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Subject: SPACE Digest V11 #203

SPACE Digest                                     Volume 11 : Issue 203

Today's Topics:
          Re: Will we lose another orbiter?
            Re: Launcher Development Costs
       Re: Did SEASAT See More Than It Was Supposed To?
           Re: Need some Space Station Figures ...
      Re: B-52/Pegasus launch scheduled for April 4 (Forwarded)
Re: Supercapacitors?? (was Re: The Amazing technicolour flying coilgun
          Re: Will we lose another orbiter?
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 30 Mar 90 15:01:31 GMT
From: pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!nic.MR.NET!timbuk![e-mail]  (Lou Adornato)
Subject: Re: Will we lose another orbiter?

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Paul Dietz) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Lou Adornato) writes:
>>                   One of the root causes of the Challenger accident,
>> was public pressure to launch on schedule.  This was caused by the
>> public's inability to understand just how complex and demanding
>> launching an experimental aircraft can be.  Once people stop taking
>> technology for granted, they start learning.  Maybe in the long run
>> Challenger will have made us stronger by making us see the danger in
>> having 90% of our population (and 100% of our policy makers)
>> technologically illiterate.

>What a load of crap.

And a fine good day to you, too.  Looks like someone skipped his high
fiber breakfast this morning.

>
>The public isn't responsible for the institutionalized self deception
>that characterized pre-Challenger NASA.  The public didn't say NASA
>would launch 60 (then 24) shuttle flights per year.  The public didn't
>force NASA to not admit those estimates were baloney.  The public
>didn't hold a gun to NASA's collective head and say "my god, NASA,
>when do you want to launch, next April?"

Throughout my lifetime, we Americans have had a growing tendency to leave the
"details" of the technology on which we depend to "experts", and then turn
on the "eggheads" when anything goes wrong.  A case in point is the present
attitude about the original launch rate.  It seems that the clarity of our
hindsight is now considered proof that NASA was actively lying.  Anything so
obvious after the fact must have been equally obvious to NASA before the fact.
Niavete is not to be considered; success or duplicity are the only allowed
alternatives.  This is the type of public behavior that I was alluding to.

The launch rate had little to do with the Challenger disaster.  A slip of a
few days wouldn't have had that big an impact on the annual launch rate that
NASA was pushing at that time.  The direct cause of the accident was a mindset
by a handful of Huntsville managers that put the Thiokol engineers in the
position of having to _prove_ that it was unsafe to launch.  I'm not going
to be cast as apologist for these idiots.  As far as I'm concerned, they
should have been liable to criminal prosecution.  But the real source of the
"must do" mindset was a desperate desire to stay off the critical path,
fueled by the public belief (which goes all the way back to the 60's) that
launch delays are caused either by bumbling or fraud.  This belief is
caused entirely by technological ignorance; if you have a black box model
of technology, it's hard to understand why NASA takes so much longer to
launch than Luke Sywalker.

>
>It was NASA's responsibility to inform the public about the safe
>flight rate of the system, not recklessly exceed it in a futile
>attempt to preserve the myth of the shuttle's economic viability.  It
>was NASA's responsibility to be honest about the potential
>capabilities of the shuttle when it was being sold.

We _are_ talking about the same public that thought that Gallileo was going
to make Florida uninhabitanble for the next 10,000 years, right? The same
public that beleived that Meryl Streep knew anything about Alar, aside from
the spelling? The same public that _still_ beleives that SDI will make the
world safe from "nuculur" war?  One of the perks of the engineering biz is
that you get to deal mostly with intelligent, educated people.  The drawback
is that you forget that the average IQ is, by definition, 50.

Dealing with overblown expectations isn't as easy as you make it sound.  NASA
is currently in the process of trying to downscale the public expectations
of the space station.  Look at all of the NASA-bashing that's been going on
in this newsgroup over that.  I think it's pretty clear that NASA is in a
no win situation, and has been since long before the accident.

How do you go about informing the public about safe rates of flight when the
public only understands "safe" and "dangerous"?  NASA certainly
contributed to the unrealistic expectations of the electorate, but it's
pretty hard to explain the difference between "operational" and "experimental"
to a public that gets it's science education in 30 second sound bytes on
the evening news.

Just as an aside, how much funding do you think NASA would have gotten for
a safety redesign of the already unpopular shuttle if it had grounded the
entire fleet in '86 _before_ the accident?

>                                                     But, as Keyworth
>noted, NASA is the only government agency that outright lies.

What makes you think the same thing wouldn't have happened to a private
contractor?  Anyone who's worked outside academia knows that deadlines
breed stupidity in any organization.  In the ten years that I've been in
private industry I've seen engineers intentionally supress information to
throw others onto the critical path, and managers fudge status reports to
avoid using built-in schedule slippage (just in case my boss is reading this,
none of this was at Cray).  IMHO, the biggest difference between government
and industry is that the civil service types have to spend a dime to justify
every penny they spend, and every yutz with ears has the right to an opinion
about it.  Fact is that NASA has a better launch record than Amroc.  I
personally hope that this changes, but until private ventures are proven to
be a better approach, I wouldn't be in such a rush to shut NASA down.

