proof; nothing much more complicated than a silhouette or quick scan through a few thousand images would do the trick.
Under arbitrary lighting conditions at arbitrary angles at arbitrary ranges - childishly easy it precisely isn't. The systems you link to have nothing resembling that capability.
What do you need with "computer vision", especially when a mistake will probably still do damage?
You're the one that specified computer vision, not I. (Not to mention that "doing damage" != "doing useful damage".)
You are so far out of touch it's a waste of time talking to you. Nevertheless, because your naivete is good for a laugh
On the contrary, I keep up with the related fields because weapons and ordinance are one of my hobbies. On top of having worked with inertial guidance systems professionally and keeping up with developments in that field because they are related to COTS space access, another interest of mine.
A lot of very expensive American ordnance wound up pounding the hell out of civilian targets in the former Yugoslavia because some nasty-minded people figured out all you needed to simulate a SAM site was a microwave oven and a few basic tools.
Actually, the Serbs were fairly effective using a variety of techniques (but not the one you cite), but their main successes were propaganda - by altering photographs and staging scenes they made available to journalists to make it look as if civilian targets had been pounded.
Get a clue.
I have a clue. You just can't recognize it because you know so little while mistakenly believing you know much. You're roughly equivalent of a four year old who has barely mastered 1+1=2 wandering into an advanced calculus class.
When I find two major errors in such an important report that was supposedly written, edited, and reviewed by some of the top experts in the world - I wonder what other mistakes slipped by. Checking your writeup against your sources and verifying those sources is something even Wikipedia enforces.
I'm doubly suspicious when it takes the people derided as 'deniers' to find the errors, but the people who support the conclusions can't be bothered to take time out of their cheerleading to double check the document themselves. That smells of religion, not science.
Good luck with that. If I were designing one of those and my objective was to kill innocent people and/or disrupt a country's manufacturing/distribution infrastructure, all I need is a chip that will get it where it's going, run through a series of shape templates (a bus, train or transport truck or specific building, for example), then dive into it.
ROTFL. I've always loved how Slashdotters will say "all I need to accomplish X is Y", and then run through a specification implying its triviality but seemingly without that faintest clue that Y is at or near the bleeding edge, or requires hardware of software unlikely to be available to the person performing X, or will requires months/years of dedicated development time....
Easy, cheap, and no external control needed. Another plus: hardening such throw-away devices is usually easy and cheap. Example: Inertial navigation to target, flip on the video for a quick look-see, then hit whatever's closest.
If you have the capability to build cheap and easy (and accurate) machine vision at this level, you have no need to resort to terrorism. The world is going to be beating a path to your door to buy the system. You'll need to build a fleet of these drones just to keep the hordes of venture capitalists and investors rushing to throw cash at your feet at bay.
Drive By Wire in itself is a bit stupid idea... Servos break more easily tha hydraulic cylinders or legs. Electric connections get loose easier than hydraulic sealings start to leak. Nevermind the lost feeling of brake, gas and clutch pedals.
We, the US Navy, have been driving submarines by wire for decades - and hydraulics are by far more troublesome than the electronic/electrical portions of the system. (And hydraulics require orders of magnitude more maintenance to boot.)
When some one says it is millions of lines of code it is them bragging how much effort they put into making the application deployable... However if there is a bug that needs to be fixed it is normally part of a module where you need to test to make sure that it doesn't effect around 5000 lines of code.
5000 lines of times however many lines of code are in the modules the buggy module interfaces with, depending on the nature of the bug. Just because a single module runs without a bug doesn't mean that it plays nice with others.
You can throw a faster processor at slow code, but you can't throw more hardware at coding mistakes.
Actually, you can - as the Space Shuttle has a secondary control computer running different (and vastly simplified) code from a different vendor specifically in the event the primary computers have an undiscovered software problem.
That's not really practical in 99.9999999% percent of the applications, but it is possible.
If anything, it should be a pretty easy modification because it's turning it into more of a traditional style rocket, since they now don't have to worry about the stresses of a big heavy orbiter stuck on the side providing much of the thrust.
That's just the thing though - it's built to have a big heavy orbiter on the side, it's not built to have engines on the bottom and cargo on top. The load paths are different, the stresses are different, the vibration environment is different... It's a minor win if they can reuse the center barrel sections and intertank structure unchanged - but those are already the cheapest and simplest parts of the vehicle.
