Goes to what I've been thinking for years. Separate the cargo from the humans. They have vastly different and sometimes conflicting needs and the launch vehicle design to support both is much too complex. Use Big Dumb Rockets (BDRs) to lift cargo (heavy), smarter, safer ones to lift humans (light).
Except - the various SDV's (Shuttle Derived Vehicles) don't do that. The same rocket is used for both cargo and manned flight, they just use two of them - one for each. (Frankly a rocket that can't be trusted for people shouldn't be trusted with billion dollar cargoes.)
In the medium term (say 10 - 15 years), advances by companies like Scaled Composites show that runway-to-orbit-to-runway is possible
Um - no. SpaceShip One isn't an orbiter any more than a R/C sail plane is a jet fighter, there's simply no reasonable comparison.
These (SDV) schemes are stupid - the worst of all possible worlds. They keep the standing army at LC-39 intact, they keep the pork flowing to the same small circle of aerospace contractors, and they keep the expensive and flawed SRB and ET in service. On top of that, their low flight rates means that costs won't drop significantly.
Re:What about the Martian Poles
on
Ice Lake on Mars
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· Score: 1
There's something I've never understood about this quest for water on Mars.
Why do Mars' frozen poles not get more attention in this quest for water?
Because the 'ice' in the Martian polar regions is dry ice (frozen CO2), not water ice.
Re:Living On Mars? A Little Dose Of Reality
on
Ice Lake on Mars
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· Score: 1
No, you don't have to take fuel for the return trip. You produce it on Mars by extracting carbon from the CO2 atmosphere and combining it with a small store of hydrogen you bring with you. Then you have methane, a perfectly respectable rocket fuel. The oxidizer gets extracted from the CO2 atmosphere as well.
That's the theory anyhow.
The reality is that processes have been only tested on the lab bench - they've never been tested under field conditions. (I.E. with dust/etc in the intake stream, trace gases, extremely long run time...) There are major concerns about filtration, I.E. how do you clean them? How do you clean them without contaminating your system? There are major concerns about creating a system that can operate for months/years with little maintenance. There are concerns about the impacts on the process from trace gasses in the atmosphere of Mars.... And on and on.
Very simply under Clinton the EPA refused to let NASA use Freon to apply the foam to the H2 tank.
[sigh] 'The Lie that Will Not Die' raises it's hoary head again... Once more into the breach.
The 'new' foam is only used on acreage foam. The hand sprayed/sculpted foam (which killed Columbia and produced the big scary chunk after SRB sep on the current flight) is still the old freon blown foam. This is very plainly spelled out in the CAIB report and recent NASA press releases.
This story is completely contradicted by the CAIB report - furthermore this graph/image plainly shows that NASA *has* been making progress in reducing foam shedding/tile damage caused by the 1998 switch to 'enviromentally friendly foam'.
I know much of/. will be complaining about how this is about the Bush Administration attacking science in their quest to please big business,
I doubt anyone in the upper levels of the Administration even know about the issue - the (US) goverment isn't some huge monolith where everyone is in absolute sync with the Top and the Top is universally omniscient.
That being said, TFA is somewhat misleading in claiming the proposal is/was 'secret'. It's been kicking around for a couple of years now.
What there is a shortage of is American developers willing to work for the same wages as receptionists.
More accurately, there is no shortage of developers who think they should be paid the wages that were typical of the bubble era as opposed to current market rates.
You know what annoys me more? Geeks like you who dissect every good thing, every litte progress
Your comment should have been score "-5 Misses The Point".
His point was, that Spaceship One/Two *isn't* progress - not on the space side of the house anyhow. It's a really, really, neat aircraft - it's not a spacecraft. It's a sideshow - a carnival attraction.
And a lot of people who should know better having been drooling all over themselves as if it was the Second Coming.
The large piece of foam that was seen to fall off Discovery this time is AGAIN essentially the same piece of foam that doomed Columbia. (Foam from the external tank bipod strut.)
