
Faster, NASA, Faster - vorador
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/opinion/21lu.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
======
gaius
I think I speak for every sci-fi fan when I say, while we're not reckless, if
NASA said hey, you may die doing this, but either way humanity will be a
little bit closer to becoming a starfaring species, we'd be like, hell yeah.

~~~
noonespecial
Or, failing that (and fearsome moral dilemmas aside) you could just have a
lottery open to the public where the "winners" only had a 1 in 10 chance of
coming back alive, but if they did, they would be millionaires and heroes. You
would need a separate agency just to handle all of the applicants.

Don't even get me started on the nightmare element "reality TV" would bring to
it.

~~~
bitwize
"Who Wants to Be An Astronaut?"

Hosted by William Shatner.

------
djcapelis
Innovation comes at a cost. One has to be willing to accept failure.

NASA isn't at the moment. I'm not sure any nation is willing to accept high
enough failure rates in their space programs to fly by the seat of their
pants.

Increasing launching is maybe a start, but until the space program tolerates
more failure true innovation might be tricky. High risk high reward work loses
in that environment, no matter the lipservice paid towards that work in
overviews.

~~~
idlewords
NASA missions have proven very innovative - and very tolerant of risk - when
astronauts' lives are not at stake. The various missions to Mars are a good
example.

Contrast this to the kind of extreme conservatism needed to operate manned
missions, where every mission-critical system needs to be massively
overengineered and multiply redundant.

~~~
djcapelis
From what I understand of the original rover designs they were originally
designed to be extremely intolerant of risk and it's only after an intern was
dicking around with a robot that actually worked that they saw the light and
realized they had to go with the "bump around a bit and see what happens"
approach.

Even then, I would argue that NASA's strength is more in finding solutions to
extremely constraining problems (i.e. all their big saves) more than it is to
finding solutions when nothing's the limit. Though it's not my field and what
they do is pretty amazing, so really this is all just coming from me and my
armchair here.

I don't really believe you that the missions have been at all tolerant of
risk. I see very very little to back that up.

Look at how much of a stink got raised when units were converted wrong and we
lost one probe. Do you really think NASA's a risk embracing kind of place?

IIRC the current reaction that particular issue is all schematics involving
every single component must be in US units. Sure sounds like a fast and loose
environment to me!

~~~
idlewords
You may be confusing risk with recklessness. NASA is very careful in how it
runs missions (since there are so many opportunities for irrecoverable
operational errors), but the actual designs in unmanned missions have
routinely pushed past the state of the art.

Using aerobraking shells, landing on Mars with bouncy pillows, catching a
returning solar wind probe with a helicopter, shielding a probe within 10
solar radii of the sun... NASA projects are daring in their design even if
they are (quite properly) conservative in execution.

------
physcab
What's interesting is that despite the consevatism, the space shuttle program,
I think, has the worst mission success record. They've had what--14 deaths in
the past 20 years?

From what I learned on my recent trip to Kennedy Space Center, the Space
shuttle program is actually incredibly risky compared to other and past rocket
designs. It's got solid rocket boosters that once lit, cannot be turned off.
It's got no abort sequence until those SRBs are finished firing. Hell, the
rocket itself is asymmetrical and _rocks_ back and forth before liftoff.

Contrast all this with the Soyuz and our very own Saturn V designs. Saturn V I
believe had 100% mission success during all our trips to the moon. It's liquid
engines could be shutoff almost instantaneously during an abort sequence AND
it had a blasting cap on top that would fire if the crew needed to abort
during launch. Oh and the rocket did all this while being something like 95%
efficient.

Why NASA abandoned this program is beyond me.

~~~
supahfly_remix
The space shuttle does have the ability to snatch satellites out of space and
bring them back to Earth. No other craft does this, and this was probably an
important feature during the Cold War. NASA doesn't talk much about the
military uses of its spacecraft.

------
rbanffy
I see a problem with the article: while launching a dot-com or a program is
somewhat cheap, testing a new rocket engine concept frequently involves a
couple years of work before you can even build a small prototype.

The fact failing integration tests ruins a million-dollar piece of machinery
and not infrequently kills a dozen people also doesn't help much.