The SRB's are, at first glance, the same... But they too now experience a different environment than that which they are designed for. (In particular, both the SRB's and SSME's are both now in very different thermal and aerodynamic environments.) So both are going to need to be recertified, but it will be a big win if no major issues arise. And those issue won't be (or wouldn't have been) discovered until the design process was much further along than it was.
The tail and the nose are all new - and the tail in particular is a complex structure with major structural issues due to the need to transmit thrust from the engines to the vehicle and to support the load of the vehicle. Then there is all the plumbing and wiring the engines will require. It's the most expensive and complex portion of the vehicle next to the engines, and it's all new.
Don't get me wrong, DIRECT/Jupiter could be a big win (or could have been), but there are a lot of pitfalls and potential problems down in the fine print that virtually nobody has read. The creators and proponents of DIRECT/Jupiter have been seriously partisan (for lack of a better word), and more than a little willing to gloss over those pitfalls.
I am pretty sure that the internal state of Toyota right now is a safety mania that trumps all else that would make a Puppeteer proud.
Speaking as someone who has been in a company in full recall mode, if there is ever a time to trust that a company really is putting safety first, now is the time.
+1 for the Puppeteer reference.
-2 for seemingly being unaware that Toyota tried to sweep this problem under the rug with the silly nonsense about floor mats. They only became safety conscious when those efforts to shift blame failed.
It is usually easier to write bug-free microcontroller code (ECUs and such) than general purpose PC code. Also, the distributed nature of most automotive microcontroller code keeps code separated into nice little easily-testable modules.
That's fine for the individual little code modules. But the code doesn't run as an individual little modules - it runs as part of an integrated and distributed system and has to be tested as such.
So he's using it wrong because he optimizes it and actually evaluates the running code, and you're using it correctly because you treat it as a black box?
There is a huge difference between the Saturn V's heating issues and Ares V's.
I never said they were identical - I merely pointed out that huge engineering challenges are routine when developing rockets and used the Saturn V to illustrate that a) challenges arise in all rockets*, and b) that weight growth in the payload isn't something new**.
* Even though the Saturn V is regarded as a screaming success, its development was very rocky indeed. If we'd had the internet back then, there's not a doubt in my mind you'd hear many of the same (mostly ignorant) outraged shouts that we are hearing over the Ares V. Ditto for the Jupiter if it was ever developed.
** The LEM in particular went through three dedicated programs to reduce its weight. They were tweaking the Saturn V hardware and ascent profile in order to accommodate the ever increasing weight of the Apollo payload right through the flight of Apollo 17.
Did they press a bright green legal button labelled, "Push here to initiate site takedown process"? Yes, they did.
No, they didn't. Cryptome pushed the bright red "take my site down" button when they refused to comply with a legal DMCA request. The choice and decision was theirs, not Microsoft's.
The problem is that a NASA project is long term, while a Senator only sees mid term. The space shuttle development ran from the late 60's to the first launch in 1981. Even Apollo was a seven year program, one year longer than the term of a senator.
Actually, from the inception of the Apollo program as a general purpose Earth orbiter (in 1960), through JFK's repurposing of the program, to the Lunar landing was *nine* years. And it only received significant funding for four (64-67) of those years. (Though 1967 funding was almost 40% off the 1965 peak.)
On top of that, the lunar landing mission depended specifically on the F-1 engine which had been in development since 1956.
It's a perfectly sensible design, unlike an entirely-new design like the Ares. It reuses components that already exist and are highly tested and perfected
The problem is, that many of the components aren't used in the form in which they are highly tested and perfected - they're heavily modified.
In the same way, and for the same reasons, that a compact economy car is cheaper than an 18 wheeler.
As far as working goes - practically every single flying booster has a reliability rate around 98-99%, *including* the Shuttle. The ones that don't have a rate in that range have a rate that is worse.
You do realize that the plans were unworkable, the designs flawed, and the very engineers for them introduced alternative designs which could be produced sooner/faster/cheaper.
Assuming those alternative designs themselves didn't turn out to be unworkable or flawed. And assuming they didn't run into any significant development or engineering challenges along the way. (IOW assuming they behave completely unlike any other major engineering project.)
Paper vehicles are always perfect and without sin. The problems don't start until you try to make them real.
Look up "Ares V Base Heating Issue" sometime.