The changes undertaken during the last 2.5 years were supposed to prevent that particular location from shedding foam!
The main reason for putting the extra cameras on Discovery was to see if the preventative fixes worked. They didn't!
Welcome to the real world - sometimes fixes don't work. Sometimes fixes make the situation worse rather than better.
It may be argued that the corrective programs were not large or agressive enough - but to claim they were non-existent is sheer ignorance. Equally, it's foolish to blame management, when the fingers point equally at the engineers.
I did NOT say that corrective programs were "non-existent"; those are your words being put in my mouth, and I admit to being irked about being called ignorant for statements that aren't mine.
You are correct - you didn't say that. I should have phrased my statement "you utterly ignored the fact that corrective actions were in progress in your haste to slam management". An error you continue to make in this post.
When you post a long diatribe against management and claim (contrary to evidence) that the risks were treated as 'normal', that's exactly what you are saying. The foam shedding was not 'dismissed' (your words) nor was the O-ring problem accepted as 'inevitable' (again your words). In your original post you ignored the truth (that corrective action was in progress) in favor of the sensational (dammed management and their handwaving).
I did say that risks that were initially seen as serious problems, came to be accepted as "normal" over time; the point being that serious risks do not diminish just because they become familiar.
The problem is - that statement is utterly false. If the risks were seen as 'normal', then there would not have been corrective actions being taken to reduce the risk. They were not treated as being familiar - but they equally were not being treated as if they were as serious as they were. The difference between the statements is crucial to understanding the causes of the accident.
Even if you don't agree with my assessments, I hope you will understand my conclusions are not uninformed ones.
Uh, dude, are you insane. Howard Stern, every morning, has some chick moaning away in some sex scene. Daytime soaps have many steamy moments, as do evening shows. Not "hard core", but neither is the sex in the Hot Coffee mod - which, I wonder, have you even seen?
Yes, I've seen it. And nothing on Howard Stern, daytime soaps, or evening shows even remotely approaches it. None of them shows fellatio (as does Hot Coffee), none of them show a man pumping away between the legs of a nude woman.
You're delusional if you think anything shown in the examples you cite compare at all to Hot Coffee.
Possibly the best post on the whole issue - both the mod and the lawsuit. (But I see the/. hivemind is already hard at work making it the victims fault as usual. The idea that folks other than them might have standards is alien and frightening.)
Nonsense. There are numerous technical reasons for having contrary content included in the game that is not designed ever to be exposed to human eyes.
Cite them.
For example, in the sims the models get naked, and are blurred - the blur code can be disabled.
Which is meaningless When you disable the blur you see - nothing. There are no genitals to be hidden that require the blur. The blur is there to conform to the modern expectation (via tv) that naked humans will be blurred in certain areas.
External content is external content - even if it's just flipping a bit.
ROTFLMAO. Even though the CRC of the source files remains unchanged, regardless of the status of the bit... Even though the content is on a read-only disk... it's external content.
The mental contortions/.ers have been going through to avoid admitting that there is a problem is utterly astonishing.
Park it at the Space Station for use as quarters and an extra instrument platform,
Won't work. The Shuttle isn't designed to stay active in space for longer than 2-3 weeks. It will run out of reactants for the fuel cells after that, and ISS doesn't have the power generation capacity to support it.
then send up a couple of extra Soyuz to bring the crew down??
There's no such beast. The Russians pretty much build them as the need them - and don't have the capacity to build more.
How about switching back to the older foam that shead less. NASA switched to an "envrionmentally friendly" foam a few years back, even though they have an exemption...
That's partly truth and partly fiction. The 'enviromentally friendly' foam is used for acreage foam (and has lead to the 'popcorn' problems). The ramp that broke off was made from the older "enviromentally unfriendly" foam. At any rate, Columbia flew with an older tank, all if it's insulation was the older "unfriendly" foam.
