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)
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-stormin
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-stormin
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Also, I'd be a bit surprised if extra weight would "doom" anything built on a modern solid rocket. It's not like there are any hard limits you run up against, its just a matter of scale and balance. This is because solid rockets are far more powerful th
Instead of inciting FUD... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds like we need to be open-source in our approach to communicating with NASA - ask questions, offer ideas, create a solution that all may benefit from rather than firing the cannons of FUD.
Devil's Advocate... (Score:2, Funny)
Sounds like we need to be open-source in our approach to communicating wi
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The mod obviously has no sense of humor or proportion. I thought your post was a spot on reply to the GP.
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They're still making design decision based on issues like which defense contractors have sites in which key congressional districts. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that. What makes you t
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NASA works the way NASA works because that's the way Congress likes it. Sometimes, you get Apollo. Sometimes, you get Shuttle. I hope that the Ares program yields results more like Apollo, although I think the moon is a waste of resources.
Mars, baby. Whoever gets there first gets to name it.
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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.
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If that is your mission profile, and it is, I can see no problem with that.
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And like a dragster, the shuttle engines are overkill for the transportation job at hand, and they require prohibitively expensive maintenance after each use. In contrast to the shuttle, nobody is silly enough to use a money-pit such as a dragster for anything other than entertainment.
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I suggest you peruse "Thrust Into Space" by Maxwell W. Hunter III if you want to see why laid out in terms for the non-aerospace engineer.
You need amazing thrust at a very high specific impulse.
You need to keep the engine and airframe as light as possible consistent with safely containing the fuel, resisting gravity and aerodynamic loads and transmitting the thrust to the payload.
These are
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I think your dichotomy may need some adjusting. The proposition isn't cheap vs. expensive, but really expensive vs. absurdly expensive, or really high performance vs. absurdly high performance. As it is, the shuttle is optimized towards rather absurd performance margins, which is nice on paper, but doesn't really do much to try to reduce launch costs. If anything, launch costs are deliberatel
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hope it's not Apollo! (Score:3, Interesting)
Space is not for rocket scientists anymore than climbing Mt. Everest is only for explorers. Lots o
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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.
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Re:Instead of inciting FUD... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually - they haven't. The last booster designed by NASA was the Shuttle, back in the 70's. What few efforts they've undertaken since then have been more to keep the teams busy and employed than actually producing useful hardware.
As I state above - they real problem is that NASA doesn't have any practical experience at any scale. The guys who last handled these kinds of problems/systems were the guys who did Apollo - and they are all retired. The Shuttle guys have been all about operations, not R&D on a new[ish] booster system.
The hard reality is that nobody has recent experience in designing new[ish] large boosters. Even the Russians have limited themselves to modest stretches of existing designs, or doing minor retooling on designs from the late 80's or early 90's. The Chinese are using a stretch of either the Long March II ICBM (vintage late 80's or early 90's in design, even earlier in technology) or modifications of the same Soyuz booster the Soviets rely so much on. Niether the Japanese, nor the Indians or the Brazilians have anything this size. Nor is anything better on the ESA side of the house - the Ariane V design also stretches back over fifteen years.
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Not true. Rocketdyne, developer of the Space Shuttle Main Engines, begin development of the RS-68 in 1998, did the first successful testfire September 11, 2000, and had it's first successful launch on the Medium+(4,2) variant of Boeing's brand new Delta IV. Nasa has decided to use the RS-68 for the Ares V. I suppose you could argue the RS-68 is at least partially based on the SSME's, but the idea that the people
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Apples, oranges. Lightbulb, shopping mall. Engines, boosters.
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Are SSME and RS-68 both booster engines on LOX/LH2 or not? They are both lit on launch to provide thrust. You put your foot in your mouth. Just suck it up.
EADS Vulcain 2 and Mitsubishi LE-7 are not that old either. LE-7 is even a staged combustion engine.
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Fortunately, that might not be more than another century.
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The ugly way would be to build ships with thick walls of lead, or some other effective barrier material. The cons are obvious, with sheer mass being the biggest problem.
The other way I think might work would be to surround the ship with a magnetic field, the way Earth is. That would need a pretty big energy source. With the current attitudes toward nuclear materials in space, I don't see this being viable.
