Failure Is Always an Option 479
Logic Bomb writes "The New York Times has a short but elegant op-ed regarding the different perspectives of engineers and managers and the role that plays in accidents like the space shuttle Columbia disaster. It's the sort of article you'll nod all the way through, then print and leave anonymously on your supervisor's desk. Any tech managers in the Slashdot crowd might have some interesting comments on how the right balance is struck." Henry Petroski has written several good books on engineering and failure.
In software terms (Score:5, Interesting)
In the case of my last software project, engineers who worried about bugs that the software may have suffered during design were ineffective in getting it properly inspected before launch.
"No boss, I have no idea where that article printed out 15 times and strewn across your office came from........ It looks like a good article though."
I'm just glad... (Score:4, Insightful)
NASA's Vietnam (From today's Wall Street Journal) (Score:5, Interesting)
When I go to the Cape and watch the Shuttle being launched, I still get a lump in my throat watching it soar. Even though I no longer work for NASA, its thunder affirms my dreams for spaceflight. Still, when I put emotion aside, I can't ignore my engineering training. That training and my knowledge as a 20-year veteran of the space agency (and also a Vietnam vet) has led me to conclude that the Space Shuttle is NASA's Vietnam. A generation of engineers and managers have exhausted themselves trying to make it work and they just can't. Why not? Because the Shuttle's engineering design, just as Vietnam's political design, is inherently flawed.
Much has been made of the report produced by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB). I've read newspaper articles that called it "scathing." Hardly. Its tepid recommendations probably had Shuttle managers who made poor decisions dancing with relief. It gave them a pass by proclaiming "culture" made them do it.
I don't believe there's a NASA culture. There is, however, a Shuttle cult. It is practiced like a religion by space policy makers who simply cannot imagine an American space agency without the Shuttle. Well, I can, and it's a space agency which can actually fly people and cargoes into orbit without everybody involved being terrified of imminent destruction every time there's lift-off. With some reservations, written in the politest language, the CAIB recommended to keep Shuttles flying but with more inspections, more bureaucracy (an outside safety agency), and more money. But piling on more inspections, people and dollars won't make the Shuttle safer. Neither will the safety sensitivity training that will probably be dumped on top of the overworked, disillusioned NASA engineers. My God, they've already dedicated their very souls to keep the Shuttle flying safely! The truth is, no amount of arm-waving about "culture" can fix a flawed design.
Take a look at the Shuttle stack and what do you see? A fragile spaceplane sitting on the back of a huge propellant tank between two massive solid rocket boosters. The Shuttle has to sit right in the middle of all the turmoil of launch because we once believed it would be cheaper to bring back those engines and rebuild them than to build new ones. That has not proved to be the case -- far from it -- but it has left us with a crew sitting in the most vulnerable position possible in terms of design. Simply put, had that spaceplane been on top of the stack, the destruction of Challenger and Columbia wouldn't have occurred. The CAIB ignored this flawed design and that makes their conclusions suspect: no amount of inspections or condemning another NASA generation to worry over this thing will solve it.
So let's get practical. We can't just shut the thing down. We need the Shuttle to finish the space station and also to keep the Russians and Chinese from dominating space. I'm not willing to see that occur while we dither. Human spaceflight is important to this country. But the Shuttle is as safe as you're going to get with what's in place today. Let's put some tough engineers in charge, fly it 10 more times over the next four years with hand-picked crews to finish the space station and meet our international obligations. Then close the program and replace it with expendable launchers and a shiny new spaceplane. And, this time, put it on top.
Re:NASA's Vietnam (From today's Wall Street Journa (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:NASA's Vietnam (From today's Wall Street Journa (Score:3, Interesting)
At this point the X-Prize gives me more hope than NASA.
Re:NASA's Vietnam (From today's Wall Street Journa (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:NASA's Vietnam (From today's Wall Street Journa (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with private enterprise is that it expects rewards from its funding - rewards that generate $$$, not scientific knowledge or nationalistic pride, but cold hard cash. The problem with space is that there is as-of-yet, no viable way to make $$$ out there. Tourism is the only industry that's already made a start in space, but its first steps were shaky, it relied on a publically-funded infrastructure, and it has yet to progress any further. As for mining, there is nothing up there that we can't get down here for cheaper. Some might point to the He-3 resources on the moon, but these are not needed at all except for in undeveloped nuclear fusion technology.
I suppose there is one commercial industry that has been succesful in space: the sattelite communication/telecommunications industry. However, private interests are not going to progress beyond the sorts of sattelites we are currently flying, let alone go anywhere near manned flight on there own.
In conclusion, I would argue that private interest is not an "easier beast to summon." In fact, I would say that it is much more difficult to raise funds for space exploration through private means than it is to get public support. A space race with China would generate the neccesary support very quickly, and we might start seeing some projects come to fruition rather than being nearly completed only to be scrapped for going over-budget, and then being restarted a few years later to satiate the military-industrial complex. The only alternative that I can see having any success in space other than publically-funded programs is philanthropy. If some very rich people got together and started offering more prizes similar to the X-prize, we could see some actual development. It worked in aviation, the only thing holding it back for space is that the prizes need to be that much bigger to make it worthwhile.
In short, space exploration's only hope lies in publically funded programs or philanthropic rewards, not in the commercial exploitation of resources that don't exist.
Re:NASA's Vietnam (From today's Wall Street Journa (Score:3, Insightful)
This may have been true in the last millenium, but it's becoming less and less true as time goes by.
Most (American) companies are spending less on R&D these days than they did in the past.
I don't know whether this is due to the recession, or due to an increasing "let's not look beyond next quarter" mentality.
Probably both.
Face i
Re:NASA's Vietnam (From today's Wall Street Journa (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be nice if more people listened to engineers instead of politicians when it came to science projects, wouldn't it?
For heaven's sake! (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, it's the same Homer Hickam.
