6 ms·

Faster, NASA, Faster

67 points by vorador 17y ago

djcapelis 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.
  - anamax 17y ago
    > Contrast this to the kind of extreme conservatism needed to operate manned missions Needed? By whom and why? It's not the test subjects.
    - Retric 17y ago
      Politics, every human death is ammunition for people who want to cut the program.
  - djcapelis 17y ago
    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!
    - pwmanagerdied 17y ago
      I agree with most of your post, but the incident with the unit conversion deserved to have a stink made about it. There are so many things that can go wrong on a mission like that, and having the point of failure being something as simple as unit conversion is a pretty big mistake.
    - idlewords 17y ago
      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.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
idlewords 17y ago
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).
- dmfdmf 17y ago
  I agree. Manned space programs are a waste of money. Space is a dangerous place inimical to life. There is nothing out there, no places to go, no economical resources to claim. The analogy to seafaring implicit in the term spacefaring is an emotional appeal to adventure and discovery. But going to the moon is not comparable to the discovery and colonization of America. I am happy we went to the moon, it is a great achievement but nobody can live there or on Mars. Though I oppose govt stimulus spending, if we must spend a fortune on an "adventure" program let's colonize the oceans or learn to sea-farm or drill to the center of the Earth or build giant pyramids in the Nevada desert. Such projects would at least have the virtue of being honest goals.
  - encoderer 17y ago
    The thing is, nobody has compared the moon and North America. Instead.. the moon is analogous to the inhabitable rocky island just off the coast, just past the horizon. Getting there was relatively easy. Vikings did it. It took a decade. No, going several orders of magnitude further, several centuries later, that's the New World. But nobody would've ever gotten there if they first hadn't made it to the inhabitable rock 20 miles off the coast.
    - dmfdmf 17y ago
      > The thing is, nobody has compared the moon and North America. The comparison is implicit and my statement was a generalization; that spacefaring means traveling and colonizing the moon and beyond. > Instead.. the moon is analogous to the inhabitable rocky island just off the coast, just past the horizon. This is exactly the analogy I was rejecting in my comment. The moon and space are inhospitable. Even the astronauts who went to the moon and back were lucky they weren't fried by radiation. They were getting dosed the whole way and avoided a solar flare or radiation flux that would have killed them out right. Not to mention the deleterious effects of long term zero-G on biological systems. For the Vikings it was "relatively" easy to get there by orders of magnitude and no need to bring air, food and water to their destination and total dependence on complex support systems. I'm not trying to quash your dreams and I am as big a fan of the early explorers as the next guy but living in space is totally impractical at this point. I wouldn't rule out venturing out in space some day but that is probably 100's of years away, if ever.
rgrieselhuber 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    As we go further and further out, the lightspeed delay will become a bigger and bigger inconvenience.
rbanffy 17y ago
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.
gaius 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    "Who Wants to Be An Astronaut?" Hosted by William Shatner.
- aarongough 17y ago
  Absolutely. While in a lot of cases I would say that safety and the value of human life should be the first consideration, space is not one of them. Tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people lost their lives trying to sail across the oceans to discover new lands, but the world as we know it could not exist without their sacrifice. Space is a frontier. Frontiers are dangerous. Trying to make them safe requires either a short period of intensely dangerous activity or a very long period of less dangerous activity. But space is too important to be taken slowly. Personally, if NASA told me I could be an astronaut but there was a 30% chance I would die, I would still do it. And I am sure there are thousands more out there like me. Additionally, what NASA should be doing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_dumb_booster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_dumb_booster
joubert 17y ago
Why doesn't NASA use Soyuz rockets then?
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  NIH?
- gaius 17y ago
  Or fund the development of Skylon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_Engines_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 17y ago
    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...
- physcab 17y ago
  Well, they do. They buy seats fairly regularly and when the space shuttle is discontinued next year the Soyuz will be the primary rocket for doing space missions. The problem is that the rocket has a very limited payload capacity compared to the shuttle and it can only carry 3 people at a time.
RyanMcGreal 17y ago
The author seems to be conflating two very different things both called "launching".
- stcredzero 17y ago
  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.
anonjon 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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.htm http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/history/mercury/mercury-unmanned...
      - idlewords 17y ago
        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 17y ago
moron4hire 17y ago
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 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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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?
oofoe 17y ago
See also http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html - "A Rocket a Day Keeps the High Cost Away", written in 1993...
physcab 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.