What NASA does is the impossible, bordering the very difficult. What we see is
the artifacts that fall outside the impossible space.

------
idlewords
This is a very good (if unintentional) argument against manned space flight.

There is no way that firing an elaborate terrarium full of large primates into
space is ever going to be cheap, and there is no scientific basis for
continuing to do it (other than the circular justification of learning more
about how space affects the people we fire into it).

~~~
stcredzero
_This is a very good (if unintentional) argument against manned space flight.
There is no way that firing an elaborate terrarium full of large primates into
space is ever going to be cheap_

One should only say something like that with some physical principle as its
basis, otherwise, it's just pointy-haired boss flying by the seat of one's
pants.

Some prominent physicist once published a "proof" of the impossibility of
heavier-than-air flight in the New York Times. (One which treated atoms as
billiard balls and ignored fluid dynamics.) I think it was Kant who once gave
"the chemical composition of the stars" as an example of something we'd never
know. Two very smart gentlemen who had good sounding arguments, but a mistaken
physical basis. From this thread, I haven't any idea about your acumen nor the
basis of your argument.

I think if someone told a subject of Queen Elizabeth, that someday teenagers
could idly write a screed, to be read by ten-thousands or millions of others,
and effectively pay only a pittance to do so, they'd be dismissed as a
lunatic.

EDIT: energy to get a spacecraft to orbit? It's comparable to sending a 747
over the Atlantic.

~~~
gvb
"[E]nergy to get a spacecraft to orbit? It's comparable to sending a 747 over
the Atlantic."

[citation needed] I have not done the math, but I find this quite improbable.

The space shuttle has two SRBs with one million pounds of solid propellant
_each_ plus more than 500,000 gallons of super-cold liquid oxygen and liquid
hydrogen.
[http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/information/shuttl...](http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/information/shuttle_faq.html#14)

The 747-8I has 64,225 U.S. gallons of jet fuel.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747#Specifications>

According to
[http://www.convertunits.com/from/gallon+%5BU.S.%5D+of+naphth...](http://www.convertunits.com/from/gallon+%5BU.S.%5D+of+naphtha+type+jet+fuel/to/joules),
one gallon of jet fuel contains 133.92e6J, so a full fuel load on the biggest
747 is 8.6e12J.

According to somebody google found, the energy to get the shuttle into orbit
is 1.17E11J, but that is just the potential and kinetic energy, neglecting the
losses due to air resistance, etc.
<http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=229835>

<http://xkcd.com/669/>

~~~
stcredzero
8.6e12J is indeed comparable to 1.17e11J.

Thanks. I remembered that from a Robert Zubrin book.

~~~
gvb
I agree that 8.6e12J is comparable to 1.17e11J, but the energy required to
flying a 747 in real life is _not_ comparable to the potential + kinetic
energy of a shuttle, neglecting all losses required to achieve that potential
+ kinetic energy.

In particular, two million pounds of SRB propellant plus more than 500,000
gallons of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen is _not_ comparable to 64,225
U.S. gallons of jet fuel.

~~~
stcredzero
The point is that marshaling energies of that magnitude is actually pretty
routine for our culture.

 _In particular, two million pounds of SRB propellant plus more than 500,000
gallons of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen is not comparable to 64,225 U.S.
gallons of jet fuel._

In particular, you are acting as if the fundamental problem is represented by
the Shuttle. That's just one particular configuration of one possible
solution. What you're doing would be like someone from the early 1900's
showing the in-feasibility of the performance envelope of a 747 by quoting the
stats of a Curtiss biplane.

Abandon the idea that you _have_ to use chemical propulsion, or that you have
to carry your own power, or even your own reaction mass, and you get fantastic
improvement.

Here's what you get when you only keep doing the 3rd thing:

[http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/meetings/fellows/mar0...](http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/meetings/fellows/mar04/897Kare.pdf)

------
joubert
Why doesn't NASA use Soyuz rockets then?