Meh, where's Zefram Cochran
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Completely False--Pointed Out To Be (Score:5, Informative)
I apologize if you and anyone who feels like I propagated FUD, I only meant to draw attention to the fact that it was mere rumors causing a severe amount of fall out that should never have happened. Hence my final sentence in the submission.
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Now, others have caught up i
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Really the original article could be much better summed up as "NASA engineer lays the smackdown on ignorant armchair critics" than "Constellation Battl
It will never work! (Score:5, Informative)
In other words nothing new. People that can write seem to think they always have something worth saying.
BTW the New York Times did print a retraction of that statement on July 20th 1969.
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Well, sure, but the rocket would push against the 'ether', that the electromagnetic radiation propagates thru...duh!
</sarcasm>
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"In 1920, a New York Times editorial ridiculed Robert Goddard and his claim that a rocket would work in space:
That Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react - to say that would be
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I'm a little confused by your statement... Griffin wasn't administrator during the Challenger disaster. Also, there hasn't been a new shuttle produced since 1992, and official policy is that no more will be produced.
Answer to the Question (Score:2)
Criticism is the seed of improvement (Score:3, Insightful)
How??? (Score:2)
On my planet, a growing bureaucracy is generally considered to be about as desireable as a growing fungal infection.
Not news (Score:5, Interesting)
This is not news, this is sensationalism. The stick concept will probably work just fine. It grates on me because I've got real problems with the SRB as relates to the shuttle, but with an actual launch abort system that can pull the capsule away, I guess it's a good and cheap solution. It'll probably be quite a ride, too.
C'mon folks, this isn't rocket sci- well... let me rephrase. C'mon folks, this isn't a new problem, and it's not even unexpected. It's a standard part of rocket development, just like debugging compile problems is a usual part of large software development projects.
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Too heavy? (Score:5, Funny)
So are most Slashdotters!
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
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.
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Man, you haven't seen any of the code around here, have you?
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Can you imagine what NASA would have to wade through if this was tried? 'Please don't do it, the Face on Mars came to me in a dream and said it would hurt its healing Atlantean rays', 'Can you look for L Ron on the way down?', 'I'm writing to inform you that I purchased your pr
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Yes I would have, and NASA now routinely does that also. Apollo 12 would have been just as successful had it taken off during the next launch window.
"The problem was with a property of foam that was unexpected: at high speeds, it impacts as a very rigid body."
Duh. Water isn't very damaging when you dive in to a swimming pool but hit that
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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 clai
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Fascinating! Pray tell, given that the strike was on ascent, how would you have landed the lifting-off Saturn V to take off "during the next launch window"?
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.
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If there is a mechanism where NASA can get additional expertise/oversight with little to no increase in cost, then let's do it.
One thing that all the "leave the experts alone" posters are forgetting is that NASA is spending
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"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
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The fact that you can't think of any recent NASA successes other than the Mars rovers proves that you have no idea what you're talking about. One huge recent success was Cassini, the mission to Saturn. Sadly, the news media doesn't report on most of NASA's smaller projects, but in the last ten years NASA has also launched several Earth-orbiting satellites to make new measurements of
No-can-do (Score:2)
National security concerns restrict access to some of the technologies. I'm sure N. Korea and other unfriendly countries would love to get unfettered to man-rated launch systems to improve their balist
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Actually, since it will magnify harmful genes much faster, inbreeding is the best way to optimize a gene pool.
Unless you're one of the culls, of course, then it kind of sucks.
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Honestly...no. Have you ever tried to calculate an interplanetary trajectory? It's not a 1 page exercise. It's big, calculus heavy project with a lot of parameters (masses, forces, velocities, previous actions, and even dates are all important) that involves a lot of number crunching. There's a reason that it took 11
You saw it coming (Score:3, Funny)
Projectile Dysfunction.
Thank you, try the fish.
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?
Congressional Elections (Score:2)
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 seem
Normal development issues (Score:5, Informative)
These are normal development issues. Here [nasaspaceflight.com] is a good summary. Also it is not the Ares I launch vehicle that is overweight, but the Orion CEV.
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"Does this service module make me look fat?"
Yes... and yes. (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes. And yes.