Lou Adornato    |  Statements herein do not represent the opinions or
Cray Research   |  attitudes of Cray Research, Inc. or its subsidiaries.
[e-mail]    |       (...yet)

P.S.
I'm not from Texas and anyone's inability to post a response has _nothing_
to do with me.

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 30 Mar 90 13:11:24 CST
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Launcher Development Costs

> Jim Bowery, posted by agate![e-mail]  (William Baxter)

> I agree with Fred McCall on this issue except I'm sure he won't
> like the WAY I agree with him. :-)

Now *there* is a fairly safe bet!  ;-)

> Under no circumstances should we find our Congressmen debating with
> NASA managers about the details of budget, schedule and the
> perversities of technical developments.

Right.

> Congress is not competent to manage or oversee technically complex
> projects and therefore should not attempt to do so.

Right again.  The trick is to convince *them* of that.  And the same
reasoning can be applied to most other things Congress 'funds'.  Are
they really competent to decide what the best uses of funds to take
care of the poor are, or what the best use of funds to defend the
country is?  I really don't think so.

> It should, instead, prioritize RESULTS and associate funds with
> those RESULTS.

Unfortunately, Congress in general isn't even competent to get down
to this level of detail.  Congress is competent to make decisions on
general policy directions, and that's about it.  By 'general policy
decisions', I mean things like 'establish a manned base on Mars' or
whatever.

Trying to go from that kind of broad policy brush to funding things
in detail winds up putting us right back where we are now, with
Congress having to micromanage just what the priorities on every
little thing are (which they aren't competent to do) and a huge
bureaucracy to decide just what counts as 'partial success' on any
given thing.

> All funding should be COD, to WHOEVER DELIVERS FIRST.

For some things that approach makes sense; for some it does not.
Some things are 'time critical', and it's just not feasible to wait
for someone to decide to go for a particular 'prize' in those cases.

[Examples of those kinds of things are information on landing sites
for probes or for initial manned missions - the information is a
roadblock to planning the rest of the mission, and it impacts things
badly to have to wait until someone in the private sector decides to
take whatever risks are necessary to get it.]

In my opinion, what Congress *should* be doing is providing approval
of that kind of broad policy direction I mentioned earlier, and
appropriating funds toward the goals of that policy.  How the
funding gets spent in detail are decisions that ought to be getting
made elsewhere.

That would eliminate the 'bookshelf budget' phenomenon, where the
printout of the budget takes up some ridiculous amount of
shelfspace.  Of course, it would also eliminate the ability of
Congress to attach riders to various bits and pieces of
appropriations bills (which in my opinion would be another plus), so
it will never happen.

> This is a more general version of a proposal I've been circulating
> around Congressional staffers on a "National Science Trust" which
> would pay out for delivery of quantifiable information, such as
> digital maps at various frequencies, etc. of various bodies and
> atmospheres.

Was this also posted here?  I think I recall reading it (and was
almost moved to comment on it then - I can imagine what your
response to any criticism of *that* would have been).  As I recall
it, some parts of it made good sense, some parts of it didn't, and
some parts seemed to be motivated solely by politics and ideology
and probably shouldn't have been addressed in the first place.

> What do NASA's space centers do?  Who cares?  Maybe sell them off
> to the highest bidder and/or let them go belly up, hopefully as soon
> as possible.

Personally, I think that the thing to do with much of the NASA space
system is to get it into the mode that the aeronautical side has
been in since its inception.  It should be providing the detailed
policy direction and technology driving part of the equation.  This
means that it should be doing the things that are often the first to
be cut when the budget axe starts flailing about in Congres, such as
Project Pathfinder.

Spin the 'space science' part of the organization off to someone
like NSF, and let 'space science' compete with all other science for
funding (but keep the money from it in the NASA budget and allocate new
funds to NSF).  This would probably result in *less* funding for space
science, given the costs of putting something in space compared to
other experimentation, but it would at least put the programs of
various scientists into some kind of real competition, and might lead
to more funding for *other* science coming out of the space science
budget.

[Something needs to be done about the bureaucratization that NSF has
suffered from down through the years, too, but that's another story.]

Anyway, this is more than long enough without getting into too many
specifics at this point.


==============================================================================
| Fred McCall  ([e-mail]) | My boss doesn't agree with anything  |
| Military Computer Systems           | I say, so I don't think the company  |
| Defense Systems & Electronics Group | does, either.  That must mean I'm    |
| Texas Instruments, Inc.             | stuck with any opinions stated here. |
==============================================================================

------------------------------

Date: 30 Mar 90 19:47:17 GMT
From: groucho![e-mail]  (Steve Emmerson)
Subject: Re: Did SEASAT See More Than It Was Supposed To?