67 points by vorador 17y ago

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 17y ago
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.
- anamax 17y ago
  > Contrast this to the kind of extreme conservatism needed to operate manned missions Needed? By whom and why? It's not the test subjects.
  - Retric 17y ago
    Politics, every human death is ammunition for people who want to cut the program.
- djcapelis 17y ago
  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!
  - pwmanagerdied 17y ago
    I agree with most of your post, but the incident with the unit conversion deserved to have a stink made about it. There are so many things that can go wrong on a mission like that, and having the point of failure being something as simple as unit conversion is a pretty big mistake.
  - idlewords 17y ago
    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.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]

idlewords 17y ago

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).

dmfdmf 17y ago
I agree. Manned space programs are a waste of money. Space is a dangerous place inimical to life. There is nothing out there, no places to go, no economical resources to claim. The analogy to seafaring implicit in the term spacefaring is an emotional appeal to adventure and discovery. But going to the moon is not comparable to the discovery and colonization of America. I am happy we went to the moon, it is a great achievement but nobody can live there or on Mars. Though I oppose govt stimulus spending, if we must spend a fortune on an "adventure" program let's colonize the oceans or learn to sea-farm or drill to the center of the Earth or build giant pyramids in the Nevada desert. Such projects would at least have the virtue of being honest goals.
- encoderer 17y ago
  The thing is, nobody has compared the moon and North America. Instead.. the moon is analogous to the inhabitable rocky island just off the coast, just past the horizon. Getting there was relatively easy. Vikings did it. It took a decade. No, going several orders of magnitude further, several centuries later, that's the New World. But nobody would've ever gotten there if they first hadn't made it to the inhabitable rock 20 miles off the coast.
  - dmfdmf 17y ago
    > The thing is, nobody has compared the moon and North America. The comparison is implicit and my statement was a generalization; that spacefaring means traveling and colonizing the moon and beyond. > Instead.. the moon is analogous to the inhabitable rocky island just off the coast, just past the horizon. This is exactly the analogy I was rejecting in my comment. The moon and space are inhospitable. Even the astronauts who went to the moon and back were lucky they weren't fried by radiation. They were getting dosed the whole way and avoided a solar flare or radiation flux that would have killed them out right. Not to mention the deleterious effects of long term zero-G on biological systems. For the Vikings it was "relatively" easy to get there by orders of magnitude and no need to bring air, food and water to their destination and total dependence on complex support systems. I'm not trying to quash your dreams and I am as big a fan of the early explorers as the next guy but living in space is totally impractical at this point. I wouldn't rule out venturing out in space some day but that is probably 100's of years away, if ever.

rgrieselhuber 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  As we go further and further out, the lightspeed delay will become a bigger and bigger inconvenience.

rbanffy 17y ago

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.

gaius 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  "Who Wants to Be An Astronaut?" Hosted by William Shatner.
aarongough 17y ago
Absolutely. While in a lot of cases I would say that safety and the value of human life should be the first consideration, space is not one of them. Tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people lost their lives trying to sail across the oceans to discover new lands, but the world as we know it could not exist without their sacrifice. Space is a frontier. Frontiers are dangerous. Trying to make them safe requires either a short period of intensely dangerous activity or a very long period of less dangerous activity. But space is too important to be taken slowly. Personally, if NASA told me I could be an astronaut but there was a 30% chance I would die, I would still do it. And I am sure there are thousands more out there like me. Additionally, what NASA should be doing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_dumb_booster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_dumb_booster

joubert 17y ago

Why doesn't NASA use Soyuz rockets then?

RyanMcGreal 17y ago
NIH?
gaius 17y ago
Or fund the development of Skylon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_Engines_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 17y ago
  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...
physcab 17y ago
Well, they do. They buy seats fairly regularly and when the space shuttle is discontinued next year the Soyuz will be the primary rocket for doing space missions. The problem is that the rocket has a very limited payload capacity compared to the shuttle and it can only carry 3 people at a time.

RyanMcGreal 17y ago

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

stcredzero 17y ago
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.

anonjon 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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.htm http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/history/mercury/mercury-unmanned...
    - idlewords 17y ago
      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 17y ago

moron4hire 17y ago

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 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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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?

oofoe 17y ago

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

physcab 17y ago

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 17y ago
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.