-h-
Re:A logical vote. (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks (Score:2)
We Don't Need Space Craft With Wings (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's decide that we will do two things:
1) Any human space travel beyond LEO will start from LEO in spacecraft built in LEO and that return to LEO. If we do that, we will never need to spend money trying to build airplane-spacecraft hybrids.
2) Let's use big expendable boosters to get hardware to LEO, and smaller expendable boosters to get people to LEO. Put the people in modern versions of the Apollo or Gemini craft (the so-called "Big" Gemini was an appropos solution)>
And, let's also decide that the main reason to build a space station in LEO is to serve as a construction yard and a gas station for trips elsewhere. Let's put aside the quaint notion that the reason we need to be in space is to "do science".
Flying submarines (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:We Don't Need Space Craft With Wings (Score:3, Interesting)
and land with a thud. i guess if it's functional, that's what matters, but nonetheless, descending with a parachute seems so primitive.
Not primitive (Score:3, Insightful)
Our space program needs a big KISS logo.
Re:We Don't Need Space Craft With Wings (Score:4, Informative)
Originally, the military was the main driving force of the shuttle design. The wanted the ability to launch from Vandenburg AFB, launch a satelite, and return to Edwards in ONE orbit. This required a large "cross range" ability, and could only be done by having the shuttle fly back on reentry!
Re:We Don't Need Space Craft With Wings (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not against wings per se; I just want to use the cheapest, safest and simplest way to get to LEO. No one has demonstrated, yet, that wings are the way to go. At this point, I can't support spending more money on solving the wrong problem
Re:We Don't Need Space Craft With Wings (Score:4, Interesting)
Using the ISS as a construction yard and sending probes from there out into space to do science does make sense.
One scenario that might make sense is make the ISS a last-stage checkout and repair facility. A probe can be launched, and then in LEO it can be checked out and qualified before being sent on its mission (hence the probe is known to work after subjecting it to the forces of launch into LEO).
Also, large probes could be launched in modular chunks and reassembled in LEO. This might alleviate some of the concern of radioactive decay generators. The generator could be launched alone with excessive shielding, and then combined with the actual probe in orbit.
Not sure it is practical to do any of this at this stage, but right now little science is being done on the ISS...
We Don't need the shuttle (Score:3, Insightful)
The future of space exploration and discovery is no longer national but international..its time NASA wake up..
Why flythe shuttle upside down? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why flythe shuttle upside down? (Score:3, Insightful)
The existence of a large orbiter is the design flaw. There is no need for the launch vehicle to be "reusable". It serves no purpose except good publicity. A shuttle zooming downward to a 3-point landing projects an image of confidence and control. A capsule drifting to a soggy splashdown is humiliating by comparison- but the crew could survive the reentry even with the pilots unconcious and total failure of all onboard electronics.
I
Re:Why flythe shuttle upside down? (Score:4, Insightful)
Then maybe the size of the orbiter is part of the design flaw. Separate the engines from the plane and you get a smaller, more reliable, more capable craft. Hell, the entire orbiter assembly is one giant design flaw.
If you want to fly "spam in a can" on top of a larger rockets then welcome back to 1960!
Refresh my memory. Is this the same 1960 where we went from no manned spaceflight to walking on the fucking moon in nine years? The same 1960 which started a period of American manned spaceflight in which there was not a single death off the ground despite a lightning strike (!) on a running rocket filled with five million pounds of explosive fuel (Apollo 12), an explosion onboard a ship 200,000 miles out from Earth (Apollo 13), a potentially disastrous "pogo" resonance problem in the second stage of an entire series of rockets (all Saturn V missions up to Apollo 13), a heat shield that nearly fell off (Mercury 13), and a host of other problems that occur when newbies explore a hostile environment for the first time? From your commentary, I think your 1960 and my 1960 are not the same one.
The vehicles before the shuttle could take punishment and survive. The shuttle cannot. Both shuttle accidents would have either been impossible or resulted in a big zero fatalities with a 1960s-design space craft. The escape tower would have pulled everyone to safety with a Challenger-type rocket-explodes-during-launch accident, and the ablative heat shields used on those craft are much more durable than the fragile tiles on the shuttle, even if they could have been hit with debris which they can't.
The sad thing about the shuttle is that safety was sacrificed in the name of reusability. This reusability was supposed to give us more capabilities for less money. Yet the shuttle is both less capable and more expensive than the equivalent vehicle it replaced. In the end, we have gained nothing from it but a series of expensive, mostly useless programs and fourteen dead.
Re:Why flythe shuttle upside down? (Score:3, Informative)
The Apollo 1 fire was tragic, but it was not a fundamental design flaw in the Apollo craft. The response was swift, the problem was fixed, and the program continued.
Ironically, the Apollo 1 fire happened during a test, when there should have been no danger to the crew. In all the very dangerous parts of space flight, there were no fatalities. That was the point I was trying to make and so I didn't include this in my summary.
Fail? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fail? (Score:5, Funny)
We're gonna need a bunch more astronauts up in here.
Re:Fail? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fail? (Score:3, Insightful)
I like Tesla's quote better: "Perhaps if Edison thought smarter he wouldn't sweat so much."
Re:Fail? (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think comparing Thomas Edison to a late 80's rock band does either much good. Edison was smart, but he couldn't play the guitar. Tesla can play a good version of Signs, and Getting Better, but to my knowledge, never invented anything that'll change mankind forever.
Re:Fail? (Score:3, Insightful)
Pessism? I think the opposite. Thomas Edison said that after he found 1 way that DID work... on the light bulb. Imagine what would have happened if he would have given up after the first 1000 tries, and figured "Oh well, nobody cares anyway".
Re:Fail? (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that many engineers, as well as developers tries to find negative or limiting facts about a project and I belive t
Re:Fail? (Score:5, Insightful)
If engineers find problems in a project, you think the answer is to "innovate our management skills?" Is that really even English?
