![[Mars Blog]](/images/masthead.gif)
...is nonsense like this.
The system consists of four pods, located around the aft skirt on the Ares I First Stage. Early graphics of a system - that are bound to mature if accepted as the way forward - show each pod will have a fuel tank, an oxidizer tank, a pressurant tank, and seven thrusters.Gee, ya think?The downside of this concept - which is a completely separate system than the roll control system on the interstage - is the addition of failure modes, which would hit Ares I's LOC/M (Loss of Crew/Mission) numbers.
Also on the downside, the concept is a retro thrusting system (negative thrusting) - which would impact on Ares I's performance figures.
Firing small thrusters to help dampen out some of the shocks is a clever engineering solution, but not all clever solutions to problems are good...especially when they entirely miss the point. This "solution" brings to mind homework problems and exam questions I sometimes saw in college -- it's a solution to a problem so abstracted from any relevance to the larger system that, while it seems reasonable at the microscopic level of the problem at hand, it immediately becomes impractical or even absurd when all elements of the system are taken into account. If you imagine a plot of the axial oscillation of the vehicle as a (grossly simplified) sine wave, it makes sense that small inputs of the opposite sign at the peaks would reduce the amplitude of those peaks. But translating such a concept into hardware is where the absurdity comes in -- here, the small opposing input isn't just reducing the amplitude of the oscillation, it's acting against the primary function of the larger system.
But the truly breathtaking information in the NSF post has to do with the payload impacts given for two of the proposed solutions (emphasis mine):
- Active Pulse Thrusters: "'Performance and aft skirt design challenge: (around) 500 lbm (pounds mass) payload impact."
- Interstage Isolation Mounts: "May reduce payload by 1000 lbm."
The wording is slightly ambiguous, and could just be an imprecise reference to the effects on the payload as seen from the first stage's perspective. But if by "payload" is meant here "everything above the upper stage", it's simply incredible that these "solutions" even passed the laugh test. Cutting into the payload capability by 500-1500lbs, when the payload itself is already overweight (in large part due to the choice of launch vehicle), misses the point even worse than having thrusters aimed the wrong way.
When is NASA going to recognize the obvious?
ADDENDUM: I'm also curious about what this means:
Residual mass - only recently added - is classed as 'Allocated 0 pounds (due to it being a new factor) - Estimated 2,687 pounds...'Is this referring to residual propellants in the first and/or second stage? If so, does this really mean that the engineers failed to take into account something as fundamental as residual propellants in the design and performance analysis of Ares I? Wow.
It's Algore Winter here in Colorado...you know, that late bit of winter weather that comes after spring has already started. This is the view off the back deck about ten minutes ago:
Three inches of snow and 22F outside, a day after it was dry and sunny and 60F (in the foothills, at that).
I think someone broke the global warming.
It seems that you can grow marigolds in simulated lunar soil, with a bit of water and a dash of microbes, something which may hold promise for food production in lunar and martian settlements.
Of course, they're not as tasty as mums or begonias, but hey, you gotta start somewhere.
Another week, another grandiose Russian space plan: Russia To Build an Orbital Construction Plant
Russia plans to build an orbital plant for the production of spacecraft (link to sketchy Google translation of the Russian original) that are too big to build planetside, or are just too bulky to fire into orbit once built...Plans seem to be rather sparse at the moment [no kidding?], with the tentative construction date set for 2020, after the ISS is scheduled for decommissioning.
Glenn Reynolds asks for science fiction recommendations, so, in honor of tomorrow's Yuri's Night, here are mine:
- The Wall at the Edge of the World -- telepathic society lives in peace and harmony in a walled-in future Northern California...and brutally murders anyone who isn't a teep. Including the rest of the human population.
- Atlas Shrugged -- whaddya mean "it's not science fiction"? Of course it is. It's an alternate history, for one thing, splitting off from real history around 1925 as near as I can tell. For another, it features several elements of advanced technology: Rearden metal, Galt's motor (and related generators), the ray screen, the Xylophone, etc. (It's also a pretty darned funny book.)
- Methuselah's Children/Time Enough for Love -- they really have to be read together. A good collection of character vignettes, with far-future technology and culture and the allure (and drawbacks) of radical life extension as unifying elements.
