Mail 243 February 3 - 9, 2003 (original) (raw)

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. "X"-33 wasn't intended to be SAVABLE, and thus threw away a major cost benefit of the kind of spacecraft we advocated.
  7. 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.
  8. The assumption that SSX design was to be performance driven is flat wrong and demonstrates unfamiliarity with the concept as proposed and advocated.
  9. 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.
  10. 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:

  1. Savable
  2. Reusable
  3. Higher
  4. Faster
  5. 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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