Don't look now, but Dilbert and The Way of The Weasel is making fun of PHBs, it's not a management blueprint? Well, actually, it is a rather good guide to managing successfully, but the key is to read what's in the book and *not do* those things.
If engineers on a project, whether it's hardware, software, or something else, come to management and say "We have found problems with this project that will have a negative impact on its quality or possibly cause it to fail" the answer is not to sweep those concerns under the rug or blow them off. The answer is "OK, what do you need to fix those problems so that this project will succeed and reach its full potential?" When they tell you, obviously, there may be a cost/benefit tradeoff between some of the items, but basically you have to send them out to fix the problems so that the project will succeed.
If engineers tell you "You can't do X for Y amount of money, it's just not possible," you should listen to them. Knowing what can be done, and for what price it can be done, is their job.
If the engineering team comes to you and says "This project is so broken that it can't succeed, the best thing we can do is scrap it and do a total redesign," then you had better listen good. They are probably right, and the ass they save will be your own. The money sunk into the project is gone; don't make it worse by throwing good money after bad.
Being committed to quality and excellence in a project are not "old thinking and old views that hold us back." They are the things that make projects successful. That's my company has a successful product, is growing fast, and is making money. Is yours?
Aside to those who modded the parent Insightful: I never believed it before, but now I'm convinced that (some of) the mods really are on crack.
Safety always has a price (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that money may be in the form of lower gas mileage in a car, or in the form of hundreds of unmanned test flights before putting a human in, or obscene safety margins.
But to pretend that anything is ever perfectly safe is to ignore the fundamental economic issue that at some point you have to stop putting money into safety concerns and just fly the damn thing.
Re:Safety always has a price (Score:2)
Reminds me of Larry Niven's Puppeteers, an entire alien race of "cowards" who designed the nigh-indestructible General Products hull but refused to fly in them. Only "insane" Puppeteers ever travelled in space, even in a General Products hull, because in true Catch-22 fashion the act of doing something as obviously dangerous as space travel was proof of insanity.
Following both Space Shuttle accid
Re:Safety always has a price (Score:2, Interesting)
"The most effective safety device for a car would be a 6 inch metal spike, attached to the steering wheel, pointed at the driver's chest."
Surely that would be cheaper than today's airbags, and I agree that I'd be inclined to drive a little more cautiously... Safety doesn't have to cost money, but it will cost something. In this case It would take me much longer to cross the city in my car, travelin
Re:Safety always has a price (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't prevent things you don't want to happen with absolute perfection... you can only try to lower the likelyhood so it happens less often and reduce the damage when it does happen.
Pragmatic vs. perfect safety (Score:5, Insightful)
There was clear evidence of problems with the O-rings before the Challenger was lost. NASA had somebody produce some really cryptic plots, but nobody bothered to really investigate whether the cooler weather on some of these launches might have an influence. It takes a real genius to reduce this to dipping an o-ring into a glass of ice water, but any competent investigator should have been able to reduce the data to plots of damage vs. various independent variables such as temperature at launch or overnight lows.
With Columbia, the arrogance of management is far more stunning. It KNEW that the insulation had flaked off, it KNEW that the insulation had caused surface damage in the past, and it KNEW that some areas on the leading edge of the wing are much more vulnerable to damage than others because of access points. It could have test fired foam at wing mockups at any time, just to have hard proof instead of just hunches that the foam could never cause significant damage to an orbiter... yet it did nothing.
This testing is expensive, of course, but it's really not that much when compared to the cost of a normal launch (isn't that approaching a billion dollars per launch now?), or the various costs associated with the loss of an orbiter and crew. It's akin to failing to spend $10 to check something on your car even though you knew that a mistake would mean that the car would erupt into a fireball and kill everyone inside if you're wrong.
An Overlooked, But Important, Recommendation (Score:4, Insightful)
That is, the people who decide "This machine can/can't fly even if we do/don't fix that widget" ought not to be the same people who are responsible for flying the thing. This especially applies to approving safety waivers.
The model to follow is that of the U.S. military. Operations is in one command, R&D is in another, and the people who say a plane is safe to fly are not the people who get paid to fly it.
Re:Safety always has a price (Score:4, Insightful)
And not only does safety cost money, but that money can have perverse consequences. Some economists, for instance, have posited that increased security in U.S. airports following 9/11 may actually have caused more deaths than otherwise would have occurred. Why? Because the added security increases costs and inconvenience, and at the margin that might cause some number of people who would've flown to drive instead. And given that driving is vastly more likely to result in a fatality than a scheduled flight in a transport-category aircraft, net fatalities might actually rise.
This is annoying. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is annoying. (Score:3, Insightful)
False. The shuttle launches involve a ground crew of literally thousands of people. That come out to less than one follow-up per person, or assuming only about a tenth of those people have some technical skill, perhaps each would need to check up on a few safety issues each.
Hindsight is twenty-twenty
But they KNEW that a chunk of styrofoam had hit the wing at ma
Re:This is annoying. (Score:3, Informative)
at between 400 and 600 mph, relative to the wing. It may have
been going mach-4 in relation to the Earth, but it's the wing
that is the important frame of reference here.
Re:This is annoying. (Score:5, Interesting)
Hindsight is 20/20, but that doesn't mean that we should wear blinders when looking towards the future!
The Management team _actively_ canceled requests for information pertaining to the impact. See page 153 of the PDF.
The management team also didn't follow their own procedures, they didn't meet every day (they were supposed to).
I was impressed by the engineers at Boeing (I think that was the company) who elected to research the impact and footage of it over the weekend even when management told them not to.
Read the report. [www.caib.us] Section 6.3 (DECISION-MAKING DURING THE FLIGHT OF STS-107) is extremely interesting and points out Eight seperate missed opportunities to find out more information about the problem.
There were also some engineering related issues - the engineers using test software that wasn't designed to analize an impact nearly that large, and other issues - but it really comes down to a lack of the management team accepting that there could be a real, out-of-family problem on the mission.
