| Tuesday, February
4, 2003
Subject: The EPA kills
http://brian.carnell.com/articles
/2003/02/000001.html
and
http://brian.carnell.com
/articles/2003/02/000003.html
- Roland Dobbins
Indeed. Alas. The interesting thing
is that NASA won't make any changes to ANYTHING "man rated"
without enormous reviews, except for politically correct stuff like this. Had
we decent space suits we would long ago have had both the training and the
means to do tile repairs. And of course back in about 1992 Niven and I
visited a NASA project for a Shuttle and ISS rescue ship, which was
supposed to be on the fast track. But NASA spent the money without
producing much in the way of hardware, and then seems to have abandoned
the program although I would not be surprised to find there is still a
money sink in there somewhere that produces some paper every year, but
doesn't add to the ability to rescue astronauts. Chapman
is right. Take the shuttles and all other operations away from NASA and
give them to the services. Let a much truncated NASA play science games.
NASA has some really good science people. Even there I'd want NSF looking
over their shoulder, because NASA science administrators are about what
you'd expect. Of
course the real questions come now. Was rescue possible? Did NASA want to
know?
Jerry:
I can't get the idea out of my head that some sort
of Columbia rescue might have been attempted. At the heart of this is my
assumption, which is still an assumption but there's plenty enough reason
to believe it, that damaged tiles are what destroyed the ship. Analysis
was done which made the program director confident, he says, that there
was no damage. In retrospect, I want to know how reasonable that belief
was. Maybe completely reasonable, maybe a complete whitewash. His
statements that "nothing could be done anyway" strongly suggest
to me that "not wanting to know" played a role in his belief,
and in his decision not to get imaging to check the tiles. His decision
making was derelect, if so. I can't imagine a worse indictment of a
scientific manager than that they "didn't want to know."
Even if it were totally true that nothing could be
done, the more he feared damage, the more he should have wanted imagery.
It would be invaluable to the post-mortum in the worst event.
And I don't believe for a second that nothing could
be done. Very much could. Atlantis could have made an emergency flight.
Risky but doable.
Then there's the Russians. They launched a Progress
cargo pod to the ISS Sunday. If it had a launch window for rendevous with
Challenger, and if they could have quickly substituted cargo, they could
have sent supplies and repair equipment to the Columbia. The thing
couldn't have docked, of course--cargo transfer would have to have been by
extemporized EVA, but two of the Columbia crew had EVA suits and minimal
EVA training. It might have been possible.
Such resupply would allow more time to do the most
crucial checks before launching Atlantis.
So that gives us a two-pronged rescue effort. In the
cargo pod, we send repair equipment, so an attempt can be made to patch up
Columbia. The main plan, though, is for everyone to come back on Atlantis.
If there's enough confidence in the patch job, the pilot and co-pilot
might attempt to recover Columbia. Or perhaps just try to bring it down by
automatic/remote control if that's possible. Finally, if the risky
Atlantis launch goes bad, Columbia can try it's luck with the patched wing
and everything possible done to lighten the ship.
Much more knowledgeable people than me might have
worked out this or better plans. But they didn't want to know, so no one
even thought about any of this.
Michael Juergens mjcom99@hotmail.com
That is my impression. It could be
wrong. Eric
on the Locus contribution.
This man appears to be a perfect example of
"Those who can't do, teach."
What's more, although he tries to deflect the
accusation in advance within the article, he is indeed a coward.
He starts by wagging his finger at a group of
unnamed individuals but there is little doubt who he has in mind. It's
interesting that he, by all appearances given by his bibliography and
information offered on various sites a life long literary academic, is
self-appointed as a commentator on this issue but doesn't hesitate to use
that same label in a derogatory sense against those with actual scientific
and engineering experience in aerospace. Heaven forbid that qualified
individuals lend guidance to the field and expect their opinions to carry
a bit more weight than the lit-crit crowd.
He offers that the history of atmospheric flight
created a delusion of ease. This would come as a great surprise to the
hundreds who died in the process of making modern powered flight a reality
for civilians. Things proceeded as quickly as they did because Western
Civilization had developed highly refined methods of handling engineering
endeavors and producing rapid advancement. We were applying this
understanding to space in the early days but then this beast called NASA
was invented and things have gotten progressively worse ever since. If we
had continued to use our hard won knowledge in a rational manner rather
than to create a massive bureaucracy and jobs program we'd unquestionably
be in a much better position to exploit space today.