~~~
gaius
Or fund the development of Skylon:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_Engines_Skylon>

(Altho' arguably ESA or even the British MoD ought to be, whatever anyone else
thinks)

~~~
aarongough
That is awesome! I had never heard of it before either, which is an incredible
shame. I personally think that spaceplanes like this are a great idea and are
likely to be the way we finally get into space for real...

------
rgrieselhuber
Seems like we would be better off with android-avatars. There is not really a
need to send actual humans to just do the kind of early exploration we want to
do at this stage.

~~~
chancho
But Avatars shaped like ourselves are still a few decades off, and needlessly
complicated to execute. Avatars of our cars have worked out well.

~~~
stcredzero
As we go further and further out, the lightspeed delay will become a bigger
and bigger inconvenience.

------
RyanMcGreal
The author seems to be conflating two very different things both called
"launching".

~~~
stcredzero
I don't think he's actually comparing a company launch to a rocket launch. I
think he's likening a development iteration to a rocket launch.

------
oofoe
See also <http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html> \- "A Rocket a
Day Keeps the High Cost Away", written in 1993...

------
moron4hire
This article is waaaay off base. First of all, NASA _is_ trying to get into
faster launch cycles, that's the entire point of the whole reusable rocket
projects. Second, nobody can complain with the shuttle software defect rate:
the last 11 versions had a total of 17 defects
(<http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html>). _Seventeen_. If
anything, the rest of the world could learn a lesson from NASA, especially in
the realm of medical technology.

~~~
stcredzero
I have a couple of friends who worked for NASA, and I've met and spoken with
others who worked there. The part of NASA associated with the shuttle _is_ a
bit ossified. One of my friends ported the software that tracks the shuttle's
trajectory, and determines abort trajectories. He did that either right at the
beginning of this century or the very end of the last. In any case, it was
very recent, yet the use of _version control software_ was considered a
radical and risky move on the part of his group!

~~~
dandrews
So what specific problem in NASA's development methodology do you think would
be fixed by your favorite VCS? From the few references I've bothered to google
the existing development process is heavily regimented - if expensive - and
their record is pretty good.

~~~
stcredzero
They also have a record of ignoring warnings of problems by engineers, and in
the parts that launch the shuttle, ineffective motivation to achieve economies
of scale.

As in a lot of government projects, there's an incentive to bill expensively
for things regarded as esoteric, hence a desire to keep things esoteric.

My friend also told me about one control, which was something like a 10-key
keypad, a commit button, and a nixie readout. It dated from Apollo. You'd send
commands by dialing in alphanumeric codes. What was it like when they
"updated" it to run on workstations? It was a 10-key keypad with a few other
buttons, with an alphanumeric entry field.

I don't necessarily want VCs running NASA. But it's for sure that there's some
_ossification_ in that government organization. Maybe it's time for private
enterprise to step in?

------
anonjon
This is an awful analogy because silicon valley has a huge failure rate for
companies. Even an established company can fail quite rapidly. Imagine
launching the shuttle and 90% of the time it blows up spectacularly. That
would not do anything good for the space program.

~~~
stcredzero
That's not the author's analogy, only a straw man resulting from your
misplaced referent. A shuttle launch is not analogous to a company launch. A
shuttle launch is analogous to a version or a feature deployment of one
particular company.

A company that iterates a lot, and deploys a lot, gets good at iterating and
deploying. An organization that preps, launches, and retrieves spaceships a
lot gets good at that too.

More effort on proving the null hypothesis is suggested.

~~~
idlewords
The parent's point remains completely valid. Rapid iteration only works if you
are allowed to fail. In the case of manned space flight, failure means you
lose the crew.

~~~
stcredzero
What straw-man organization is unable to send up _unmanned_ prototypes? Oh,
yeah. Must be NASA.

[http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/history/mercury/mercury-unmanned...](http://www-
pao.ksc.nasa.gov/history/mercury/mercury-unmanned.htm)

~~~
idlewords
If you're sending up unmanned prototypes, why go on to man the missions at
all? Save yourself the cost of all that life support plumbing and call it a
brilliant hack.

~~~
stcredzero
Fine, your side can explore space and establish enterprises on Mars with
remote-controlled machines. My side will have all of that technology, plus
immediate human presence.

We can see who innovates faster.