Look up "Saturn V base heating issues" sometime. Or to save you the trouble, I'll summarize: The Saturn V's S-Ib stage had to have a fifth engine inserted fairly late in development to a) prevent plume recirculation from frying the other four engines, and b) because the Apollo spacecraft kept growing ever heavier.
The management at NASA and the special interests behind key areas kept pushing for Constellation due to it's huge R&D budget, despite the laws of physics which stated that it would never work with the designs as/is.
NASA was hamstrung by an inadequate budget and the inability to work out the design incrementally (as they did with Apollo). They were forced to cast too many thing into stone too early because of Congressional politics.
The laws of physics have absolutely nothing to do with the situation.
It was obvious 5 years ago that this would happen, which is why NASA's engineers "moonlighted" and introduced the DIRECT launch design. It could be ready from approval to launch within 36 months, as it is based on existing technologies *and* it has already passed PDR.
As I said above, that assumes that no major issues arose during development or engineering. This isn't too different from assuming the Sun will rise in the west tomorrow.
I mostly agree. I've been saying for some years now that back in the day, geeks/nerds were people who were passionate about some out-of-the-mainstream interest. SF, computers, model railroads, real railroads, chess, war games, obscure bits of history...
But nowadays 'nerd' is synonymous with what would have been called a 'computer geek'.
The meaning of geek has suffered an even worse fate - geek now means conformity. It's not just about being into Star Trek or anime, it's about having seen and being into the right anime. About knowing the popular cultural references. About having read the right books and seen the right movies. (Hence the phrase "geek cred" and "turn in your geek card")
I don't call myself a geek or a nerd nowadays, because both terms have been rendered essentially meaningless.
There's that "money" thing again. Or are you saying that NASA and Big Aero failed in cost-effectively designing the STS?
Big Aero is a red herring. And it's a mistaken assumption that I'm talking about money alone, because I'm not. I'm also talking about reputation, and national pride. It has nothing to do with the design per se but how the design evolved.
The money problem is simple: NASA overpromised and underdelivered, Congress overdemanded and underfunded. Everything else springs from that simple premise along with a generous helping of political pressure on NASA to keep the prestige and job pumps running.
In the wake of Apollo everyone wanted a huge high prestige project - but nobody wanted to actually pay for it. As a result, when problems arose (some of them due to immature technology, some of them due to underfunding and schedule pressure [1]) nobody ever went back and examined the basic assumptions. Nobody ever said we can't actually do this without more money or more experience. Like Titanic everyone assumed the ship was unsinkable[2], after all hadn't we just gone to the fucking moon?, and steamed full tilt into the ice field.
Instead people are learning a lot of 'false lessons' from the Shuttle
What are those false lessons?
Well, there's a wide variety - but they all stem from one flawed premise: Expecting a first generation engineering prototype vehicle to behave like an nth generation mature system. Essentially holding a Wright Flyer to 747 standards. (That's perhaps a bit extreme in overall magnitude, but it serves as a general indicator of the problem.)
the irrational obsession with crew safety (space and rockets are dangerous; people are going to die no matter how redundant and thus expensive you make the vehicles)
Well, they won't get any safer unless we try and there no particular reason not to try. There's nothing magically dangerous about spaceflight that can't be fixed with experience and engineering. The problem is that, again, we're looking at the Wright Flyer v. 747 issue again - trying to leap too far with each step with little patience for actual test programs to gain that needed experience.
putting all your eggs in a few really expensive baskets leaves no money for designing and building better baskets.
As such things go, the Shuttle isn't particularly expensive, not significantly more than any other engineering development program seeking the same goals.
The problem is that Congress and the Administration won't budget the money to develop new eggs. Partly because NASA has proven so inept at doing so, which is itself partly due to them never being allowed to try and fail and learn from failure. NASA is institutionally afraid of failure as stain on their image and because Congress treats failure brutally. Congress won't accept failure because they insist in not funding smaller development projects and thus every project is a huge chunk of national prestige. It's a Gordian knot combined with positive feedback loops. (Ask any engineer what happens to a system with no negative feedback loops, only positive ones.)
If Congress had been willing to hand to NASA, no strings attached, the amount of money the Federal government spends on entitlement programs in Los Angeles alone... (And if NASA would cut through it's hidebound bureaucracy) we could field a new generation of spacecraft every ten years or so. But neither Congress or NASA will ever indulge in a program where failure will be the natural course of things while we learn.