By Westfahl's measure there is nothing dangerous
worth doing. If his kind had made up the mindset of Europe centuries past
nobody would ever have gone farther to sea than a few miles until the
technology to produce a Princess Cruise liner was perfected and thoroughly
tested. What an exciting bunch that Europe would have been. )A sneak
preview of the current one, perhaps.) After all, the failure rate in the
era of Columbus was much higher than 2% and even the successes had a
substantial number of fatalities.
What magical point in the future will be suitable
for us to set out to explore space again in the world according to
Westfahl? What magical technology will deliver us in safety and comfort
sans effort? Who shall chair the committee that will judge us ready? The
character of this individual will have great influence on what is found to
be adequate prowess. Left to Westfahl I suspect nothing less than
instantaneous teleportation while reclining in a Barcalounger will do.
Anything less would just be too frightening and uncomfortable.
I have to wonder. We've long since mastered
atmospheric flight, transporting vast numbers of humans and megatons of
freight on a daily basis. Every once in a while something goes wrong and
people die. Are we to mothball our airports until we can improve the odds
further still?
Westfahl doesn't aid his position by enlisting a
scene from an adventure movie, 'Space Cowboys.' Obviously they were
indulging in blatant fabrication for that scene but it does not diminish
the message of the film in which the heroes do not surrender to
circumstance without doing their best to succeed. This is what NASA has
failed to provide our shuttle crews. They are reduced to 'spam in a can'
not for lack of ability but because the bureaucracy dictates it.
If Westfahl doesn't like the way NASA is running
things he'll hardly find any argument from the people he's criticizing.
The list of people who'd prefer to see most or all of this left to private
enterprise has a very high crossover with that of space exploration's most
ardent supporters. Likewise the claim that there is no immediate need for
space's resources would come as quite a surprise to those portions of
humanity who still look upon dependable electricity service as a luxury.
Science Fiction does not drive our dreams and fears,
it reflects them. It has been doing this since people first began telling
stories. Mass media may create some illusions in the minds of consumers
but the basic need to see what is past the horizon is something we possess
at birth, long before we understand what 'final frontier' means.
Eric Pobirs
Indeed. Returning
to the SSTO debate.
Dr. Pournelle, I began this note several weeks ago,
never guessing that it would be relevant so soon. It is interesting how
many similar thoughts have already been submitted, but I think this has a
slightly different slant.
Regards, Robert Mitchell Research Fellow Landmark
Graphics
Cheap Space Transportation
I read your discussion of cheap space transport with
a great deal of interest. Clearly, there is a market for cheaper satellite
delivery to orbit. If you could deliver roughly the same or better
reliability as current launch systems, but at, say, a 20% reduction in
cost, the customers would stand in line to buy. I would expect this level
of cost reduction to be easily achievable, since no launch system has ever
been designed with minimum cost to orbit as the primary design criterion.
I realize you want much more than this, but the point I'm trying to make
is that there is a realistic business argument to be made. I'm sure D. D.
Harriman would understand. Without a solid business argument, there is no
option but government funding.
While I am sympathetic to your arguments, let me
play devil's advocate with some of the details.
Why do we want single stage to orbit (SSTO)
technology? The benefits I can think of are:
1. No logistics problem of assembling and
reassembling multi-stage vehicles, assuming all parts are recoverable and
reusable.
2. Multi-stage design has numerous problems of
design and integration that could be avoided by SSTO design.
The major drawback to SSTO is that it must be a very
high performance design. This suggests that it will be expensive to build,
and likely expensive to maintain. Engine life, if not vehicle life, may be
short because of high performance - low weight design. As you observed,
payload is marginal, so everything must be designed to the limit of safe
design, or beyond. It seems to me, "design to the limit" caused
the failure of the X-33 program. The liquid hydrogen tank was being
fabricated from composite materials to save the last ounce of weight, and
an effective design could not be produced on budget. Lastly, I don't think
that building sub-orbital models and then "tinkering" them to
orbital capacity is a viable strategy. At this level of design
sophistication, drilling holes to save weight is just not an option.