Need the guts to stop. (Score:2, Insightful)
Full Text (Score:5, Informative)
By HENRY PETROSKI
URHAM, N.C. -- Scientists seek to understand what is, the aerospace pioneer Theodore von Karman is supposed to have said, while engineers seek to create what never was. The space shuttle was designed, at least in part, to broaden our knowledge of the universe. To scientists the vehicle was a tool; to engineers it was their creation.
With the release of the report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, there is a new focus on the "culture" of NASA. Engineers have played a prominent but not a controlling role in that culture, both in the design of the shuttle and in the planning of its missions. When the report speaks of NASA's "broken safety culture," the particular failure it cites is "a consistent lack of concern" that Columbia may have been damaged by debris at takeoff. But perhaps NASA can be better understood by examining the culture that arises from the inevitable -- and healthy -- tension among scientists, managers and engineers.
A common misconception about how things such as space shuttles come to be is that engineers simply apply the theories and equations of science. But this cannot be done until the new thing-to-be is conceived in the engineer's mind's eye. Rather than following from science, engineered things lead it. The steam engine was developed before thermodynamics, and flying machines before aerodynamics. The sciences were invented to explain the accomplishments -- and to analyze their shortcomings.
The design of any device, machine or system is fraught with failure. Indeed, the way engineers achieve success in their designs is by imagining how they might fail. If gases escaping from a booster rocket can lower efficiency or cause damage, then O-ring seals are added. If the friction of re-entry can melt a spacecraft, then a heat shield is devised.
Much of design is thus defensive engineering: containing, shielding and fending off anticipated problems on the drawing board and computer screen so that they cannot bring down the design when it flies. Obviously, total success can only come if every possible mode of failure is identified and defended against.
Engineering is also very much about numbers. O-rings must be sized; the thickness of heat shields specified; the weight of insulation calculated. Often, the numbers work at cross purposes, as when increasing shield material decreases available payload. Engineering design is ultimately the art of compromise.
What results from the design process is a thing that has unique characteristics. It can withstand the conditions for which it was designed as long as it maintains its integrity. There is usually some leeway allowed, for engineers know that operating conditions cannot be predicted with absolute certainty. Until it fails, how far beyond design conditions a system can be pushed is never fully known.
But engineers do know that nothing is perfect, including themselves. As careful and extensive as their calculations might be, engineers know that they can err -- and that things can behave differently out of the laboratory. On the space shuttles, O-rings got scorched, heat tiles fell off, foam insulation broke free. To engineers, these unexpected events were incontrovertible evidence that they did not fully understand the machine.
Engineers do not feel comfortable with things they do not understand. It is at this point that they begin to act more like scientists. In the case of the scorched O-rings, the engineers studied burn patterns. They looked for a correlation between damage and temperature, and they warned about launching when the temperature was outside the bounds of their experience and scientific study.
If engineers are pessimists, managers are optimists about technology. Successful, albeit flawed missions indicated to them not a weak but a robust machine. When engineers and managers clashed over the 1986 Challenger launch, the managers pulled rank. In the case of Columbia, engineers who worried about damage that the
No Money == Failure (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem NASA has right now is trying to convince the rest of the country that what they're trying to do is worth spending the money on. Why worry about what Saddam can do if we could all just move to Mars (for instance)? On the other hand, funding was cut because nothing significant was happening... but nothing significant was happening because funding was cut. It's a vicious cycle.
Demotivational... (Score:4, Funny)
You still can't prove a negative. (Score:5, Insightful)
Simply put, the problem was that the engineers concerned with the safe re-entry of the orbiter after the foam strike were put in the position of having to prove a negative. Management wouldn't pay attention to them until they could prove that the strike was *not* safe.
They couldn't prove or disprove the notion that the foam strike had caused critical damage until they got the images, but they couldn't get the images without first proving they needed them to assure the safety of the re-entry.
There had been a number of previous foam strikes, many of them involving this same piece of foam (the left bipod ramp), and all of those shuttles had landed okay, so management believed that this foam strike was similarly okay just because they had gotten away with it so far.
No science. No analysis. Just an assumption that if they had gotten away with ignoring this problem so far, they could continue to ignore it. The schedule was king, not safety.
Engineers know well that "getting away with it" is not evidence of reliability. Managers, at least in my experience, tend to be proportionately successful in their careers to the extent that they can spin "getting away with it" into a career advancement tool.
This is really why the orbiter was lost. This is really why the astronauts died.
Denial is deadly.
Re:You still can't prove a negative. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, sounds familiar. "We've had O-ring erosion due to low temperatures before, but it's never caused a real problem, so we can launch." IOW, they learned nothing from Challenger.
Re:You still can't prove a negative. (Score:4, Informative)
This is explictly the position of the CAIB in their report, mentioned in several different places.
Re:So what if the engineers HAD been heard? (Score:4, Informative)
They could have gotten Atlantis up in time to rescue the crew. With alterations to work schedules, activity levels and such the Columbia crew could have survived until Feb 15th, and Atlantis, assuming a problem-free launch protocol, could have gotten up there by February 10th. They covered this in the CAIB report, section 6.4, pages 173-174.
It would not have been without risk, and they could have lost TWO orbiters and TWELVE crew members if Atlantis failed on re-entry, but had they gotten the images everyone admits that they probably would have been able to tell that Columbia was doomed by January 18th.
The limiting consumable was not fuel, it was the lithium hydroxide they use to scrub CO2 from the air. They had enough to go until about February 15-16th, they had enough oxygen for perhaps another day after that.
Re:So what if the engineers HAD been heard? (Score:3, Informative)
NASA has already released information that states that they could have put Columbia into a low resource consumpt
Can it really be fixed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Everything has an opportunity cost. The money spent on NASA could otherwise be spent elsewhere, such as aiding the homeless or better road infrastructure, and preferably on something the person earning the money (the taxpayer) himself chose.
