Ares I Rocket Rumored To Be Too Heavy 165
eldavojohn writes "In an article entitled "Constellation Battles the Blogosphere," problems with the Ares I lift vehicle are dispelled by NASA. An e-mail containing the rumor that the payload was a metric ton too heavy spurred this post which caused a lot of sidelines speculation that NASA might be setting themselves up for failure and simply need to start over. From the article, '[M]any who carp from the sidelines do not seem to understand the systems engineering process. They instead want to sensationalize any issue to whatever end or preferred outcome they wish," wrote Jeff Hanley the NASA official leading the development of the rockets and spacecraft the United States is building to replace the space shuttle and to return to the Moon.' The article also mentions that NASA looked at 10,000 to 20,000 different iterations of designs in their "Exploration Systems Architecture Study." As armchair speculators of space exploration, do our posts & blogs create negative fallout for NASA or is public criticism like this healthy for keeping government agencies in line?"
Leave it to the professionals (Score:5, Insightful)
Criticism is the seed of improvement (Score:3, Insightful)
Need all the help they can get. (Score:2, Insightful)
"Go fever" seems to be at least partially in remision, but when you look at the stupid stuff that's gone on recently in the NASA failures you have to wonder if they could have been avoided if they'd just asked a non-involved person for their perspective. I know that I for one would never have said an SST could lift off if large, hell... even small, chunks of foam were falling off the external tank and hitting the vehicle.
What if the entry plan for the Mars Climate Observer had been reviewed publicly? Don't you think there's a chance someone would have noticed the metric conversion issue and saved the project? If NASA wants fewer people harping on their opaque processes, and fewer Monday morning quarterbacks then they should allow more review and outside input. Inbreeding is rarely a good thing in in the long run.
The bigger question is does NASA have the ego to handle letting outsiders look at projects and can they accept the constructive criticism that results? NASA is continually trying to do more with fewer dollars, perhaps its time they tried a more open source/distributed computing approach to some of the work.
Basic tenent of the Internet (Score:4, Insightful)
How much has NASA spent, in PR money and man-hours on trying to debunk the "faked moon landing"? How many Congresscritters believe there must be something to this?
It isn't that criticism is wrong, it is that an important part of criticism called "critical thinking" is absent. At least the thinking part is. While this has existed since the beginning of time with people complaining about the pyramids going to fall over the first time it rained, this sort of nonsense has been made far, far more accessible to the average Joe now. Is the answer censorship? I doubt it. But what if someone wrote a long Wikipedia article about this sort of thing and a devoted group of followers kept any attempt at introducing reason, logic and common sense from being added?
Re:Leave it to the professionals (Score:3, Insightful)
-stormin
You left out a step. (Score:3, Insightful)
At for this audience here, you must add:
3(b). Complain that the government has propoganda machine set up to "get out the truth" and straighten out toxic spin-FUD spread by idiots, because obviously any office run by a government agency specifically to "correct" wrong-headed or outright BS notions circulating in the news or blogosphere is obviously Evil.
At least, that always seems to be the groupthink take on it. Unless of course it's NASA doing the correcting, I'm guessing. If the FCC or DoD do exactly the same thing, then The Evil goes without saying. *sigh*
Re:Need all the help they can get. (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you certainly would have called an abort if a spacecraft, on launch, was struck by lightning, right? You would have cancelled Apollo 12. Or does foam sound somehow worse than a bloody bolt of lightning?
With all of the things that *can* go wrong in a vehicle like a rocket, cancelling when anything *does* go wrong means that you never launch, and you abort right away if you ever get off the ground.
The issue with foam is that it doesn't have all that much energy even at high speeds, compared to how strong RCC is. The problem was with a property of foam that was unexpected: at high speeds, it impacts as a very rigid body.
What if the entry plan for the Mars Climate Observer had been reviewed publicly?
An English-Metric conversion error wasn't in the "entry plan". If you mean reviewing the code, I'm not sure how many lines of code MCO had, but Pathfinder had 160,000. Commercial code usually has 5-10 defects per line, and since most errors have the potential to cripple a craft, it's pretty darned impressive that they can get these things to work at all. When you look at their failsafe modes and the degree of testing they do, it becomes clear how prepared for fault they usually are. However, some faults aren't as easy to detect as others.
A good example of these failsafe modes is visible in the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Remember that flash memory error that they had? Spirit worked fine until it experienced a fault, and rebooted. The system automatically reboots itself on faults. Spirit's problem, however, was in the boot sequence, when it activated the flash memory. Well, they thought of this, and had the radio run on its own computer, and put a delay in between reboots. The radio also switched into a low bandwidth, wideband mode that would be easier to reach Earth if improperly pointed. So, Spirit rebooted every few minutes, but inbetween boots, there was time to briefly talk to it. Of course, normally, if you have a failed boot, you wouldn't be able to talk to it, but they thought of this, too, and had the radio's computer able to disable boot sequence elements on the main computer and to be able to order reboots. Thus, they were able to debug the boot sequence on a machine that they couldn't touch and had huge challenges in even communicating with.