[1] For example, the joint rotation problem that killed Challenger was discovered IIRC in 1974 - but there was neither tim
I felt there was a bit more to add here. NASA plans to run the ISS through 2020, perhaps even well beyond without any more MPLMs. That's at least nine years of operation. You agree implicitly that they can do so.
I did no such thing - I pointed out how NASA is urgently seeking replacement capacity to replace MPLM's.
My view is that NASA has determined, correctly, that neither continued use of the Shuttle nor MPLMs are beneficial to the operation of the ISS and the future plans of NASA and the US in space.
ROTFLMAO. If the capacity provided by Shuttle and MPLM's are not needed, then why is NASA scrambling so hard to find vehicles that replace that capacity?
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like the latest version of those who don't have live in poverty romanticizing the lives of the peasantry.
I bet that, as usual, the peasants and the poor don't feel particularly blessed.
I think it's particularly bad taste to be blogging about how resistant you are to earthquakes when many people are dead and suffering just a short distance away due to an earthquake.
Yet you failed to mention them, implying that canceling it was some form of a mistake.
It's safer, but orders of magnitude more complex and expensive and difficult,
The Saturn V is one of the few boosters to make the Shuttle look like a bargain. The Ib had such abysmal performance that no rational reason exists to continue it's production.
Every engineering project is a huge bundle of compromises.
And one of the reasons they canceled it was because in the form it was nearly complete in - it wouldn't have worked. The shock wave coming off the nose tended to impinge on the wings, burning the wingtip rudders off. This is one of the reasons the Shuttle 'bellyflops' through reentry rather than flying the entry entirely nose first. (That and it avoids the heavy and complicated jettisonable heatshield the Dyna-Soar required over it's cockpit windows.)
Then there is the issue of it's booster, significant work on which had just begun. It has started out just needing a Titan - but by the time is was done it was heavy enough to require uprating the Titan core and adding solid fueled boosters. (Not to mention the huge question of the effects of the massive fins required on the first stage to counteract the aerodynamic effects of the Dyna-Soar and maintain stability during launch.)
No, no, a thousand times just fucking no. The Dyna-Soar was a prototype of the mistakes NASA would make with the Shuttle just a few years later - trying to leap too far too fast in a single bound coupled with an unwillingness/inability to stop and rethink the design when the numbers started going south.
I agree we should have stayed with aerodynamic craft rather than spam-in-a-can, but the way to go was to extend from what we knew (I.E. the X-15) rather than trying to leap from the DC-3 to the Concorde in one fell swoop. We keep trying that in space, and it just doesn't fucking work.
It's funny that you believe that people with a sense of entitlement to health care are somehow 'better' than those with a sense of entitlement to go traveling in space.
I say keep them both the hell out of my wallet.
And as late as the 1990's inertial guidance systems that accurate costs tens of thousands of dollars and took up several cubic feet of space - and that's just for the inertial platform. You can buy cheaper and smaller platforms nowadays, but you're still talking in the low four figures range for a fully functional system. Reliably and automatically hitting a given city block is going to be right at the bleeding edge in that cost range.
Under arbitrary lighting conditions at arbitrary angles at arbitrary ranges - childishly easy it precisely isn't. The systems you link to have nothing resembling that capability.
You're the one that specified computer vision, not I. (Not to mention that "doing damage" != "doing useful damage".)
On the contrary, I keep up with the related fields because weapons and ordinance are one of my hobbies. On top of having worked with inertial guidance systems professionally and keeping up with developments in that field because they are related to COTS space access, another interest of mine.
Actually, the Serbs were fairly effective using a variety of techniques (but not the one you cite), but their main successes were propaganda - by altering photographs and staging scenes they made available to journalists to make it look as if civilian targets had been pounded.
I have a clue. You just can't recognize it because you know so little while mistakenly believing you know much. You're roughly equivalent of a four year old who has barely mastered 1+1=2 wandering into an advanced calculus class.
When I find two major errors in such an important report that was supposedly written, edited, and reviewed by some of the top experts in the world - I wonder what other mistakes slipped by. Checking your writeup against your sources and verifying those sources is something even Wikipedia enforces.
I'm doubly suspicious when it takes the people derided as 'deniers' to find the errors, but the people who support the conclusions can't be bothered to take time out of their cheerleading to double check the document themselves. That smells of religion, not science.
ROTFL. I've always loved how Slashdotters will say "all I need to accomplish X is Y", and then run through a specification implying its triviality but seemingly without that faintest clue that Y is at or near the bleeding edge, or requires hardware of software unlikely to be available to the person performing X, or will requires months/years of dedicated development time....