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Are people really this stupid?? (Score:5, Informative)
So, people honestly think that actual engineers, with actual engineering degrees, and actual engineering experience - people who can calculate exactly how much compression force a load-bearnig wall is under, and exactly how much tension the cables on a bridge need to be able to withstand, and exactly where to point and how much thrust is needed to send Cassini inward to Mercury, then back out past Venus, then inward again, then past Earth, then past Jupiter, and go into orbit at SAturn - going right past Titan so that it can release a probe...
*takes a breath*
And then some random guy on the Internets looks over their work and says, "whoa guys, I may not have any education or experience and not even be able to balance my checkbook, but it looks to me that you're 1 metric ton too heavy."
Is that how the world works?
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No, but those same engineers start out by throwing an engine choice and some loose structure weight estimates onto a PowerPoint slide. The choices are based more on calculations than on yelling and hoping, but the numbers still tend to change as the details come in. In their classes those engineers did learn how to predict "exactly how much compression force a load-bearnig wall is un
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Three problems with your comment: 1) they are most definitely not the same people. JPL is very different from MSFC, and I can tell you from personal experience that most MSFC guys have their heads pretty far up their asses. 2) Even those vaunted JPL engineers have been known to fsck up. Especially lately. 3) The "Orion Exploration archtecture" was not designed from the ground up. It wa
Stuck on the Stick (Score:2)
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How obviously bad do the engineering decisions have to be before we're allowed to comment on them?
*takes a breath* ... and yet these same engineers just randomly throw an engine onto a rocket while screaming "ye haw!!" and hope that it works??
You're operating on the mistaken assumption that the design choices behind the Ares I and V launchers were primarily engineering based. Instead, it appears they were intended to preserve Space Shuttle manufacturing and maintenance infrastructure. The bruhaha we'r
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?
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Just as several decades of wasted effort has lessened the number Moon-landing-was-a-hoax wackos? Yes, it'd be moderately interesting, even humorous, but I'd prefer that the NASA engineers do what they they're there to do and not waste time and money trying to clue in the clueless.
When will it end? (Score:2)
Nobody else does it. (Score:2)
If the rocket blows up and kills astronauts, it will be NASA's neck which gets chopped, not Lockmart's. Their optimal "risk management" strategy is to transfer risk
"Contracting" vs purchase (Score:2)
The contractors you are talking about don't get paid for mission success. Service providers do -- often including purchasing insurance for mission failure. Airlines do this and they handle many deaths per year -- a lot more than a few joy-stick jockies.
You might not see the difference but it is so fundamental to risk management that your joke about Lockmart's "risk management" falls flat due to ignorance of the very principle.
This is actually good news. (Score:2)
If everyone ignored NASA, which has been the case in recent years, then why bother even having them. that's the line of thought I fear pervades the general populace and in congress.
Yep. They create healthy negative fallout. (Score:2)
Yes.
No, I really mean that. Naysayers and people playing devil's advocate ALWAYS create problems for those in power, and for groups working on giant projects. Investors don't like hearing about major problems in the projects they're investing in, even if they're governments, and, well... that sort of trouble just gets spre
Easy proof (Score:4, Informative)
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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
Arse Rocket? (Score:2)
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Every time I read that I chuckle. I have owned several Fisher Space Pens over the past ten years and my wife owns one. The best thing about it is it fits next to my pocket knife in it's sheath, therefore I don't need to dig around in my pocket to find it...I'm sorry, this is turning into a Slashvertisment(tm).
Every time I think of pencils in space I chuckle. It might work, but I would not want to deal with bits of broken led in 0g, or even
Re:The Russians (Score:5, Informative)
It's terribly off-topic, I know, but hopefully it's interesting enough to avoid burnination.
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Not cheap to produce, though, but that cost seems to have been overwhelmed by operating cost savings. Quite simply, a SRB requires much less support to prepare for launch.
Even back in Von Braun's day, we considered large SRBs for space exploration.
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Even the Delta and Atlas-derived proposals would be so different from the present launchers to have to undergo extensive testing.
But the concept of a Big Dumb Booster using solid rocket segments is not nutty, or unachievable, or even uneconomical.
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You see, the Ares is top-heavy. Thus, it'll climb a certain distance and then it will crash. Coincidentally, it will kill those people who use words like "blogosphere" and "information superhighway."
Sure, there'll be some collateral damage. But it's a small price to pay.