All thanks to the sort of preparation that they do. When was the last time that you designed a system with this kind of fault tolerance?
The bigger question is does NASA have the ego to handle letting outsiders look at projects and can they accept the constructive criticism that results?
I think the biggest question is why do armchair quarterbacks like you feel compelled to criticize the work of people with the benefit of hindsight on a system that only with the most incredible dilligence could even get that far? NASA has had a relatively impressive success rate with Mars; compare this to the awful Russian space program attempts to visit the Red Planet, and ESA's ill-fated Mars program.
Yes... and yes. (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes. And yes.
They're not diametrically opposed. (Score:3, Insightful)
Should we allow it to go on? Yes: NASA has a thick skin, and in other industries and venues (notably politics) it's crucially important. Here, well, it's just sort of detritus. Fermat's theorem attracted this kind of noise too. The short version? When it's at the very edge of human capacity, and when it's popularized, then you just have to crank the bullshit filter up a ways.
Now, the *best* would be if NASA left comments on these blogs explaining why these people were wrong, in a rude way, so that they'd shut up until they grokked. Unfortunately that'd be prohibitively time consuming, but it'd be great, wouldn't it?
Re:Need all the help they can get. (Score:5, Insightful)
Monday morning quarterbacks second-guessing your decisions after you've lost the game can be annoying. But that's not what's being complained about here. What's being complained about here are people wanting to stick their heads into the huddle during the game and demand the quaterback explain to them, while the clock is running, how he can possibly expect to score a home run with no bat.
Not all criticism is constructive, or even meaningful.
Re:Instead of inciting FUD... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, it's an extremely high-performing rocket engine. A top-fuel dragster also has a an extremely high-performing engine. Neither engine is necessarily the "best" for any application other than performing stunts. For most applications, whether it's cars or rockets, you want a reliable, cost-effective engine that operates on an easy-to-use fuel.
Re:Need all the help they can get. (Score:3, Insightful)
"If there is a mechanism where NASA can get additional expertise/oversight with little to no increase in cost, then let's do it."
Absolutely. Is taking the time to answer every crank who makes some noise on a blog in case one of them turns out to not be a crank a cost-effective way to get that? Seems unlikely.
"One thing that all the 'leave the experts alone' posters are forgetting is that NASA is spending OUR money."
That is exactly what we do not forget. It's our money too, and we don't want it wasted dealing with people who think that because they pay taxes, their questions must be answered regardless of how inefficiently they ask them, and how little effort they put into finding the answers elsewhere.
I mean, read the article. A guy who didn't know what he was talking about, and who nobody should have expected to know what he was talking about, essentially made some stuff up, and made a bunch of noise about it. And dealing with it resulted in wasting a whole bunch of NASAs time, by which I mean, a whole bunch of OUR money.
Systems Engineering (Score:3, Insightful)
The Stick may or may not be over/underweight. The real issues, to me, are that it uses the most dangerous part of the Shuttle architecture (but rebuilds into an untested new stage) while promising to be as absolutely expensive as possible. All this while replicating current (Atlas, Delta, Soyuz, Ariane) capabilities. Just buy your flights to LEO and base-camp from there! Instead of waiting 15 years for crewed access to the moon, NASA could be building the deep space hardware they are actually good at and leave the Earth-LEO segment to the companies that already do it regularly.
NASA, where having something, maybe in a couple decades, is more important than keeping today's capability.
And yes, I'm a big supporter. Except when Hanley and the others act like 6th graders because someone criticized their wittle wocket.
Josh - proud member of the peanut gallery
Re:Need all the help they can get. (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course it does. You don't know the basic background information, you're not going to produce useful questions.
You keep referencing how it would have been obvious to you the foam was a problem. Well, why wasn't it? Are you trying to suggest you were desperately trying to ask someone before the fact "What happens when the foam insulation falls off the tank during launch?", but they just wouldn't listen? If not, then how can you claim the problem is your frustrated ability to ask questions?
How much of MY tax money would you like NASA to spend evalutating questions from unknown strangers on the internet about designs nobody has ever called complete, or even ready for review?
Re:hope it's not Apollo! (Score:3, Insightful)
Space will never be cheap, except perhaps in terms of low-performance sub-orbital excursion rockets. Those will become cheap, but nothing that can reach orbit ever will.