NASA's Orion Mock-Up Fails Parachute Test 163
leetrout writes "Fox News has the story on a parachute test failing on a mock up of the new Orion spacecraft. 'This is the most complicated parachute test NASA has run since the '60s,' said Carol Evans, test manager for the parachute system at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. 'We are taking a close look at what caused the set-up chutes to malfunction. A failure of set-up parachutes is actually one of the most common occurrences in this sort of test.' Space.com has the video."
This is not even news... (Score:5, Insightful)
...parachute tests fail all the time. That's why they are tested. These aren't parachutes from Lucky's Parachute and Bait Shop for chrissake. They are custom designed and often cutting edge.
A Successful Test! (Score:4, Insightful)
They found a bug! It was a good test.
Incompetent andaerodynamically unstable to boot... (Score:2, Insightful)
Bring back the geezers who designed Apollo's chutes, and give them a slide rule and million dollars each just to stuff it to the Orion Program Managers who are clearly more politically skilled than technical.
In the long run this will be hundreds of times cheaper and safer for whoever draws the short straw and has to ride in this cow chip.
Re:This is not even news... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, duh. The set-up parachutes are one of the first things to happen in the parachute deployment path. Consider path A --> B --> C ---> D.
Assuming equal probability of failure at any point, then of course failure at point A will be the most common; one cannot proceed to B (or C or D) unless A has happened successfully.
Re:Complicated? (Score:3, Insightful)
Then whos been doing the testing for all the mars landers with parachutes? I know some of them used the "airbag method" but unless my memory is faulty, NASA has been using parachutes for a while. Perhaps not in a manned application, which Im sure adds a lot of complexity to the project.
Re:Common occurances... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, except it really is kind of a disappointment that they have to "relearn" what they did with Apollo. One would have hoped they would have kept the documents and engineering notes to allow them to basically duplicate the earlier effort, but apparently they did not.
Re:Common occurances... (Score:5, Insightful)
The documents and egineering notes from Apollo are both available and useless. I really wish the urban legend would die. Do you seriously imagine that we need to "relearn" how to make parachutes for fucks sake? Please stop parroting this BS.
We're not doing things the way we did in the 60s for the simple reason that we know much better ways of doing things. Any large-scale engineering effort will run into significant problems here or there, and the problems are rarely tied to the underlying technology. Sometimes a supplier tries to get away with being cheap, and fails. Sometimes the written procedures are ambiguous in ways only obvious in hindsight. Sometime shit just goes wrong! There are always corner cases specific to a given complicated assemby of complicated pieces that you only find by testing.
That's why engineers do testing. To find these problems.
Re:Complicated? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Common occurances... (Score:5, Insightful)
You should, instead, lament the fact that The Reagan administration got rid of practically all of the corporate knowledge base as NASA in hopes of reducing the number of civil servants in favor of contractors they felt they could simply scale up and down as needed. The actual effect was to push out anyone capable of holding their own in the private marketplace. Some stayed at contractors for a while, while others simply left for other lines of work. Those at contractors stayed until the work dried up, and were then laid off by said contractors. At that point, they went to find jobs elsewhere.
When NASA needed to staff up for anything, the contractors were paid to go hire people. The problem is that they went and hired younger, cheaper engineers with no experience in spaceflight. The kind of work NASA does is, for the most part, pretty specialized. Many NASA engineers can find work in other industries and be productive fairly quickly because they (a) have core competency in very custom work and (b) industry has an old guard to give them the specific training in the new specialty. Conversely, bringing in an average engineer with "pick it out of a book" mentality is going to take forever to relearn the advanced basics (I call them that - it's the 4000/5000/6000 level stuff you learn in college; not hard, per say, but complex and _not_ part of a typical engineer's day to day life). Couple that with practically _no_ old guard to teach them the intricacies and anomalies of spaceflight work and you've destined to have a slow, painful, and failure-rich engineering process.
While the "how" is written down many places, the "why" isn't as apparent from a stack of prints. And though there are huge books of "lessons learned" on many projects, it's not easy to capture decades of experience and apply them real time given the capacity of individual human brains. What they need is continuity, not librarians.
Re:Common occurances... (Score:3, Insightful)
No, he is right. They need to start with the old design and look at how technology can improve it instead of re-inventing the wheel all over again.
Just like Ferrari should look at a '72 Fiat and try to learn from it?
You might be surprised, but those NASA engineers working on that parachute do have a clue how parachutes work, even the Apollo ones. They are making _better_ parachutes, and if you've ever engineered anything you'd know that the first design is never the final design. Neither is the second.
Apollo/Saturn WORKED! (Score:3, Insightful)
Not surpising (Score:3, Insightful)
From an organization that always goes with the low bidder - this is not surprising....
THE REAL QUESTION (Score:3, Insightful)
WHY, with NASA having so much larger budget than before (even accounting for inflation), and so much better engineering than before, and so much better design and simulation tools than before, and VASTLY more experience than before...
WHY are we seeing so much more FAILURE than before???
NASA of the 1960s kicked the current NASA's ass for success rate.
So COME ON, folks! What is wrong???
My suggestion: bureaucracy.