- The Children's War -- another alternate history, set in the present-day Third Reich.
- Dune -- need I say more?
- Ender's Game -- ditto.
- The Mote in God's Eye -- not your ordinary "first contact" novel. Interesting alien characterizations, and a deep backstory.
- Red Moon -- the Soviets got a man to the moon first...and left him there.
- Feed -- young-adult science fiction, but one of the few SF novels to make me laugh out loud in numerous places.
- Armor -- a vastly more gritty take on Starship Troopers.
I purposely left out a lot of Heinlein and Niven, since they're pretty much givens. The sad thing is, looking over this list I see very few recent works (Feed being the most recent at 2004). Either I'm getting old, or there just isn't that much good science fiction being written now -- certainly one sees very little SF on the shelves ostensibly devoted to it in the big retail bookstores, and what's there is swamped out by forgettable and interchangable novels about vampires, wizards, and -- of course -- vampire wizards. I wasn't all that impressed with the much-hyped Old Man's War, which unlike Armor was a weak-coffee retelling of Starship Troopers...not bad, mind you, just not as intense or as thought provoking (respectively) as the other two. And of course there's the Mars Trilogy, which was a great series of books aside from the asinine politics, unlikeable cardboard characters, Marineris-sized plot holes, and phenomenally naive economics (Robinson did do a good job of painting the Martian environment...at least, when he wasn't waxing poetic about lichen).
If I had to guess, though, I would say that the fantasy genre's long-running popularity is losing steam - it probably peaked with the Lord of the Rings movies, and if the box office performance of recent "fantasy epics" is any guide it must have jumped the shark about the same time. If so, we may see a resurgence in both popularity and quality in the SF genre in the near future.
Tangentially related to this, I have to wonder what the effects on SF of the "global warming" mass hysteria and associated fascist cult will be over the long term. Certainly the rationalist and libertarian strains of SF will critique the corruption of science and the bounding of the future which radical greenism represents (Niven/Pournelle/Barnes and Chrichton have already written books along these lines). I for one have a hard time imagining anyone writing good "environmentalist science fiction", since anything written with the environmentalist perspective is bound to be preachy, teachy, and tedious in the extreme, given that the authors' first priority will be to convince the reader of the dire consequences facing the planet and urge them to action...instead of, you know, telling an entertaining yarn.
Like Christian end-times fiction, environmentalist science fiction may appeal to a certain small demographic, but go largely unnoticed outside of the true-believer market (unless made mandatory reading in high school English communications arts classes and the like). It's not impossible to write a popular novel from the green perspective, any more than a Rapture-themed novel can't be written that becomes a success in the mainstream market (it's been done, after all), it's just that I doubt those who might be motivated to write from this perspective would be able to balance dogma with the demands of good fiction.
One might counter that the oddly popular post-apocalypse sub-genre has been around since the beginning of science fiction, and the environmental catastrophe or post-catastrophe story would be nothing more than a new direction for this sub-genre. I'm not so sure. I've read a lot of the more well-known post-apocalypse titles, and the plots typically involve one or more protagonists fighting to stay alive after the End Of The World As We Know It. We follow their struggles, root for them as the action reaches a climax, and cheer their success when they eventually overcome whatever nightmarish eschatological nastiness the author has thrown at them. In short, even books with as dire a theme as the end of civilization (or mankind itself) are pro-human, and will take the side of the human protagonists.
While environmentalist science fiction might also represent humans as the good guys and present their struggle for survival as a good thing, consider what the protagonists would have to do to remain heroic within the value system of radical environmentalism: acknowledge that the catastrophe is not only entirely of human making (which is the case in many post-apocalypse stories) but that it is cosmic justice for mankind's environmental sins, wallow in existential guilt at being humans, fret about whether humans (including themselves) even deserve to survive The End, etc. It's difficult to write a compelling survival story about people who hate themselves, since their self-loathing tends to undermine the believability of their struggling to overcome the apocalyptic circumstances -- what plausible reason would they have to fight for their own survival when they doubt they have any right to exist in the first place?
Again, I'm not saying that it's impossible to write a good story in this sub-genre from the environmentalist perspective, I'm just doubtful it can be done by anyone who might be motivated to do it, because of the very source of their motivation.