Much has been made of the two types of foam, but it's a non-issue in reality.
Maybe they should start painting the foam again, as called for in the initial design spec. I know if was heavy and expensive, but it might stick together better.
Go pick up a paint chip - try and snap it in two. Notice how easy it is.
Ponder the likelyhood of something that weak making any difference.
The mindset that foam was not likely to cause loss of structural integrity, was so strong for NASA shuttle managers that when the Columbia launched for the last time, they did not have a proper way to evaluate the extent of damage from foam. But the mindset that "foam is an expected event, it hasn't led to shuttle loss before" was already too well entrenched, and so the risk of wing impact damage was essentially dismissed.
Right. That explains why NASA had an extensive and ongoing program to reduce foam shedding... That's why we had so many images from NASA examining possible wing impacts... (The problem was the risk of *RCC* impact was downplayed.)
It is important to remember that the exact same problem in mindset doomed the Challenger flight. The O-rings were not designed to allow any burn through of the rubber. When it started to occur, it was accepted as an inevitable consequence of launch, rather than a fatal design flaw.
Right. That's why NASA had an extensive and ongoing program to analyze and correct the joint problems. (The design finally accepted post Challenger was actually approved in 1984..)
NASA management downplayed the risk so much that even when engineers insisted that such a failure was more likely on a cold launch, their objections were not well understood.
Of course it wasn't understood... The engineers had been telling management all along that things were fine - the existing design was low risk and the fix was in. (Which, incidentally, is the same thing the engineers said prior to Columbia's last launch.) *That* is why managment was so testy with the engineers on the eve of Challenger's launch - with no change in evidence, the engineers were changing what they'd been telling managment. (Especially since the worst burn-through incidents had been during warm weather launches.)
It may be argued that the corrective programs were not large or agressive enough - but to claim they were non-existent is sheer ignorance. Equally, it's foolish to blame management, when the fingers point equally at the engineers.
No, they simply look at the register for when this thing was sold, then check the security cameras. Unless you bought this thing with a mask on, I bet they now have a photograph of you.
Only if they do so within a fairly short time (24 hours), as the tapes are typically re-used within that time.
Well, considering people paid >10 Million for just getting into low earth orbit, 100 million for going all the way to the moon (including seeing earth as a tiny sphere in the disctance) doesnt seem _that_ out of place...
Considering the pool of people with $100 million to blow is considerably smaller than the none-too-big pool of people with $10 million...
The Soyuz capsule was designed to travel to the moon as the Zond variant. The system was tested in the late 1960s, using the same type of Proton boosted soyuz capsules to orbit the moon and return, and did so with animals aboard that survived.
True. But the Zond variant had a heavier heatshield than the Soyuz base model, and it was a variant of the long(er) duration free-flight Soyuz, not the short duration station taxi of today.
But yes, other then being wrong in almost every other respect,
No, the person who is in the wrong is you - by assuming a spacecraft tested three times (all failures to one degree or another) forty years ago means that no testing will be required.
I find it odd that Russia is at the forefront of commercial space travel.
Except - they aren't. The announcement today is just the latest in a long string of press releases with little chance of actually seeing the light of day.
but I somehow thought that by now a public company could have pulled it off already.
Few public companies will even try something that has such a high cost of entry (up to half a billion dollars US) and such dismal prospects of any reasonable return on that investment.
Loss of landing radar nearly leading to landing abort (Apollo 14 again)
This one is new to me, although I wouldn't claim to be the foremost expert on Apollo.
It's right there in one of the tick books you claimed to have read and understood. (And for someone who claims not to be an expert - you sure make a lot of positive statements.)
Could you have confused this with the 1201 and 1202 program alarms during the final stages of landing on Apollo 11? The reason that I bring this up is that this was one of NASA's finest hours.