In the referenced article, [e-mail] (Henry Spencer) writes:

>...  Some scientists were
>upset about the loss of a satellite that was still returning good data, but
>their case was considerably weakened by the fact that nobody had done much
>work on analyzing that data for several years -- it was piling up unread.

For what it's worth, I'd just like to make two observations:

    1) It's my understanding that the scientists who used the data
       from the satellite were not informed that it was going to be
       destroyed.

    2) Data that currently just piles up can be very useful at a later
       time (e.g. meteorological data).

Yes, the DOD had the right to destroy the satellite.  No, the weren't
very considerate about it.

Steve Emmerson        [e-mail]        ...!ncar!unidata!steve

------------------------------

Date: 30 Mar 90 13:44:00 GMT
From: eagle![e-mail]  (Dave McKissock)
Subject: Re: Need some Space Station Figures ...

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail]
asks:
>I need to know the orbital height and the interior (shirt-sleeve)
>volume of each of the following space stations:
>
>                Space Shuttle (cabin)
>                Mir
>                Freedom

I have before me a preliminary copy of "Space Station Freedom Technical
Overview", dated October 1988. This report contains a table comparing
Skylab, Mir, & Freedom. The table is as follows:
                                   Current   Expanded
                         Skylab      MIR       MIR        Freedom
 Pressurized Volume
   (cubic feet)          14,513     6,230    14,928       32,140

 Total Weight           159,200   101,418   237,000      485,000
   (pounds)

 Permanent Crew            0          2        6             8
                        (3 temp)


The Freedom US Laboratory & Habitation modules are 14 feet in diameter and
44 feet long. Each of the four nodes is also 14 feet in diameter and 17
feet long. The Japanese Experiment Module is 35 feet long & 13 feet
in diameter. The European Attached Pressurized Module is 41 feet long
and 13 feet in diameter.

If you multiply all of these numbers, you get 34,101.99 cubic feet. I have
no idea how/why this number was adjusted to get the 32,140 value stated
above.

If by "orbital height" you mean altitude, Freedom will fly between 180
and 240 nautical miles.

Concerning the Industrial Space Facility, on a vugraph I saw the
statement "Nonetheless, ISF capabilities are limited. Its power,
pressurized volume, and productive crew time are not substantial."
How's that for a firm estimate???!!!

------------------------------

Date: 30 Mar 90 16:58:11 GMT
From: clyde.concordia.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo![e-mail]  (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: B-52/Pegasus launch scheduled for April 4 (Forwarded)

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Kevin S. Van Horn) writes:
>>     The Pegasus program is sponsored by the Department of
>>Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency...
>
>Sponsored in what way?  It was my understanding that OSC and Hercules paid
>for the entire development out of their own funds.  Or do you consider
>purchasing launches to be a form of sponsorship?

While this is in general a valid protest -- there was no DARPA development
funding -- DARPA and NASA have been nice to OSC/Herc in a lot of small ways.
Most notably, DARPA paid a full commercial price, complete with a deposit
well in advance, for the first flight of a new launcher, and I think they
put down deposits on two or three more.  Most customers would want to see
a few successful tests before paying full price for a flight.
--
Apollo @ 8yrs: one small step.|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
Space station @ 8yrs:        .| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry [e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 30 Mar 90 14:39:00 GMT
From: mcsun!ukc!stc!root44!hrc63!mrcu![e-mail]  (Paul Johnson)
Subject: Re: Supercapacitors?? (was Re: The Amazing technicolour flying coilgun

--
Paul Johnson                               UUCP: <world>!mcvax!ukc!gec-mrc!paj
--------------------------------!-------------------------|-------------------
GEC-Marconi Research is not     | Telex: 995016 GECRES G  | Tel: [phone]
responsible for my opinions.    | Inet: [e-mail]-mrc | Fax: [phone]

------------------------------

Date: 30 Mar 90 16:55:02 GMT
From: clyde.concordia.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo![e-mail]  (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Will we lose another orbiter?

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Steve Rehrauer) writes:
>have we (meaning NASA, I guess) learned how to build a better shuttle?
>Has Challenger's replacement "evolved" in any way?

Not significantly; the specs basically said "build it the same way you
built the earlier ones".  There are some things like a braking chute
added, but those are things that all the orbiters will get eventually.
Rockwell apparently told NASA early on that they could build three new
orbiters for the price of Endeavour, if NASA would relax the specs to
allow substitution of compatible equipment rather than insisting that
the new hardware be identical to the old.  (Even now there are problems
with subcontractors going out of business and tooling being lost, so
building an identical orbiter is unnecessarily costly.)  NASA wouldn't
go for it.
--
Apollo @ 8yrs: one small step.|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
Space station @ 8yrs:        .| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry [e-mail]

------------------------------

End of SPACE Digest V11 #203
*******************