Does anyone else think all NASA employees should be sent home?

[Jared at Pelican Parts]

I remeber speaking to an engineer at one time who worked on the F-1 engines for the Saturn V rockets. He was saying that the engines were so well designed and cooled that even at full thrust, you could put your hand on the engine bell, and not get burned. Can anyone check the validity of that?

This gets me thinking, what exactly does merit this type of engineering? funding. Look back to the 1960's. NASA is given basically an unlimited
budget to design, build and operate the moon landings under the assumption that we need to beat the russians. Blind nationalism in my thinking but at the same time, you get an entire infrastructure built upon a singular goal. Aerospace companies are indirectly responsible for creating areas such as the San Fernando Valley in California, thousands of homes are built, families prosper, new technologies are developed.

So flash forward forty years, we have a space vehicle that is nearly thirty years old, based on outdated technology all built by the lowest bidder. It's expensive to operate, maintain and NASA has a budget that suggests that it stays that way for many years to come. So do we keep updating a thirty year old design just to complete the contstruction of the ISS?

I'm reminded of Challenger, where engineers at Morton-Thiokol were trying to warn the higher-ups that there was a significant risk of blow-by in the booster o-rings if temperatures on the pad dropped below a certian level. These engineers were silenced, in the interest of saving face, as they didnt want to scrub such a high profile mission as a teacher in space, hence, budget justification for the next year, and the eventual tragedy as a result. At least thats how I understand it.

Flash forward to Columbia, a one in a million chance impact causes a hole in the leading edge of the shuttles wing, and all of a sudden, NASA is accused of faulty management? I was surprised to see one of the investigators holding up a 2 pound piece of insulation foam and saying that there's no way this could cause a hole.

A nearly frozen piece of foam traveling at a relative speed of 500MPH impacts the leading edge of a wing travelling at nearly 10 times the speed of sound. The results are pretty obvious.

Sure enough, the tests concluded that this was the case. The tiling on the shuttle needs to serve one purpose, to absorb and dissipate heat from the friction caused by the shuttle re-entering the earth's atomsphere. It isnt designed for structural stability. If anything it's an engineering marvel that we able to operate the shuttle at all.

Two accidents in roughly 25 years, 113 shuttle flights, if you look at it statisically, thats actually pretty damn good odds if you factor in the design of the shuttle and the way it works. It's going to take 34 shuttle flights to complete the assembly of the international space station. A statisical analysis was done and found that there was a 73% chance that one of those flights will end in major failure.

If anything I think NASA's doing an exceptional job dealing with the budget they currently have....

[adamred]

I agree it is noble, interesting, full of scientific discovery and I don't necessarily think we should write the whole thing off, I just really wish for NASA's sake they would just get it RIGHT for a change....

It sort of is like the country's response to terrorism, get one big fat warning in '93 do basically nothing about it and get slammed in '01....

I remember being in high school and watching the challenger blow up, what an aweful moment and until 9/11 was one of the central historical moments that I marked my life with, but not much changed and years later we killed more astonauts....

I guess this latest little issue just make me wish more and more that we would learn from our mistakes around here....

[legion]

Originally posted by dhoward
A high-performance machine, using 70's technology.
Sound familiar?

NASCAR?

[Victor]

Originally posted by Leader
At the risk of being flamed to the ground...I'm beginning to wonder why we continue to spend billions on "space exploration." Somehow the whole NASA program made more sense in the '60s and '70s when the world was a more predictable place. Now, with the threats to our country so ever-present, maybe that space money could be better allocated.
Sure, the space program has given us countless discoveries that have made all our lives easier and better, but it didn't stop those idiots from flying planes into the WTC and Pentagon. Just a thought...

Hey now comon! It really is very important to research the effects of weightlessness on ant farms (or whatever they are doing up there). Also important for marketers of various non-stick / heatproof household items. How else could they use the tag line "developed in conjunction with NASA"?

Now if "The Habibs" managed to fly the space shuttle into a building I must admit I would have a hard time not seeing the humour in that.......

[stuartj]

Originally posted by Jared Fenton

Two accidents in roughly 25 years, 113 shuttle flights, if you look at it statisically, thats actually pretty damn good odds if you factor in the design of the shuttle and the way it works. It's going to take 34 shuttle flights to complete the assembly of the international space station. A statisical analysis was done and found that there was a 73% chance that one of those flights will end in major failure.

Conversley, two accidents in 113 flights also apparenty means that there would 500 crashes a day if airliners operated to those standards.

Its a dangerous business. Personally, I have nothing but admiraton for people prepared to sit atop what amounts to a giant bomb and fling themsleves into space.

