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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 failu

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

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]