Sure, it's nice to be able to explore space and determine facts about physics and cosmology, and test theories against empirical information, but I think at some point the costs associated with expanding the realm of science to more obscure areas, in the shorter term, are too high. And, yes, I know the argument that expanding basic science can lead to invention that benefits the individual, but personally I'd put more faith in the ability of industry to use the money making targeted investments while hiring scientists, than effective production from NASA. At some point I think we have to say the money can be better spent than knowing more about the behavior of some unreachable binary star. Eventually, that information will likely come anyway, as a function of better theoretical models. Why do we need it now, assuming it isn't primarily to give a Ph.D. something to play with?
NASA exists in an enviroment that offers none of the efficiency advantages of modern industry.
- No effective competition
- No way to inexpensively prototype or proof-of-concept things and test them in the intended deployment environment
- Few efficiencies of scale from being able to buy parts widely used and commoditized
- Little economic justification for the expense, even in the instances where the mission is "successful"
- No realistic, market-driven benchmarks for the performance of the managers or engineers
In the end, I don't feel that NASA is an optimal way to spend money, and since it's at least in part my money, I should be able to make this decision. Perhaps some kind of opt-in "NASA" checkbox, like I've seen opt-in "environmental" checkboxes on tax forms. I'd be content with that.
Re:Can it really be fixed? (Score:2)
Re:Can it really be fixed? (Score:2)
I wouldn't mind having this at all, even if each category was only used for approximate tax allocation purposes, or merely feedback to the government as to the prioritization the citizen personally has.
Re:Can it really be fixed? (Score:3, Insightful)
We already have methods for "voting" for these things. It's called "voting." That's what elected goverment officials are for. Hence the term "representative." Unfortunately, you hardly know what their opinions are on anything except the current "hot topics," but nevertheless, their purpose is to represent you and your wishes.
Re:Can it really be fixed? (Score:4, Insightful)
(This post was tongue-in-cheek for the sarcasm-impaired.)
BTW, about your point that there's no competition for NASA, you're missing all the other countries that have space programs. If the USA doesn't get off its butt and make serious space exploration a priority again, it's going to be eclipsed by China and India, which will have the further effect of making the US a 3rd world country as the other space powers reap the economic benefits of it.
Re:Can it really be fixed? (Score:2)
I'll note that roads did in fact exist before there were state-sponsored expenditures for them; like ships, people are willing to pay part of the costs for the benefits of the travel.
There are no economic benefits to be had by China and India to be had when they win, I'll be willin
Re:Can it really be fixed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Moreover, there's vast quantities of raw materials in space, such as metals that are rare on earth's crust and therefore very valuable. Whichever nation gets to these first and develops mining
Re:Can it really be fixed? (Score:2, Insightful)
Scientists need to make observations of the natural world/universe in order to improve their theoretical models. It doesn't happen in a vacum. (Pun accidental ;-)
Why bother? (Score:2, Insightful)
Reporter: So, Commander, after all you've just gone through, I have to ask you the same question a lot of people back home are asking about space these days. Is it worth it? Should we just pull back, forget the whole thing as a bad idea and take care of our own problems at home?
Commander Sinclair: No, we have to stay here. And there's a simple reason why. Ask 10 different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get 10 different answers. But there's one thing every scie
Re:Can it really be fixed? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you actually believe that then you are either very young or very sheltered (or perhaps both). I realize I sound trite and condescending, but I hear this sort of thing all the time. The basic problem with your assertion is that you are making decisions based on ideology rather than common sense and this has, and always will, lead to errors in judgement. In fact, I would argue that most incorrect decisions are made because of this very reason. There are many legitimate functions of governments that falls outside your very narrow definition that is the best solution to a given problem. By choosing a different solution is just because you *believe* that the government shouldn't be involved is simply shortsighted. Just ask the citizens of Atlanta about what they think about their water works. Of course it goes both ways, certain tasks that are currently performed by the government should be handed over to the private sector. Anyway, the world is not black and white and we shouldn't try to make it so.
--PCB
Re:Can it really be fixed? (Score:3, Informative)
Medicaid, at 529 Billion dollars is roughly thirty-five times the Nasa budget. The department of Justice, which is famously incompetant the
Re:Can it really be fixed? (Score:5, Insightful)
- The people are smart enough to govern themselves.
- Capitalistic forces will always find the optimal solution to any problem.
You're wrong on both counts.
If you put it to a vote, everyone in the United States would have to worship Jesus Christ, and the Death Certificate of Elvis Presley would be declared invalid. And universities would get funding money for "astrological research." The world is too complex to let all of our decisions be made by people who merely BELIEVE in things. It's far, far better to try to elect a government that will make the best decisions they can. Sometimes they make bad moves, and sometimes they make good moves. Your primary role as a citizen in the U.S. is to make sure your government is run in a way that you agree with. Not that you necessarily agree with all of their choices, but that the process works.
How would you make national freeways? How can capitalistic forces balance the rights and freedoms of the individual versus the needs of society? People are not smart enough to research which lipstick manufacturer pours less toxic waste into the ocean - and to boycott the one that dumps more. They just aren't. And hoping that "concerned citizens" and the media will help achieve that optimal solution is pure foolishness. For one, media is run by corporations. The best way to achieve that balance is to give the power to make those decisions over to a government, and keep your government in check.
I'm glad that we as a society don't directly vote for government funding. I think we would make HORRIBLE choices. For one, we would probably vote away our national debt ("why should we pay?!"). We would probably stop aid to Afghanistan ("feed Americans, not Afghans!"). We would probably chop public schools ("I have a right to raise my kid like I want to - in Catholic schools!"). We would probably stop AIDS research ("Why should we pay to find a cure to a disease they got by sinning against God?"). We never would have gotten involved in the European Theater in WWII ("what have the Nazis ever done to us?"). There would be no national archive ("who cares about old books?"). The results of the Human Genome Project would be patented and copyright by [insert major corporation here] ("Why should taxpayers pay for something that a private company is perfectly willing to do?"). Hell, there would be no public domain! ("You mean someone could make pornography with Mickey Mouse in it! Hell no! Let Disney hold the Copyright forever, so we can PROTECT THE CHILDREN!")