[Moneyguy1]

I think NASA got Galileo riget...Cassini right....Freedom and Opportunity right....

Failure is just part of pregress.

[David]

I took a Weibul analysis class a while back and one of the sample calculations we did was on the space shuttle. I think the original reliability was supposed to be 95% and we worked it out and it was around 95%. I don't remember if we calculated when the next failure would be.

The parts may be built by the lowest bidder, but that bidder has specs and drawings that insure it is exactly as designed.

On the other hand, I'm an engineer and I live in Clearlake and have meet a few NASA engineers and none of them struck me as geniuses.

[jyl]

I think NASA gets it right more often than most big organizations that are tasked with accomplishing very difficult things.

Remember in the glory Apollo days - one mission burned up on the launchpad, another almost didn't make it home, this was wth a virtually unlimited budget and equipment that didn't have to be reused and was the state of the art at the time.

As Bob said, think of all the recent NASA missions that have been spectacular successes.

And think of the error/failure rate in the FBI, the military, and other generally-admired agencies. Not better than NASA, I'd say.

[campbellcj]

Since I was a kid, I've always thought astronomy and space exploration were "cool", and presently a lot of my customers and thus my sources of income are NASA-related. Nevertheless, tough as it is to admit, I agree with several of the posts above that we really should consider throttling-back on the "non-essential" missions.

I would include the ISS, Hubble, Mars, etc. in my list of "non-essential" massive expenditures. Communications and surveillance satellite launch and support activities are far more crucial.

I would rather see my tax funds invested here on the ground in things like physical infrastructure (fixing the roads!), homeland security, and education. When we get our stuff patched up here on Earth and get our debts and defecits under control, THEN we can start goofing off in space again...

[IROC]

One thing to consider (when talking about better ways to spend money) is how small NASA's budget really is in comparison to other things we spend money on. Back when I was working on Space Station projects, a statistic came out saying that people spend more money each year on potato chips that it was costing to build Station.

The "value" of ISS has diminished since NASA's budget woes surfaced a few years ago. They mis-managed their money and now their projects are suffering (and that's why I'm working on DoD programs now and not space programs). Hubble, on the other hand, has been a massive success in my book.

One fallacy the public has is that "lowest bidder" implies low quality. NASA (like the government in general) defines very specific requirements and whovever meets those requirements at the lowest price wins the contract. Isn't that how you'd like you taxes spent?

And VaSteve - PM before you get here and we'll have a beer!

Mike

[Jims5543]

Originally posted by Jared Fenton

I'm reminded of Challenger, where engineers at Morton-Thiokol were trying to warn the higher-ups that there was a significant risk of blow-by in the booster o-rings if temperatures on the pad dropped below a certian level. These engineers were silenced, in the interest of saving face, as they didnt want to scrub such a high profile mission as a teacher in space, hence, budget justification for the next year, and the eventual tragedy as a result. At least thats how I understand it.

The Challenger flight was postponed 5 or 6 times before it was launched. On the launch day it was postponed another 2 hours. There was a LOT of pressure to get this bird off the ground and save face. Schools were tuning in every day to see it cancelled again. Not exactly putting your best foot foward for your future engineers.

A company I worked for was contracted by NASA to manufactor a set of devices for QC of the assembly of the SRB's. Listening to what was said by the engineer we were dealing with it was obvious that NASA knew there was a problem and was ignoring it.

Just like any large company (see many threads here) the higher ups tend to be idiots that are there more for political reasons rather than due to their abilities. Therein lies the biggest problem with the space program.

The Shuttles are outdated and should be retired. It amazes me how slowly technology is developing since the shuttles were built. I thought for sure by this point in time (2005) we would have better technology than we do.

I personally hope space exploration continues hopefully better technology is not too far off.

[Jims5543]

Originally posted by IROC
One thing to consider (when talking about better ways to spend money) is how small NASA's budget really is in comparison to other things we spend money on. Back when I was working on Space Station projects, a statistic came out saying that people spend more money each year on potato chips that it was costing to build Station.

The "value" of ISS has diminished since NASA's budget woes surfaced a few years ago. They mis-managed their money and now their projects are suffering (and that's why I'm working on DoD programs now and not space programs). Hubble, on the other hand, has been a massive success in my book.

One fallacy the public has is that "lowest bidder" implies low quality. NASA (like the government in general) defines very specific requirements and whovever meets those requirements at the lowest price wins the contract. Isn't that how you'd like you taxes spent?

And VaSteve - PM before you get here and we'll have a beer!

