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NASA Learns Anew From the Apollo Program
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Aug 15, 2006 06:09 PM
from the oldies-but-goldies dept.
from the oldies-but-goldies dept.
solitas writes "NASA isn't just "going back to the drawing boards" to get back to the Moon, they're also going through the museums and archives so that the new engineers can rediscover/learn how it was done the first time." From the article: "Some old Apollo engineers are even being brought back on a contract basis to work with the young folks, some of whom were not even born when the Saturn V was flying lunar missions. The new manned exploration project, called Constellation, is deliberately drawing upon lessons from the past as the space agency works to meet a congressional deadline of flying the Ares rocket ... In fact, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has described the new program as 'Apollo on steroids.'"
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Steroids, Hell (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Space Cowboys, Feasible? (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest thing about this is that some things that made Apollo successful aren't common knowledge, or worse, they aren't written down anywhere. Some of the guys that did Apollo are dead, and there's a chance they carried unique knowledge to the grave with them. New engineers and scientists really should be taking this opportunity to refresh that knowledge and store it, now that we have computer technology to store it with.
We don't need to wake up 50 years from now and wonder why a support bar on the lunar lander that should've been perfectly straight has a slight bend to it, especially if the design documents and blueprints all specify a straight bar.
Read some of the stories about the nuclear doorstop, especially one quote from here [townhall.com]: Anytime humanity loses knowledge, it's a bad thing.
Parent
To the Moon, Alice! (Score:5, Insightful)
"NASA isn't just "going back to the drawing boards" to get back to the Moon, they're also going through the museums and archives so that the new engineers can rediscover/learn how it was done the first time."
What they can find is what was done, but only with the old Apollo engineers can they get some insight into the minds that worked out novel solutions where no obvious ones existed.
I've been hearing a few times over the past weeks how school children can't esitmate. Every mathematical problem has a definite answer presented by a calculator. Ask me what's 250 * 7 and I don't sit down and do math, I figure the first four 250's are 1,000 and the rest are 750. Ask me what's the square root of 27 and I'll say 5 and a bit, because the number squared closest I know is 5. Some kids today couldn't do that. Can today's engineers think on their feet?
In fact, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has described the new program as 'Apollo on steroids.'"
Uh. Don't mention steroids to Congress. They've already got the bee for baseball.
Re:To the Moon, Alice! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:To the Moon, Alice! (Score:2)
Re:To the Moon, Alice! (Score:5, Informative)
First, because calculators and computers will take Garbage In and give Garbage Out, and engineers who don't have an intuitive understanding of the approximate answers they should get are much less likely to catch simple software errors and user mistakes.
Second, because most engineering problems are far more complicated than "what's 250 times 7" but involve many, many such simple arithmetic steps. If you have to turn to the calculator on every trivial step it makes solving the whole problem correctly much harder.
Seriously. Who gives a ****?
In this case, mostly the taxpayers and the astronauts.
Parent
Re:To the Moon, Alice! (Score:3, Insightful)
I have enormous respect for what the engineers of the 1960's did with the tools of the day. No doubt there were some brilliant minds working for NASA and its contractors at the time. However, I look at what my kids are learning i
Re:To the Moon, Alice! (Score:3, Funny)
That's why runtime garbage collection is so important. I mean, do we honestly expect these young'uns to call free() for every malloc()? It's all too damn complex. And we've got astronauts' lives to worry about! I say we just forget these ancient languages an
Re:To the Moon, Alice! (Score:4, Insightful)
Which, of course, never make mistakes and never need cross-checking.
>> Seriously. Who gives a ****?
Oh, I dunno. How about everyone who cares about the massive amounts of lost
money or the *lost lives* that can happen because of a stupid engineering
mistake? Mistakes that are caught by a guy looking at the figures and
and saying, "Wait a minute. That can't be right..."
Chris Mattern
Parent
Re:To the Moon, Alice! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:To the Moon, Alice! (Score:3, Insightful)
A classic example was when I was in college I had a physics professor put a simple question on a test.
How tall is the empire state building.
I put down 1000 feet.
Some people put 5000 or 10000 ft.
If you don't have a feeling for numbers you will may make a gross mistake and not catch it.