Never underestimate the stupidity of a crowd. I, for one, am glad we don't live in a true Democracy.
Re:Can it really be fixed? (Score:3, Interesting)
Given that humans are stupid, we have to do everything we can to craft a smarter government that can make better decisions.
Heck, relying on corporate intelligence is just as dumb. Picture a stupid executive who can't imagine failure. Pictu
Re:WHAT CORPS ACTUALLY COMPETE? (Score:3, Interesting)
Private sector ALWAYS GOOD.
Government sectore ALWAYS BAD.
I've tried to say it here and other places before, with mixed reactions:
The government has no monopoly on stupidity. The success of the cartoon strip, "Dilbert" proves that business has its share - across the board.
I used to imagine that Scott Adams worked for my employer, but when he revealed that he worked for Pac Bell, I decided that the stupidity he writes of was universal to the high-tech industr
anonymous (Score:2, Funny)
If I anonymously placed this on my manager's desk, he would wander out and ask absently:
Murphy's Law has often been misapplied (Score:3, Insightful)
and to analyze their shortcomings.
Indeed, the way engineers achieve success in their designs is by imagining how they might fail
Spot on.
Where I work we have independent feasibilty reviews of each new product concept. Not only does a new product need to do well in the market, it has to be profitable enough, and not expose the company to disproprtionate risk for the reward.
The reviews are always done by a department not affiliated with the one creating the new product. This way the review can stay relatively objective regarding new sales.
NASA is by nature risky (Score:2, Insightful)
Love the title bar... (Score:5, Funny)
"Failure is always an option - Microsoft Internet Explorer"
Gotta love it!
Re:Love the title bar... (Score:3, Funny)
"Failure is Always an Option - Lotus Notes"
Failure is not an option... (Score:4, Funny)
(blatantly stolen from fortune)
Old story same sad ending (Score:5, Insightful)
The article Misses the big points. When the Challenger blew up blame was apportioned to the engineers that built it not the congressmen who insisted the engines be built in utah. When software is shipped before its ready, blame goes to the programmers that were working 90 hour weeks not the sales people that promised the customer whatever they wanted to hear. When a heartvalve fails blame goes to the inventors that made a device that saved lives, not the insurance companies that wouldnt pay for a proper solution.
Yes managers are willing to take risks, its rare they ever have to pay the price for failure.
Not an option (Score:5, Funny)
"Failure is NOT and option."
It struck me as odd at the time. It just doesn't sound like motivation. It strikes me as a negative way of looking at things. There was no "We can succeed together!" or "Hard work will pay off in the end!" Nope. Failure is not an option.
Later I saw the perfect response in a magazine, and was disappointed that the banner was taken down before I could add it.
"Failure is not an option; it comes standard with every vehicle."
The Real Problem... (Score:4, Insightful)
If Nixon had provided the right kind of leadership -- pointing to a destination and declaring "Go There!" -- we would have built a spacecraft and the supporting infrastructure to get the job done.
Instead, the nation's political leadership turned to the NASA bureaucracy and asked "Well, what next?" NASA, unsurprisingly, asked for a lot, didn't get it, and consequently saddled itself with the sorry combination of a lame spacecraft design and nowhere for that craft to go except low-Earth orbit.
It was, however, a guarantee that NASA's budget wouldn't flatline.
Folks, the problem of getting people into and out of LEO was solved satisfactorily in the 1960's. So was the problem of getting tons of hardware to LEO. We did not -- and do not -- need the Shuttle to get either people or hardware to orbit safely, reliably, and cheaply.
The fact that the U.S., 40 years later, can't get people or hardware to LEO is a testament to the failure of both NASA and every president after Kennedy to have a clue about where to go next.
Think what we might have accomplished if we'd never built the Shuttle, but, instead, put the money into building more Saturns and more Apollos, more Titans and more Geminis, and expanded SkyLab rather than scuttling it.
Unfortunately, many quality procedures go awry... (Score:4, Insightful)
Likewise, NASA sees us (the public) crying about cost overruns and the return on our investment. Ultimately, that comes back down to the line-level managers at NASA, where no matter what the good intentions, the pressures of $$$ and time will always apply.
We need to decide if space travel is worth the cost (done properly, and left to engineering minds to decide what "properly" means), or worth the risks of doing it at lower cost. Like my company, NASA has squeaked by on luck for quite some time.
In my experience, the luck ALWAYS runs out.
Tim
Privacy friendly link (Score:2, Informative)
Management's decision not to image (Score:5, Interesting)
It's worth thinking about what would have happened if the damaged Shuttle had been images by USAF ground cameras, and it became clear that re-entry was going to be a disaster. The shuttle and crew would have been stuck in orbit, with worldwide publicity, while NASA tried to come up with a fix. They probably wouldn't have succeeded. On-orbit rescue using Atlantis has been discussed as marginally possible, and on-orbit patching has been suggested, but most likely, they wouldn't have worked.
Think of the PR fallout. Seven astronauts stuck in orbit for most of a month, with constant TV coverage, followed by their deaths on worldwide TV. That would have been career-ending for most of NASA's top management. Letting them crash saved the jobs of top people at NASA.
Worst case, a rushed launch of Atlantis could have resulted in losing two shuttles. That would have ended the Shuttle program.
Re:Management's decision not to image (Score:5, Insightful)
Managers at that level never do anything because they think it's right, they only do what will cover their asses, and they have no conscience about it whatsoever.
To See or not to See (Score:3, Insightful)
A successful rescue could have been a real boost to the space program and if not we could always get Ron Howard to make a film about it that would be.
A serious attempt at a rescue would have certainly got people more involved emotionally with the space program.