If you have the capability to build cheap and easy (and accurate) machine vision at this level, you have no need to resort to terrorism. The world is going to be beating a path to your door to buy the system. You'll need to build a fleet of these drones just to keep the hordes of venture capitalists and investors rushing to throw cash at your feet at bay.
That seem to repeat more or less exactly, but actually repeat within an unpredictable range of values and on an unpredictable range of cycle timings.
Which is why there are as many technical trading systems as there are gambling systems, with roughly the same results.
We, the US Navy, have been driving submarines by wire for decades - and hydraulics are by far more troublesome than the electronic/electrical portions of the system. (And hydraulics require orders of magnitude more maintenance to boot.)
5000 lines of times however many lines of code are in the modules the buggy module interfaces with, depending on the nature of the bug. Just because a single module runs without a bug doesn't mean that it plays nice with others.
Actually, you can - as the Space Shuttle has a secondary control computer running different (and vastly simplified) code from a different vendor specifically in the event the primary computers have an undiscovered software problem.
That's not really practical in 99.9999999% percent of the applications, but it is possible.
That's just the thing though - it's built to have a big heavy orbiter on the side, it's not built to have engines on the bottom and cargo on top. The load paths are different, the stresses are different, the vibration environment is different... It's a minor win if they can reuse the center barrel sections and intertank structure unchanged - but those are already the cheapest and simplest parts of the vehicle.
The SRB's are, at first glance, the same... But they too now experience a different environment than that which they are designed for. (In particular, both the SRB's and SSME's are both now in very different thermal and aerodynamic environments.) So both are going to need to be recertified, but it will be a big win if no major issues arise. And those issue won't be (or wouldn't have been) discovered until the design process was much further along than it was.
The tail and the nose are all new - and the tail in particular is a complex structure with major structural issues due to the need to transmit thrust from the engines to the vehicle and to support the load of the vehicle. Then there is all the plumbing and wiring the engines will require. It's the most expensive and complex portion of the vehicle next to the engines, and it's all new.
Don't get me wrong, DIRECT/Jupiter could be a big win (or could have been), but there are a lot of pitfalls and potential problems down in the fine print that virtually nobody has read. The creators and proponents of DIRECT/Jupiter have been seriously partisan (for lack of a better word), and more than a little willing to gloss over those pitfalls.
+1 for the Puppeteer reference.
-2 for seemingly being unaware that Toyota tried to sweep this problem under the rug with the silly nonsense about floor mats. They only became safety conscious when those efforts to shift blame failed.
That's fine for the individual little code modules. But the code doesn't run as an individual little modules - it runs as part of an integrated and distributed system and has to be tested as such.
So he's using it wrong because he optimizes it and actually evaluates the running code, and you're using it correctly because you treat it as a black box?
Interesting.
I never said they were identical - I merely pointed out that huge engineering challenges are routine when developing rockets and used the Saturn V to illustrate that a) challenges arise in all rockets*, and b) that weight growth in the payload isn't something new**.
* Even though the Saturn V is regarded as a screaming success, its development was very rocky indeed. If we'd had the internet back then, there's not a doubt in my mind you'd hear many of the same (mostly ignorant) outraged shouts that we are hearing over the Ares V. Ditto for the Jupiter if it was ever developed.
** The LEM in particular went through three dedicated programs to reduce its weight. They were tweaking the Saturn V hardware and ascent profile in order to accommodate the ever increasing weight of the Apollo payload right through the flight of Apollo 17.
No, they didn't. Cryptome pushed the bright red "take my site down" button when they refused to comply with a legal DMCA request. The choice and decision was theirs, not Microsoft's.
Actually, from the inception of the Apollo program as a general purpose Earth orbiter (in 1960), through JFK's repurposing of the program, to the Lunar landing was *nine* years. And it only received significant funding for four (64-67) of those years. (Though 1967 funding was almost 40% off the 1965 peak.)
On top of that, the lunar landing mission depended specifically on the F-1 engine which had been in development since 1956.
The problem is, that many of the components aren't used in the form in which they are highly tested and perfected - they're heavily modified.
In the same way, and for the same reasons, that a compact economy car is cheaper than an 18 wheeler.
As far as working goes - practically every single flying booster has a reliability rate around 98-99%, *including* the Shuttle. The ones that don't have a rate in that range have a rate that is worse.