Actually the early NASA engineers had Slide Rules (Score:4, Informative)
If you punch numbers into a calculator and hit the wrong buttons and don't know how to approximate... well you don't always realize your answer is off.
Parent
Why not learn from the russians? (Score:2, Interesting)
We may have "won" the cold war, but they definitely won the "spacecraft that aren't overly-engineered death traps" war.
Re:Why not learn from the russians? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Why not learn from the russians? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why not learn from the russians? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: Highest death rate? (Score:3, Informative)
(1960) The "Nedelin Disaster", in which an R-7 rocket undergoing repairs on the launchpad exploded. Estimates of the dead vary a lot, but the least I've seen is 100 people. Unquestionably the worst space disaster yet.
(1961) Cosmonaut Bondarenko dies in simulator accident
(1969) The N-1 launchpad explosion. The N-1 rocket was
Re:Why not learn from the russians? (Score:3, Informative)
We may have "won" the cold war, but they definitely won the "spacecraft that aren't overly-engineered death traps" war.
And how many times exactly did the Russians put people on the moon or orbit the moon? Why should we listen to them instead of former NASA engineers who did send men to the moon?
Re:Why not learn from the russians? (Score:3, Informative)
Also, how did you manage to insert a link without Slashcode diplaying the destination domain?
Space Cowboys (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm no expert but two of my best friends are a physicist and a mechanical engineer. Both follow the space program and both say that money and politics have firmly grounded NASA in 1960's science with little to no possibility to explore new options.
Plenty of guys in the X Prize world are saying the same thing. So before I visit a museum, I'd look into varied options from some of today's best minds based upon current or evolving technologies.
Then again, if NASA was scrapped tomorrow, or maybe shelved for a few decades until space flight is cheaper, safer and more feasible, I wouldn't care. We've thrown tens of billions of dollars on a pride issue, and what have we gotten in return? How much more do we know about the universe?
I'd rather throw that money are universities and I bet you money, society will benefit considerably more.
Re:Space Cowboys (Score:2)
Re:Space Cowboys (Score:3, Insightful)
We've gained a huge number of advances in science and technology from NASA. If you consider materials science alone, the cost is worth it. They conduct research on a monumentous scale. Everything from structural design to hydroponics to supercomputing is subject to NASA's research effort. Yes, Velcro too.
The Space Shuttle is the most complicated machine ever built. It's thirty years old. It's time to move on with exploration, and the best way to do that is with existing strategies (a.k.a. Apollo-esque rock
Re:Space Cowboys (Score:4, Informative)
Actually...
"The hook and loop fastener was invented in 1948 by Georges de Mestral, a Swiss engineer. The idea came to him after he took a close look at the Burdock seeds which kept sticking to his clothes and his dog's fur on their daily walk in the Alps. De Mestral named his invention "VELCRO" after the French words velours, meaning 'velvet', and crochet, meaning 'hook'."
But hey....I agree with your fundamental argument that NASA pushes development in general, plus I'm a huge Apollo dork so this is all cool news to me.
Parent
Re:Space Cowboys (Score:3, Interesting)
They aren't experts either seemingly. NASA isn't ground in 1960's 'science' (whatever that means) at all. You'll note the use of composites in the structures of the new vehicles. You'll note modern computers (modern by aerospace standards - ancient by geek st
Re:Space Cowboys (Score:3, Interesting)
We are using the same shuttles, theories and propulsions systems we were using 40 years ago. Considering the exponential rate that this technology rate has evolved, that is plain silly.
But NASA was a huge money-sink, with the promise
Re:Space Cowboys (Score:3, Interesting)
Considering that there has only been *one* person with a sucessful X-prize project (Rutan), that's flat-out impossible.
You need to understand the alt.spacer mindset - part and parcel of it is the rock solid belief that
Re:Space Cowboys (Score:4, Insightful)
> We've thrown tens of billions of dollars on a pride issue,
> and what have we gotten in return?
NASA has a technology transfer system set up specifically to give the things it invents away.
See http://www.nal.usda.gov/ttic/guide.htm#NASA [usda.gov]
It doesn't actually give away its patents and such for free. It is allowed to sell them for the cost of operating the technology transfer system.