ROTFLMAO. NASA screwed up documentation, change control, quality control, and testing... And then had to make a diving catch to avoid losing a mission.
Hardly a 'finest hour'.
About a week prior to the launch of Apollo 11, someone in the test group noticed that they had not done a very good job of simulating the program alarms, so they ran a some simulations. When the actual program alarms happened, they knew immediately what they meant and how to handle them, which ultimately saved the mission.
In other words - the screwed the pooch on training (on top of the other screwups) and caught it by chance nearly at the last moment. That's the very definition of a diving catch.
Here's a partial list of books that I've read on the matter
You claim to have read them - but you demonstrate clearly you haven't understood them.
A brute force dock with the LEM wasn't a diving catch or a near miss. It was a calculated risk that still fell within mission rules.
No, the mission rules allowed a brute force docking in lunar orbit when the LEM was returning - and the lives of the landing crew were on the line and potential damage to the docking system didn't matter. They didn't allow for the same during T&D when damage could abort the entire mission. It was a diving catch - one of many. (BTW - both the 51-L and 107 missions were calulated risks as well. But NASA lost those bets - they were lucky to have never done so in the Mercury-Apollo era.)
The Apollo spacecraft was *far* from debugged.
Absolutely. And so is the shuttle. Don't get me wrong, the shuttle is a great system, but if I had to put my ass on the line then I'd fly on Apollo any day. The reason why is simple - There's an old story (yes, I wax nostalgic) about Werner Von Braun personally man-rating a system so that they could get it out the door. I don't know about you, but it says a lot to me that instead of sending an expendible flunky to do the job, Von Braun did it himself.
ROTFLMAO. If Von Braun 'personally man rated' something - that means he personally signed a piece of paper. (Something that he as Head of Center and Head of Program would have been required to do anyhow.) Von Braun had nothing to do with the Apollo spacecraft (That was Max Faget and his merry band). Von Braun was responsible for Saturn.
Yes, I remember when terraserver.microsoft.com was in beta around 5 years ago(back before *beta* was cool) and a friend of mine used it to check property lines on a rural piece of land he intended to purchase...
I wonder how he fared - because Terraserver never has had any property lines marked on it.
Microsoft had chosen to keep it a closed, fee-based service, and it subsequently was a bit stifled in development and acceptance.
Microsoft only kept it closed for a year or so - the website has been open and widely used ever since then.
All Google did was open it up and keep it free, and it seems to be more widespread.
Google copied an open (and free) website - and the geek community (who drool over anything Google does) jumped all over it. So far as the API goes, there's a double handful of projects at best (at least publically discussed), hardly widespread.
There is no denying the fact that today's kids aren't going to have the same experience we had when we were young.
Oh certainly. When I was young (I'm 44), I was expected to read, or to play outdoors, or to otherwise engage my own imagination rather than being handed a sheaf of electronic babysitters.
The big gaming news during the summer, of course, is that my kids are out of school looking for things to do. They need things to keep them busy inside the house once temperatures reach afternoon highs, and I need things to distract them with so that I can get some work done.
Somehow generations of kids and parents survived pre-video games. But those methods generally involved active parenting.
The Saturn/Apollo stack was exceptionally robust, and its a shame we abandoned them so quickly.
What makes you think it was so robust?
Probably the propoganda/worship that has passed for space history/journalism for forty years now. Especially in the case of Apollo, the 'real facts' have only recently come out - and in dense thick books to boot. (Which removes them from the universe of the average space fanboi - who gets his 'history' from the Discovery Channel.)
There were 12 manned Apollo missions, with a total crew of 36. One mission was lost (Apollo 1), at a loss of three crew. Another was very nearly lost (Apollo 13) resulting in a completely failed mission.
Not to mention
Loss of power in spacecraft due to lightning strike (Apollo 12)
Failure to dock with the LEM which was overridden with brute force (Apollo 14)
Loss of landing radar nearly leading to landing abort (Apollo 14 again)
Partial loss of the SPS (Apollo 17)
The Apollo spacecraft was *far* from debugged.