By focusing on SSTO, we have lost sight of our goal!
The goal is to minimize the cost of delivering things to low Earth orbit.
To achieve this goal we need:
1. Low vehicle cost. We want to buy a lot of them
and we want economies of scale.
2. Low maintenance cost.
3. High reliability.
4. Recoverable and reusable if the economics
dictate.
5. Conservative design.
6. Low cost to launch.
You will be hard pressed to assert that SSTO
satisfies any of the above criteria! (The current space shuttle doesn't
meet any of these criteria either! For example, the solid rocket boosters
are recovered and refurbished without regard to the cost. The design
criterion was that they be reusable, period. ) Note that high performance
is not one of the design criteria. High performance is costly in every
aspect of the design, and will likely fail every one of my design goals.
Minimum fuel usage is probably not a design goal, either. The design must
meet the performance requirements with some margin for error. Any
improvements over designed efficiency will be considered good fortune!
My guess for a suitable design would be a two stage
to orbit vehicle, with the first stage booster to be a very simple design
- pressure fed engines using RP-1 and liquid oxygen. The orbital stage
will be designed to accept 2, 3, 4, or 6 first stage boosters to allow
maximum load flexibility. We might fly these stage 1 boosters to a soft
landing a la DCX, then barge them back to the launch site. The orbital
stage will be very DCX in design, but of lesser base performance dictated
by overall system cost. This stage will likely be reusable, so it will be
designed with low cost maintenance considerations.
Another stage 1 option might be "stage
trees", to borrow a term. I wonder how cheap we could make reliable,
single use solid fuel boosters? Especially, if we made a lot of them.
I personally doubt that NASA would allow anyone to
build and launch such a vehicle from the US. Perhaps Japan might be
interested - I'm surprised they haven't done this already.
In the following I have taken an
angrier tone than this letter deserves, but I have grown weary of saying
all this over and over. If people want to address the subject, surely it
is not unreasonable to ask that I be challenged on what I have said and
proposed, not on some myths? It isn't as if the papers weren't available,
many of them RIGHT HERE. I
presume your letter covers the subject? It contains a mass of bad assumptions,
none made explicit, while what is made explicit is delivered as a
revelation when in fact every bit of that was considered before the
Council recommended SSX to the National Space Council. The problem with
this analysis is that it assumes that the Council consists of idiots. In
fact, we had the very people who produced the arguments against SSTO that
kept it in limbo for so very long, and who had figured out what was flawed
in their original thinking. Given
that nearly everyone, including me, failed to see all this for 20 years or
so, I suppose it's not surprising that others still don't get it; but I do
wonder that few have bothered to read the original Council reports and the
arguments we made then, so that I have to do it all over again. In future,
before writing me on this, at least read what I have written. You can
start with papers available right
here on this web site. One was my Congressional
testimony about SSTO and SSX. It was under oath: I may be wrong, but I
certainly wasn't making things up. At least read that. You
might also want to see just who this Council is, and some of what it said.
That's here too. Now
to take a few obvious points.
-
Spacecraft are expensive.
At the moment they are made extremely expensive by the high costs of
launch: they have to last a long time. They are generally obsolete
about the time they get up given new technology. But even cheap
spacecraft are expensive, and if they are lost on takeoff this is A
Bad Thing.
-
It is desirable to have
SAVABLE space craft: ships that on launch can be saved if one of
the more common problems develops; saved before they get to orbit or
even to re-entry altitudes. The first criterion of SSX was SAVABLE.
-
We don't want to "buy a
lot of rockets" to get costs down. That may be the right way
to do it, but rocket ships are expensive, and even in mass produced
quantities the ammunition concept concedes some fairly heavy costs.
The goal is to get costs down: not to buy a lot of rockets. As to
"expensive" vs. "cheap" spacecraft, the same
analysis applies as to airplanes. Each copy of a 747 is a very
expensive proposition; but if that plane flies many times the cost per
flight is minimized. What we want to look at is the cost of getting
stuff into orbit, and those costs need to include operations
costs.
-
Trying to minimize the cost
per launch vehicle is a classic case of suboptimization, of
solving for the wrong variable, and the fact that this is a very
common mistake doesn't excuse it.