Assuming those alternative designs themselves didn't turn out to be unworkable or flawed. And assuming they didn't run into any significant development or engineering challenges along the way. (IOW assuming they behave completely unlike any other major engineering project.)
Paper vehicles are always perfect and without sin. The problems don't start until you try to make them real.
Look up "Saturn V base heating issues" sometime. Or to save you the trouble, I'll summarize: The Saturn V's S-Ib stage had to have a fifth engine inserted fairly late in development to a) prevent plume recirculation from frying the other four engines, and b) because the Apollo spacecraft kept growing ever heavier.
NASA was hamstrung by an inadequate budget and the inability to work out the design incrementally (as they did with Apollo). They were forced to cast too many thing into stone too early because of Congressional politics.
The laws of physics have absolutely nothing to do with the situation.
As I said above, that assumes that no major issues arose during development or engineering. This isn't too different from assuming the Sun will rise in the west tomorrow.
I mostly agree. I've been saying for some years now that back in the day, geeks/nerds were people who were passionate about some out-of-the-mainstream interest. SF, computers, model railroads, real railroads, chess, war games, obscure bits of history...
But nowadays 'nerd' is synonymous with what would have been called a 'computer geek'.
The meaning of geek has suffered an even worse fate - geek now means conformity. It's not just about being into Star Trek or anime, it's about having seen and being into the right anime. About knowing the popular cultural references. About having read the right books and seen the right movies. (Hence the phrase "geek cred" and "turn in your geek card")
I don't call myself a geek or a nerd nowadays, because both terms have been rendered essentially meaningless.
Hmm... I guess I don't agree after all.
Big Aero is a red herring. And it's a mistaken assumption that I'm talking about money alone, because I'm not. I'm also talking about reputation, and national pride. It has nothing to do with the design per se but how the design evolved.
The money problem is simple: NASA overpromised and underdelivered, Congress overdemanded and underfunded. Everything else springs from that simple premise along with a generous helping of political pressure on NASA to keep the prestige and job pumps running.
In the wake of Apollo everyone wanted a huge high prestige project - but nobody wanted to actually pay for it. As a result, when problems arose (some of them due to immature technology, some of them due to underfunding and schedule pressure [1]) nobody ever went back and examined the basic assumptions. Nobody ever said we can't actually do this without more money or more experience. Like Titanic everyone assumed the ship was unsinkable[2], after all hadn't we just gone to the fucking moon?, and steamed full tilt into the ice field.
Well, there's a wide variety - but they all stem from one flawed premise: Expecting a first generation engineering prototype vehicle to behave like an nth generation mature system. Essentially holding a Wright Flyer to 747 standards. (That's perhaps a bit extreme in overall magnitude, but it serves as a general indicator of the problem.)
Well, they won't get any safer unless we try and there no particular reason not to try. There's nothing magically dangerous about spaceflight that can't be fixed with experience and engineering. The problem is that, again, we're looking at the Wright Flyer v. 747 issue again - trying to leap too far with each step with little patience for actual test programs to gain that needed experience.
As such things go, the Shuttle isn't particularly expensive, not significantly more than any other engineering development program seeking the same goals.
The problem is that Congress and the Administration won't budget the money to develop new eggs. Partly because NASA has proven so inept at doing so, which is itself partly due to them never being allowed to try and fail and learn from failure. NASA is institutionally afraid of failure as stain on their image and because Congress treats failure brutally. Congress won't accept failure because they insist in not funding smaller development projects and thus every project is a huge chunk of national prestige. It's a Gordian knot combined with positive feedback loops. (Ask any engineer what happens to a system with no negative feedback loops, only positive ones.)
If Congress had been willing to hand to NASA, no strings attached, the amount of money the Federal government spends on entitlement programs in Los Angeles alone... (And if NASA would cut through it's hidebound bureaucracy) we could field a new generation of spacecraft every ten years or so. But neither Congress or NASA will ever indulge in a program where failure will be the natural course of things while we learn.
[1] For example, the joint rotation problem that killed Challenger was discovered IIRC in 1974 - but there was neither tim
I did no such thing - I pointed out how NASA is urgently seeking replacement capacity to replace MPLM's.
ROTFLMAO. If the capacity provided by Shuttle and MPLM's are not needed, then why is NASA scrambling so hard to find vehicles that replace that capacity?