If NASA were allowed to profit from its inventions, then on the developments it made in just 4 areas, microelectronics, cryogenics, medical telemetry and systems analysis software, it would have made $4.50 in the twenty years following Apollo for every dollar spent up to the end of Apollo. We know how much NASA would have made, because we know who picked up those balls and ran with them, and how much they made. And that's just 4 areas. NASA has contributed tens of thousands of inventions, developments and patents of all kinds, and someone has made something off of most of them. That's contributed far more to the economy than the taxes taken out to fund the program in the first place. As for you personally, I'd bet an inventory of your home would show a number of things that either wouldn't be there, wouldn't be as good, or would cost a lot more, if it weren't for the contributions of NASA. And when it comes to number of lives saved by the various technologies that NASA contributed to, we're well beyond talking about profit and loss.
> How much more do we know about the universe?
Aw geez, seriously? Don't you read any science news? We know tons more about the universe because of NASA programs and their participation with other programs. The Science and Discovery Channels are always running that stuff.
> I'm no expert but two of my best friends are a physicist and a
> mechanical engineer. Both follow the space program and both say
> that money and politics have firmly grounded NASA in 1960's
> science with little to no possibility to explore new options.
In large part your friends are correct. NASA has become a corporate welfare system for the aerospace industry. There have been many, many tried and proven technologies and even space transportation systems that were started by NASA, R&D funded by NASA to the aerospace companies, and cancelled when enough people had made enough money. There were also many spaceworthy systems developed by others that were far cheaper than what NASA had the aerospace companies crank out, and those never saw the inside of a hangar. It is only the large number of recently very rich people willing to gamble on space that have created visibility for the private space business upstarts. There have been many in the past that died on the vine. Read up on Robert Truax for example. People were so convinved he'd be the first person into space without a government program behind him that they even made a TV show based on him (Salvage I).
NASA and the aerospace industry it exists in symbiosis with (they live off NASA, but NASA lives off the money it gets to give them) do not stand to gain from the sort of massive forward movement such as we saw from 1960 to 1970. They stand to gain more by the same stepwise, incremental improvement such as has been happening in the consumer computer/electronics industry for years. This definitely slows the pace of progress, but not the amount of R&D done by NASA which gets passed into the US economy. That remains.
When engineers ran the space program, we got "Failure is not an option." (Apollo 13)
When bureaucrats ran the space program, we got "My God, Thiokol, what do you want me to do, wait until April to launch?" (Challenger)
Frankly, regardless of the success or failure or sheer bullheaded political wrangling or welfare status of NASA and its corporate children, I'd throw in with the likes of Burt Rutan, and anyone else who tackles the job without any help from NASA. Those
Parent
Back in my day... (Score:4, Funny)
Veterans - the ultimate backup when you run out of (Score:2)
Heh (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Heh (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey, look on the bright side... back then those poor people only had one kind of Coca Cola. Now we have Diet Coke, Vanilla Coke, Caffeine Free Coke, Cherry Coke and more! We're still exploring the horizons. They've just dipped a little lower.
I certainly hope not! (Score:2)
Then again, if we go back to the drawing board, perhaps we'd consider funding basic education and research again beyond just memorization and giveaways to the isolated private sector
Bygone era (Score:5, Interesting)
I cannot imagine America having the resources to land on the moon successfully now. Our society was different back then. Science was something to revere. Now we are more concerned with American Idol.
Re:Bygone era (Score:4, Insightful)
nothing has changed. While people where plotting to get us to the moon, others where goggling their current american idol, Elvis.
The only thing different is that now they're googling american idol.
Parent
Why go to the Moon? (Score:4, Funny)
Why don't we just put some big rockets on the dark side and push the whole thing down here were we can get at it easily?
We could land it where it came from in the first place - the location of Atlantis.
Anyhow, dropping the Moon onto the Earth should would shut up a lot of whiners.
Boy I hope so.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The response I got stunned me a bit...
One of the most senior structural engineers there told me that the loads within an engine core are far too complex and why was I even bothering with hand computations?
It made me immediately think of two things:
1) We were building jet engines long before there was a Nastran (or a NASA for that matter)
2) Complexity!?...NASA brought Apollo 13 home using slide rules and one hell of a pilot. I'm old enough that I remember that. In fact, it's probably why I'm in the aerospace industry.