-
We learned nothing from
"X"-33 and no one expected to learn anything from it.
Why you wish to beat me up about a project I opposed and about which I
forecast disaster is beyond me. All "X"-33 proved is that
Lockheed was able to influence decisions a lot better than I or my
Council could. That probably wouldn't have happened in Reagan's day,
but Bush First got rid of every Reagan person in the Administration as
soon as possible, leaving us with no one to talk to but Mr. Quayle.
Quayle was in fact able to get DC/X funded, but not to get enough
money for SSX.
-
"X"-33 wasn't
intended to be SAVABLE, and thus threw away a major cost benefit
of the kind of spacecraft we advocated.
-
The major advantage of the
SSX approach to spacecraft design was that it could be incrementally
tested. That is, like DC/X it could be flown to low altitudes and
landed. Then progressively higher altitudes and speed regimes. We
would be developing flight data. We would be learning about operations
costs, as well as about performance requirements.
-
The assumption that SSX
design was to be performance driven is flat wrong and demonstrates
unfamiliarity with the concept as proposed and advocated.
-
One of the major features of
the SSX approach to space ship design was that this was to be an
operations driven design. By concentrating on operational factors
we would learn what performance we required. If the performance proved
to be beyond our capability within permissible costs we would know
that reasonably early. The data developed would be useful in
determining what the new approach should be.
-
By having an X ship that
could be incrementally tested and operations driven, we could
determine what kind of performance improvements we could make through
incremental changes in structure design. Most early models of high
performance craft are over-designed. By flight testing you see what
parts are more than strong enough, and lighten the structure. This is
what Hunter used to call "nickel and dime" improvements, and
they can result in very significant performance improvements without
risks.
As to your breathless revelation
that Shuttle doesn't do this, you may well have got some of that
observation from me, and almost certainly you achieved that revelation
from people who were part of the Council. Did you think we were unaware of
it?
Accusing me of wanting a new
supershuttle is absurd given all I have written on the subject, and my
apologies if this seems a bit curt, but I am weary of people using that
argument. The Shuttle is not reusable, it is refurbishable, and Columbia's
28 flights over its lifetime are absurd compared to, say, the lifetime
flights of an early 707.
Your guesses on what might be the
final ship may well be correct, but are based on guesswork and theory. The
SSX approach was intended to find out by flying hardware. None of us were
locked on to Single Stage to Orbit: but of course it's convenient to label
us with that and then spend time talking as if all reusable ships have to
be SSTO and have to have super high performance.
Our approach was a series of
experimental programs to develop ships that would be:
-
Savable
-
Reusable
-
Higher
-
Faster
-
Cheaper
The notion was to develop those
ships through incremental testing.
All that was in the
reports. Continued later.
Richard sends this:
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/
special_packages/shuttle/5098881.htm
Ex-staffers say NASA needed to do more
BY SETH BORENSTEIN
sborenstein@krwashington.com
CAPE CANAVERAL - NASA failed to properly assess the
damage caused by the 2.67-pound chunk of foam that hit the space shuttle
because of a don't-worry-about-what-we-can't fix attitude, a retired NASA
tile chief and a former deputy shuttle program manager told The Herald on
Monday.
''How the [expletive] can you say it's
inconsequential,'' said Ernie Reyes, the man responsible for making sure
that tiles stayed on Columbia when it first flew in 1981. ``It wasn't
inconsequential to the seven lives on a four-something-billion-dollar
orbiter.''
NASA engineers just didn't take the incident
seriously enough because solving the problem would have been too hard,
said Reyes, the first space shuttle ''tile czar'' and former
quality-assurance chief at Kennedy Space Center. ''Somebody should have
done more. Jimminy Christmas that should have sounded alarms across the
agency, around the world,'' Reyes said.
A SMACK NASA officials Monday said engineering
analyses and computer models told them Columbia withstood a smack from a
20-inch-by-16-inch-by-6-inch flying chunk of insulation from the shuttle's
external fuel tank. The shuttle probably suffered loosening of nearly
three feet of crucial tile and some structural damage, but a Jan. 28
analysis found it would not be a ``safety of flight issue.''