Reading the abovementioned dense thick books, one thing that struck me was the sheer number of diving catches and near misses that characterized the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo era. Once you grasp that, the origins of the Shuttle era attitudes become abundantly clear.
Slashdot Mirror
These (SDV) schemes are stupid - the worst of all possible worlds. They keep the standing army at LC-39 intact, they keep the pork flowing to the same small circle of aerospace contractors, and they keep the expensive and flawed SRB and ET in service. On top of that, their low flight rates means that costs won't drop significantly.
The reality is that processes have been only tested on the lab bench - they've never been tested under field conditions. (I.E. with dust/etc in the intake stream, trace gases, extremely long run time...) There are major concerns about filtration, I.E. how do you clean them? How do you clean them without contaminating your system? There are major concerns about creating a system that can operate for months/years with little maintenance. There are concerns about the impacts on the process from trace gasses in the atmosphere of Mars.... And on and on.
Many major question - no answers.
The 'new' foam is only used on acreage foam. The hand sprayed/sculpted foam (which killed Columbia and produced the big scary chunk after SRB sep on the current flight) is still the old freon blown foam. This is very plainly spelled out in the CAIB report and recent NASA press releases.
This story is completely contradicted by the CAIB report - furthermore this graph/image plainly shows that NASA *has* been making progress in reducing foam shedding/tile damage caused by the 1998 switch to 'enviromentally friendly foam'.That being said, TFA is somewhat misleading in claiming the proposal is/was 'secret'. It's been kicking around for a couple of years now.
His point was, that Spaceship One/Two *isn't* progress - not on the space side of the house anyhow. It's a really, really, neat aircraft - it's not a spacecraft. It's a sideshow - a carnival attraction.
And a lot of people who should know better having been drooling all over themselves as if it was the Second Coming.
When you post a long diatribe against management and claim (contrary to evidence) that the risks were treated as 'normal', that's exactly what you are saying. The foam shedding was not 'dismissed' (your words) nor was the O-ring problem accepted as 'inevitable' (again your words). In your original post you ignored the truth (that corrective action was in progress) in favor of the sensational (dammed management and their handwaving).
The problem is - that statement is utterly false. If the risks were seen as 'normal', then there would not have been corrective actions being taken to reduce the risk. They were not treated as being familiar - but they equally were not being treated as if they were as serious as they were. The difference between the statements is crucial to understanding the causes of the accident.Repeating the party line is hardly informed.You're delusional if you think anything shown in the examples you cite compare at all to Hot Coffee.
Possibly the best post on the whole issue - both the mod and the lawsuit. (But I see the /. hivemind is already hard at work making it the victims fault as usual. The idea that folks other than them might have standards is alien and frightening.)
The mental contortions /.ers have been going through to avoid admitting that there is a problem is utterly astonishing.
Much has been made of the two types of foam, but it's a non-issue in reality.
Ponder the likelyhood of something that weak making any difference.
It may be argued that the corrective programs were not large or agressive enough - but to claim they were non-existent is sheer ignorance. Equally, it's foolish to blame management, when the fingers point equally at the engineers.
Hardly a 'finest hour'.
In other words - the screwed the pooch on training (on top of the other screwups) and caught it by chance nearly at the last moment. That's the very definition of a diving catch.- Loss of power in spacecraft due to lightning strike (Apollo 12)
- Failure to dock with the LEM which was overridden with brute force (Apollo 14)
- Loss of landing radar nearly leading to landing abort (Apollo 14 again)
- Partial loss of the SPS (Apollo 17)
The Apollo spacecraft was *far* from debugged.Reading the abovementioned dense thick books, one thing that struck me was the sheer number of diving catches and near misses that characterized the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo era. Once you grasp that, the origins of the Shuttle era attitudes become abundantly clear.