Now that the current inter-DAC is nearly done, the normally less-nonexistent level of blogging will resume.
Something that puzzles me about Orion, and about aerospace engineering programs in general, is why it seems every last organizational thing has to be reinvented with every new project.
LM has a pretty extensive process documentation organization, which promulgates company-standard procedures for even the most mundane of business activities. It also has a separate organization whose focus is specifically on engineering process improvement, through the creation of CAD tools and processes and the like.
So why, I have to wonder, has every project I have ever worked on with LM (X-33, VentureStar, ET, CEV/Orion, among others) started from scratch with everything from numbering schemes to release processes to configuration management to data vaulting to drawing formats and standards to basic skill mix and team structures? You'd think that after so many decades that a lot of this stuff would have become routine by now -- revised periodically as new technology becomes available, of course, but not built anew every time.
A counter argument to this -- and one I used frequently when confronted with the All-Encompassing Michoud Excuse for Not Improving Processes: "That's the way ET does it" -- is that one ought to take advantage of the start of a new program to incorporate the lessons learned from other programs, thereby continuously improving the way business is done. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a middle ground between status quo and Year Zero when it comes to these things.
If LM were smart, it would set up a "project in a box", with all of the essential organizational elements defined and ready to go. Or rather, a handful of such packages, designed for projects of different sizes, from small R&D efforts up to major production programs.
So, when James Hansen makes a stink about how NASA was supposedly "censoring" his views about global warming, it's an intolerable abridgement of free, unbiased, and objective scientific inquiry. But when NASA refuses to publish one of its own scientists papers because it doesn't fit the AGW narrative, well...where's the outrage?
So Miskolczi re-derived the solution, this time using the proper boundary conditions for an atmosphere that is not infinite. His result included a new term, which acts as a negative feedback to counter the positive forcing. At low levels, the new term means a small difference ... but as greenhouse gases rise, the negative feedback predominates, forcing values back down.NASA refused to release the results. Miskolczi believes their motivation is simple. "Money", he tells DailyTech. Research that contradicts the view of an impending crisis jeopardizes funding, not only for his own atmosphere-monitoring project, but all climate-change research. Currently, funding for climate research tops $5 billion per year.
Miskolczi resigned in protest, stating in his resignation letter, "Unfortunately my working relationship with my NASA supervisors eroded to a level that I am not able to tolerate. My idea of the freedom of science cannot coexist with the recent NASA practice of handling new climate change related scientific results."
It doesn't matter for this discussion whether Miskolczi is right or wrong...what matters is that the appearance of suppression of free scientific inquiry in this case is being ignored. Were NASA giving the cold shoulder to a paper which appeared to strengthen the pro-AGW case -- that is, were the results of the research exactly the opposite -- there would be no end to the howls of protest. But in fact, there is very little information on this in the usual news channels.
So...where is the outrage?
"Rocket Man" over at Rockets and Such seems to think that Lockheed Martin scammed NASA on the Orion proposal.
To the extent that LM is adding cost for added features, it's due to changes in NASA's requirements for Orion. The configuration at the moment bears only a superficial resemblance to the configuration that won LM the contract, in large part because of NASA-directed changes.
To retool Rocket Man's car-buying analogy, what NASA said it wanted when it was looking around on the lot was a station wagon (basic transportation). Having signed the contract, they now want the dealership to throw in this add-on and that trim package, in an effort to turn the station wagon into a vehicle with the durability of a Hummer, the flexibility of a Jeep, and the reliability of a Volvo...while simultaneously reducing the curb weight to that of a Yugo so that the underpowered engine can actually get it off the lot.
Which is, of course, no easy task.
The blame here is misplaced. LM is doing what it can to accommodate the requirements changes coming from NASA. But LM is not a charitable organization - it's in business to make a profit, and there's no reason to expect a contractor in any line of business to simply eat the cost of changes requested by their customer, as Rocket Man seems to imply in the case of Orion. To expect otherwise is to invite abuse by the customer, and bankruptcy for the contractor.
UK television show Top Gear turns a Reliant Robin into a space shuttle.
No, really.
"I thought the Robin as a good place to start because, er, it's...pointy...at one end..."