I hate to sound like an old man, but sometimes I worry that we rely too much on tools that separate the engineer from the analysis. Don't get me wrong, Nastran is great, but if you have no way to cross validate the results, how do you spot an error?
Ya, know...the method I used to evaluate those loads probably came from around the mid 1940's.
Re:Boy I hope so.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Secondly, testing is a good way, but the only way. At some point, you have to make you best accessment without the benefit of testing.
Finally, you have no idea what specific analysis I was doing so have no basis to say it was too complex to do by hand.
I suggest you research the origin of the term "back of the envelope calculation", you will learn the story of one "Sir Geoffrey Taylor". Then come back and tell me again what is too complex to do by hand.
You are a perfect example of the problem I was trying to present. No ingenuity, just reliance on machines....pity you don't seem to understand how dangerous that can be.
Parent
Back of the Envelope (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Back of the Envelope (Score:3, Interesting)
According to the wikipedia article on the Buckingham Pi Theorem, Taylor is commended for his calculations on the energy from the atomic bomb based on the videos. This is a similar story to the Fermi one, but there appear to be two distinct stories here.
I will give you the secret..... (Score:4, Interesting)
Mathematics in not a science, it is a language
Let me explain....
Many people think in terms of using mathematics to figure out how nature behaves. What I propose is a slight change of philosophy. All your life, you've experienced and observed nature in action. Let your instincts and understanding of nature guide you to what you think is going on first, then use math to describe it.
Parent
I'm so disappointed in this whole CEV garbage... (Score:3, Insightful)
However, this whole CEV concept is "One Giant Step Backward for Mankind" - I don't care how they spin it. It represents a failure of nerve before the Universe and reflects a "tuck tail and run" policy of our nation as a whole.
Freeking politicians are screwing the whole thing up and NASA is a massive beuracracy maintaining jobs for the "less than creatives". Long live Burt Rutan, Richard Branson and their crews - poke the crap out of NASA's eye!
Re:I'm so disappointed in this whole CEV garbage.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, yes... replicating something that NASA did 45+ years ago is really a poke in their eye. (And NASA did it time, after time, after time - for nearly a decade. Branson & Rutan haven't flown in over two years - after only flying a handful of times.)
All Blueprints's and Jigs were.. (Score:4, Informative)
The Saturn Project held so much promise as an general-purpose heavy-lift vehicle. I just hope that some plans escaped the shredders and reside in someone's collection that would be a hefty bonus to the new HLV program.
I'll bet that they will take over the Kansas Cosmosphere for a month or two, reverse engineer the Apollo CM and SM they got there, not to mention pick over the LEM as well.
Blueprints should still be around somewhere (Score:3, Interesting)
Lesson #1 (Score:5, Funny)
Meat-based Robots Are Not the Answer (Score:3, Insightful)
By the time we are ready to send more of these units to the Moon and beyond, their silicon-and-metal counterparts will have advanced to such a point as to render them obsolete for such missions. It seems to me a much better use of our national resources to advance the cause of our metallic, compliant brethren, develop their capabilities to the fullest, and save a ton of cash in the process. By pushing their new Meat In Space program, our government is once again pandering to jingoistic sentimentailty rather than the needs of hard science.
Re:they should patent that idea (Score:5, Interesting)
"learning from past experience" - that has a nice ring to it.
What?!? And break with tradition?
Honestly, when I was a lot younger I thought only new stuff was good, decent quality, reliable, etc. Eventually I learned, after wasting a lot of money, some new stuff is utter crap and some things build in the distant past were done with real craftsmanship and quality.
On another note, there was this great show on Discovery or History Channel or sommat, some years back. Engineers had struggled to figure out how three large stone slabs and been lowered into place in a crypt. No trace of ropes left pinched by the massive slabs, no pole holes, no marks of any kind. How did the bronze age engineers do it, that engineers from the 20th century were left so puzzled by?
Eventually a team of japanese engineering students realised the crypt had been filled with sand and the slabs place upon the top and gently lowered into place as the sand was removed from below.
Parent
Re:they should patent that idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:they should patent that idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Rather obvious, to anyone who works with engineering. I have seen so many reports on how "smart" those ancient people must have been to think of those masterful methods... Only problem is that, if you work in solving that kind of problem day to day, you eventually come to think of new ways to do it, all by yourself,
Re:Joke... (Score:3, Funny)