Most tantalizing to me though is the notion that perhaps if Americans had been seriously looking
Re:Management's decision not to image (Score:5, Insightful)
Assume NASA did attempt to evaluate the damage and it revealed the Columbia to be a death trap. Yeah, there will be media coverage had it become necessary to send up a repair crew or something.
But there would be an Apollo 13 type effort. Atlantis could go up with a minimal crew and pick up the Columbia crew. Maybe do it in two flights. Leave the Columbia in space until repair becomes possible. Not possible? They'd find a way.
Or, engineer a solution on the ground and figure out a way to get that solution up into space and istalled. Again, an Atlantis crew would head up with the necessary materials and perhaps be the ones to do the repair job. Sounds like the Hubble, doesnt it? Also impossible? They'd find a way.
Engineers are quite capable of great things, and you seem to be underestimating the potential of great thinkers. When JFK made his "before this decade is out" challenge, everyone at NASA thought "No way! You've got to be kidding." But then the people who would do it got thinking of ways they could and they came through.
Optimism and pessimism (Score:4, Interesting)
>If engineers are pessimists, managers are optimists about technology.
Is this the difference between programmers and engineers?
Fred Brooks, in The Mythical Man-Month (go read it!) argues that programmers are optimists. We work with pure thought-stuff, so of course it should work the way we think it will. Bzzt. But that optimism drives projects. Who'd start a big project knowing how many stomach-churning bugs, random external changes, stupid feature requests, irrelevant but deadly external bugs, dependencies and just plain stapler misfires would come up? How many projects, open or closed source, would have started if the actual development timeline had been known in advance?
Failure != Failure (Score:2)
On the other hand, if lifes are at stake, it's better not to screw up, although it's not a perfect world, so it's inevitably bound to happen.
To Engineer is Human (Score:2, Interesting)
This reminds me of a decent book I read about a year ago, called To Engineer is Human [amazon.com] . It discusses the role engineering failures play in our many engineering successes.
Interesting read, though the author tends to drone on and on a bit. He makes some great points, though, not the lest of which is that (gasp!) engineers are not perfect, and thus, failures will happen. And guess what--most of the time, we learn from those failures!
The most effective engineers (Score:2)
If as a software developer you do not have enough financial resources to walk..then you shoul dnot take that project..
Manager free Technical Authority???? (Score:4, Insightful)
After reading this, my immediate thought was, "Goodie, who going to be appointed to manage this new technical authority? A seasoned NASA manager, right?
Our best hope is that NASA is wise enough to make this Authority a panel of rotated, working engineers!
You need to read the RISKS forum (Score:5, Informative)
It's a sober and informed discussion of engineering safety (mostly but not entirely computer related) that's been going on for almost twenty years.
Try entering "shuttle" in the search form. I did just now and found the brief, grim announcement of the Challenger explosion [ncl.ac.uk].
If you prefer to curl up with a dead tree by the fire, read moderator Peter Neumann's Computer Related Risks [sri.com]. It is also available in Japanese translation.
Now, few of us are likely to ever risk our lives flying in space shuttles. Maybe some of us might write the code or design the machinery the astronauts will trust with their lives. But all of us depend on computers every day for our livelihood, and many of us depend on them for our lives more than you would feel comfortable with if you understand the implications of it.
Fly on an airplane lately? Anything a little more modern than a DC-3? Do you know what fly by wire means? Ever write code with a stack overflow or heap corruption? What do you suppose that means for the embedded systems that run today's commercial aircraft?
Does your car have antilock brakes?
Read RISKS. It will make you a better programmer. Because it will put the fear of God into you.
Managers take all the credit too! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Managers take all the credit too! (Score:4, Insightful)
I think one answer is UNION
Egads, do you have any idea why we have Unions? They are groups to protect *highly-specialized* jobs. Take commercial airline pilots. They spend their education learning how to fly 747s. That is a non-transferable skill. If the major airlines want to cut their pay by 50% and they didn't have a union to protect them, what would they do? What does an out of work 747 pilot do? Fly crop dusters? Drive a cab? Unions are in place because "the market" can't self-balance certain jobs. There is too much power in the hand of too few employers.
Now engineers are nowhere near that highly specialized. If you design software for IBM and they fire you, what do you do? You go to one of the 1000s of other firms that employ software engineers. The Engineering market can self-balance itself. It's large enough that a group of coorporations can't get together and decide that electrical engineering should be a minimum wage job.
Viva la capitalism!
Re:Managers take all the credit too! (Score:4, Insightful)
Every type of worker should have a union. Unionization provides the ability to leverage your labor pool as a whole, to strike, to increase publicity or awareness of certain issues, and is fundamental to determining and being treated according to your real and fair worth as a labor pool, rather than what the corporate monopolies and upper classes want you to believe you are worth (i.e. next to nothing).
One worker alone is expendable and can be manipulated, lied to and if necessary disposed of with relatively little impact on the bottom line. All workers together are a much bigger bear to strangle, and when workers get together it forces the Wealthy Powers That Be to grudginly admit that they actually do need hands to make their cars or their buildings or their documents, not just edicts from the board room sent out into the vacuum, from which goods magically emerge.
Some people argue that unions allow silly, backward workers to price the fruits of their labor out of the markets, much to the chagrin of the wise old management team who actually knows what they're worth. This is a stupid argument; workers don't set out to unionize their companies out of business. They set out to unionize the CEO's seven-figure salary down to six fixures and to unionize unnecessary layoffs which occur as a result of these salaries back into paid positions. It is the upper management who is generally shamefully willing to shut down an otherwise profitable plant, company, or location simply because they are unwilling to take a pay cut down to reasonable levels in order to remain competitive in the marketplace.
How many times have we seen companies lay of nearly their entire workforce, spending the last year or two before bankruptcy with an essentially empty workplace and sixteen VP's and their secretaries sitting around reading comic books drawing seven figures until the end? This is what Unions are trying to fight... Unions want to help companies remain viable by paying the workers in needed numbers a real and livable wage to do the best job possible, in order to ensure the well-being of the workers and the well-being of the company, which the workers need in order to work!