Mike

I worked on the "other side of the fence" outside of NASA. I wasn't a NASA employee. But, I worked in KSC a lot as a subcontractor. We used to marvel how if you took a job with NASA you could make twice the money and full paid benefits doing the same job. Its no suprise to me that they are having money problems.

We were called in to troubleshoot problems when constructing new launch pads. I was somewhat amazed at the amount of problems they would encounter. Nothing ever seemed to go smoothly.

We had to take measurements on the gantry doors on one of the launch pads. They were binding up and not fuctioning at all. There is nothing like having to go to a launch pad at 3:30 in the morning to take measurements because some engineer decided that was the point of the day when the steel was at its most constant tempurature.
Some stuff they made us do would defy any logic at all. We felt like we were having a bad joke played on us a lot of the time.

[IROC]

I'm not going to argue that NASA is a well-oiled efficient machine by any stretch of the imagination. I've worked closely with NASA folks since the late '80s (and spent quite a bit of time at MSFC, KSC, JSC, GSFC and Lewis Research Center) and I still stand by my earlier statement that contractors do the lion's share of the "real" work and sometimes the things that NASA asks for defies logic...but they're the ones with the money. :>)

Mike

[dhoward]

Interesting read for those wondering what NASA has provided, besides cool rockets....
http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html

[911pcars]

" I thought for sure by this point in time (2005) we would have better technology than we do. "

Yes, I agree. We do.

Didn't privateer Burt Rutan take a vehicle into space recently? Granted, it wasn't to the moon, but his budget was billions less than NASA gets. At some point, perhaps a private company could do this (or parts of it) more efficiently than a govt. bureacracy.

Doesn't everybody complain about higher taxes? This could be one of those black holes. Not sure NASA's best days have past, but I think more attention should be paid to issues here on earth including but not limited to cost-plus contracts some govt. vendors are currently enjoying.

Sherwood

[campbellcj]

One random thought regarding privatization is that some of the primary NASA contractors, and/or a consortium of several of the big and smaller ones, certainly -could- in theory accomplish engineering, fabrication and execution programs similar to what NASA has historically funded and overseen.

As mentioned above, there is a small handful of firms who do a huge proportion of the work to get the Shuttle and other vehicles launched and into mission-ready position.

But the big question is "why?" -- these are all for-profit, primarily publicly-held corporations. They are currently working on contract to NASA to build profits and shareholder value.

How many of these NASA missions would generate commercial profits, were they not backed by taxpayer funds???

[Moneyguy1]

Burt Rutan's flight, as spectacular as it was, would not have been possible without technology developed by NASA and other government research.

[dd74]

Today I laid my hand on the Apollo 9 space module here in the San Diego Aerospace Museum. There's nothing truly symbolic about a hunk of heat resistant tiles, and when looking through the window into the cramped three-person interior, absolutely nothing again that would connect the walls of toggles with the engineering feats that they control. Nah, space is a big BTDT, and can't in any way help us live our lives better, right? I mean it is, as is its namesake, an ugly "Gumdrop" that circled Earth 152 times. But hell, that's no big deal.

Of course, by the time your grandchildren come around, there likely will be no rain forest and the oceans will be hot polluted swamp water. In essence, global warming and overpopulation will have effectively killed this planet. So, don't explore space. Don't look for an answer beyond our own world. Instead, as one poster suggests, find a way instead to improve orbit-borne satellites, I guess so our cell phones and Dish TV comes in clearer.

Hubble is by far one of the most important items we have in space. It now has seen how galaxies were formed and how they might end. Sure, tangibly, such information isn't going to pay your electric bill, but it is still information that might funnel itself down and apply to our own existence on Earth and within our solar system, not to mention our own galaxy. As for the shuttle, it has acted as a shuttle would in the case of servicing the Hubble. After all, how else would its damaged lenses be repaired?

I hope the thoughts on this thread that space exploration is unimportant don't reflect the masses in this or other countries. We've damaged our own planet quite well, and possibly space has the componentry for us to fix her, or if not, potentially find our emerging lineage another place to live.

[Hetmann]

Hubble is coming down. NASA can't save it. You'd think with the money and technology involved, they would have tried to get that thing up in permanent orbit. Nope, it's a throw away.

Sorry, but I agree that manned space flight/exploration is a BTDT. The work they are doing seems trite and pointless compared to the cost. That money would be better spent down here working on renewable energy, better health, better security.

[M.D. Holloway]

dd74 - so what your saying is that I should take in my trash cans rather than looking down the street to bring in my neighbors?

Space is cool but the enviromnet and the body is far more important. I don't beotch at my nieghbors trash cans untill mine are taken care of.