On Saturday and Sunday, shuttle program manager Ron
Dittemore said his agency reviews found the foam hit was
``inconsequential.'' Sam Beddingfield, a former deputy shuttle program
manager, said that NASA management ''blew it'' by downplaying the foam
hit. And Bob Hotz, a member of the commission that looked into the 1986
Challenger accident, agreed. He said it seems like management took the
attitude, ``Gee, if it's not a problem, let's don't deal with it.'' Reyes
said the agency probably downplayed the problem because it was ''too
hard'' to fix. Dittemore has repeatedly said there was no way to fix
shuttle tile in space or make flight adjustments on reentry. Monday night,
NASA spokesman Bill Jeff said the agency did a thorough review of the
incident and was not trying to avoid an issue that was too tough to
handle.
But Reyes said the agency might have been able to
come up with a solution if it applied itself as it did during the Apollo
13 crisis. When an oxygen tank on Apollo blew, NASA turned a lunar module
into a lifeboat and even used socks, cardboard and duct tape to repair a
key device that removed deadly carbon monoxide from the capsule.
FLIGHT VIDEOS About two days after the Jan. 16
launch, NASA engineers realized from flight videos that the shuttle's wing
area had been hit from insulation from the external fuel tank. One of them
immediately told Reyes, who replied: ``Oh man, you're going to have
trouble on reentry.''
Foam can dislodge a tile on launch and ''if one lets
go, others are going to let go,'' Reyes said. '' Once you expose it to the
stress, it's going to be a daisy chain.'' If the tile goes, he said, the
aluminum shuttle could melt. NASA managers should have remembered that,
Reyes said. He said he recalled a landing in the early 1980s when a
shuttle tile came off on a wingtip and ''that scared the hell out of me.''
It melted the aluminum in a way ``that looked like someone had taken a hot
knife to a stick of butter.'' At Monday's press conference, NASA's
Dittemore said several days of examinations by engineering, safety,
quality, tile, fuel tank experts and mission managers all agreed ''in a
check and balance system'' that the debris incident was no problem. While
no one objected at the time to that conclusion, upon further review there
may have been some concerns raised by others, Dittemore said.
REDOING ANALYSIS ``I would suspect there were some
who had reservations. But I was not aware of them. They weren't part of
the playbook at that time. ''We are redoing the entire analysis,'' he
said. Reyes said NASA should revive jet-pack-like devices for spacewalks
so that astronauts can repair tiles in space with the space-shuttle
version of caulk. ''We can't say it's not feasible,'' Reyes said. ``If
it's human life involved, it's damn feasible.''
Typical NASA. No one there seems to
understand just what is going on. "We were just doing our jobs as
best we could."
But then look at
what our schools produce:
Jerry,
Saturday night, following the Columbia disaster, I
overheard two college-age couples at the Yenching Restaurant in Harvard
Square discussing the news.
They all agreed that NASA must be stopped from any
further activities in space because their rockets are
"environmentally unfriendly, just like the Concorde. Who knows what
damage they are doing to our air up there?"
I wanted to tell them that at least the astronauts
were not stealing the air, but thought the comment would be wasted.
Fiction imitates something, for sure.
Larry May
And those are the best and the
brightest. O God O Ottawa... And,
in case you were sleeping easily:
Jerry,
The guys over at CAIDA (Cooperative Association for
Internet Data Analysis) have done an analysis of the SQL Slammer worm in
cooperation with a bunch of other people who's work I take seriously. If
their analysis is right then we have just stepped into a very scary and
dangerous time for computer security. I would go so far as to say we have
now officially entered the "it's going to get a lot worse before it
gets any better" phase. According to their data "It infected
more than 90 percent of vulnerable hosts within 10 minutes". The
report is here:
http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers/
2003/sapphire/sapphire.html
90% of all vulnerable hosts in 10 minutes?!!?
This means it actually scanned every host in the
world in approximately 10 minutes.
Doubled in size ever 8.5 seconds!
This thing just tore through the world in short
order. The need for a firewall to block a personal own network should be
mandatory at this point now I'd say.
Anything Microsoft ships from now on has a critical
need for "defaults off" security I would say.
-Dan S.
Ye flipping gods! Thanks
g
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