Of course management and shareholders are typically the short-term losers in this equation, because they are unable to passively rape and pillage entire economic sectors to the same degree that would otherwise be possible from the decks of their carribbean yachts. The desire to shamelessly suck all of the wealth from an otherwise healthy company and leave its workers and its former assets as so much junk on a barren landscape is exactly what drives many in the wealthy west and is exactly what unions want to stop.
My Managements response... (Score:3, Informative)
The book?
"The inmates are running the asylum"
A book which basically says that engineers don't know squat about schedules and "real world" concerns and need to be managed.
I'm not working on software that's of a life and death nature, but still...
if you want your supervisor to actually read it... (Score:3, Funny)
Tufte's commentary is apropos (Score:5, Interesting)
What a dark, yet utterly true statement. Do the NASA and contracting company managers sleep well today knowing that in 1986 their decisions cost lives?
Edward Tufte [edwardtufte.com], author of some amazing books on information display, wrote in Envisioning Information on the Challenger disaster. Looking at the materials prepared by engineers, he saw that they had correctly correlated temperature with O-ring failure. Yet their materials, hastily prepared during the 11th hour, failed to convince managers to abort the launch. Tufte shows a design of a simple graph that shows temperature on the abscissa and burn-through on the ordinate, and any manager could draw a line through the points and extrapolate out to the bitter cold Florida day that cost the shuttle.
Having my own share of bad managers, I have to wonder, would it have made any difference?
Risk??? (Score:3, Interesting)
First, the engineer/scientist comparison is incomplete. There is a third category, the inventor. He can often be one of the two, often he is all three.
The engineer leverages science to build useful creations. The scientist researchers the way the universe works, he often cares nothing for invention, only knowledge.
The inventor really doesn't CARE about science OR engineering. He just wants something that works and is happy when it does. If it fails, he will invent something better. He'll use science and engineering if it furthers his goals.
The beueracrat is of course the forth factor that tries to get engineers, scientists and inventors to serve some other goal. Sometimes the public well-being, sometimes his own. Most often he serves his bosses well being in pursuit of his own which may or may not correspond to the well being of an organization (like the public interest).
Part of serving your bosses best interest is not making him look bad. When you ground your project, your project looks bad irregardless of whether it's the right thing to do. It causes the schedule to slip, and somewhere up the line the big boss is staking his reputation on it. Thats how you get to be the big boss, making promises and coming through.
The truth is that failure is a part of success. Risk is a fundamental part of achievement and risk will ALWAYS produce failures at some point.
I am disspointed at the nature of Columbia's failure. However, in such a game as space travel, risk is an incredible factor. Despite an incredible effort to systematically mitigate risk, you will have failures.
Whether it's from the managements perspective or the engineers, failure will inevitably occur. The prime risk for the managers is that NOTHING would get done if they did EVERYTHING the engineers wanted to. The perfect system isn't created, it evolves. And evolution NEEDS failure to point out mistakes.
In this case, the managers were wrong. Their stonewalling and mindless dedication to schedule produced the death of a crew and the loss of a multi-billion dollar vehicle. In some other case, it could be an engineer who used the wrong unit system or an engineer that pendantically freeted over an issue that ultimately wasn't that important.
The lesson is to seek balance. And of course, even when you have balance you will have failures. Unfortunatly, for NASA, their failures are always VERY unforgiving.
Shuttle == Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
But try as I might, I can't lay 100% of the blame on them: they see the budget for aero and space research being cut (more tax-cuts for the wealthy!!!) and they know they need to get public opinion behind them. That means the Shuttle must fly, and it must be a media spectacle.
The truth of the matter is:
- much of the "research" that is done on Shuttle flights could be done just as well by unmanned missions; and
- "reusable spacecraft" is an oxymoron at the current state of technology (even ignoring pork boondoggles like Morton Thiokol in Utah)
.
Time to ax the Shuttle program. Give NASA some real money. Move the little experiments to the various LEO launches on small vehicles. Use heavy lift rockets like Energiya and Ariane while NASA designs and contracts out a US design, perhaps an updated SaturnV or something. To hell with jingoistic crap like "giving up the space race to the Russians and Europeans" -- let's not cut off our noses to spite our faces.And let's not forget that space travel for humans is still very much an experimental thing. "There be dragons -- expect to die!" There still will be no dearth of volunteers for astronaut positions.
No Saturn V Saaturn VI! (Score:4, Insightful)
here's my case:
1. Cryogenic turbo pump design and reliability has improved significantly since the early 70's
2. all the data we need is just lying around in space museums and outdoor rocket gardens. i think i saw something on the net that had an SV laying on it's side. not to mention recoverd apollo capsuls.
3 Materials technology both metalurgical and especially composite is well in advance of what they had available in the 60's. All we really neeed is the dimensions of this stuff
4. our sensors and digital control devices are much more accurate and faster reacting and can process more I/O.
5. the stages could be made reusable due to advances in materials technology giving us higher strength and lighter weight. with our miniscule electronics we could also have "smart" stages that could recover themselves to pre determined points on the globe.
6. the payload could increased because of he abovementioned wieght savings and improvements in the turbopump/engine design.
Thus we would have a Saturn VI instead of a Saturn V.
Re:FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION (Score:2, Funny)
I guess failure is indeed an ooption.
Mission failed! (Score:2)
Re:The Wrong Focus (Score:2, Insightful)
i find your statement "Focus on doing your best. If you made a mistake, fix it" somewhat oxymoronic. your "best" should take into account possible failures and likely causes thereof in an attempt to *prevent* mistakes, not apologize for them afterward.
mistakes will happen. it is an
Re:The Wrong Focus (Score:3, Funny)
I resent that.
This is not how professional software developers behave.
What a real professional would say is one of....