NASA attempts to geld SpaceX? Ironic indeed.
Discussion
Eric Mc said:
I'm sure if this was the 1960s space race nobody would be saying a word. As Al Shepard once said, "Let's light this candle and go".
But its not the 1960's the world, public and congress are perhaps a little more aware of what happens when things go awry, its more Challenger disaster rather than Apollo 13 Yep currently manned space flight has about 1 in 63 chance of failure.
The pad abort system might fail 1 in 10 that bumps the odds up to 1 in 1000 or so.
Given nasa's frankly s
tty attitude towards safety with the shuttle i think they'll take it..
Block 5 has addressed any Nasa concerns over design etc
The pad abort system might fail 1 in 10 that bumps the odds up to 1 in 1000 or so.
Given nasa's frankly s
tty attitude towards safety with the shuttle i think they'll take it.. Block 5 has addressed any Nasa concerns over design etc
Eric Mc said:
There has only been one pad abort in the history of manned spaceflight - so far. The crew were saved.
people are still killed even though a vehicle has 'Autonomous' capability aka Tesla or if Airbags and ABS are fitted, ejector seats on aircraft have failed the most recent on a red arrow. Parachutes fail so just having an abort system on a Rocket does not mean all crew will be saved every time.RobDickinson said:
Yep currently manned space flight has about 1 in 63 chance of failure.
The pad abort system might fail 1 in 10 that bumps the odds up to 1 in 1000 or so.
Given nasa's frankly stty attitude towards safety with the shuttle i think they'll take it..
Block 5 has addressed any Nasa concerns over design etc
Ah OK so we can all sleep well then.........The pad abort system might fail 1 in 10 that bumps the odds up to 1 in 1000 or so.
Given nasa's frankly s
tty attitude towards safety with the shuttle i think they'll take it.. Block 5 has addressed any Nasa concerns over design etc
Toaster said:
Eric Mc said:
I'm sure if this was the 1960s space race nobody would be saying a word. As Al Shepard once said, "Let's light this candle and go".
But its not the 1960's the world, public and congress are perhaps a little more aware of what happens when things go awry, its more Challenger disaster rather than Apollo 13 Normalisation of deviance and groupthink.
Normalisation of deviance is defined as
- “Organisations establish safe best practices. One day it becomes expedient to deviate from one or more of these processes. Nothing untoward occurs. Over time, this becomes the new “normal”. Other small steps away from this new normal occur. Then, a disaster happens. RCA (Root Cause Analysis) reveals this progressive movement away from safe practice.”
This happens because NASA like any organisation has targets and has to meet them as they get used to ignoring other smaller safety issues as they risk them and it turns out ok, they end up deciding it’s OK to launch when the O rings are too cold.
Groupthink
''a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.'' It is the triumph of concurrence over good sense, and authority over expertise.
In the Challenger disaster, engineers warned the O rings were too cold, everyone knew it, leaders and the group ignored the outside voices of dissent. They then find it hard to admit they don’t have a complete answer.
Normalisation of deviance and groupthink were endemic in NASA and appeared earlier with Colombia as it became accepted that tiles fall off the shuttle on launch. Engineers again warned about this but the leaders pushed on (due to groupthink) and it became normal as previous shuttles didn’t crash and an acceptable risk.
Obviously the risk for NASA is now listening to the dissenting voices and being unable to make a descision.
The answer is to establish safe procedures and not deviate from them. Monitor them and make sure people comply. Then you have to have a system where voices of dissent can be heard and everyone feels they can speak up and be listened to by their managers.
NASA is addressing these issues now, we don’t know if space x or whoever else is in the running have these procedures in place yet.
Tesla for instance has made many mistakes that worry me if the same organisation is involved in human space flight. Have the same problems with groupthink led to production issues at Tesla that might stop problems being highlighted at space x?
I wonder...
If NASA were to decide that neither SpaceX nor Boeing met their new, extremely stringent, safety criteria required to fly NASA astronauts, would that decision influence the CAA to stop them flying non-NASA crews ?
I don't think it would come to that, as NASA would face a huge political kicking if they were to ask for more funds to continue launching astronauts on Russian spacecraft, and SLS is simply way too expensive for the role of ISS crew rotation. ( that's why the original Constellation plan included the smaller crew-launch Ares-1 )
If NASA were to decide that neither SpaceX nor Boeing met their new, extremely stringent, safety criteria required to fly NASA astronauts, would that decision influence the CAA to stop them flying non-NASA crews ?
I don't think it would come to that, as NASA would face a huge political kicking if they were to ask for more funds to continue launching astronauts on Russian spacecraft, and SLS is simply way too expensive for the role of ISS crew rotation. ( that's why the original Constellation plan included the smaller crew-launch Ares-1 )
RobDickinson said:
The requirements are well laid out and understood, if they for some reason failed at one point they would just fix that and move on
What seems to be happening though is that NASA are changing the requirements, making safety criteria more stringent than in the original contracts.Kccv23highliftcam said:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-...
NASA advisers say SpaceX rocket technology could put lives at risk
When Elon Musk and his team at SpaceX were looking to make their Falcon 9 rocket even more powerful, they came up with a creative idea — keep the propellant at super-cold temperatures to shrink its size, allowing them to pack more of it into the tanks.
But the approach comes with a major risk, according to some safety experts. At those extreme temperatures, the propellant would need to be loaded just before takeoff — while astronauts are aboard. An accident, or a spark, during this maneuver, known as "load-and-go," could set off an explosion.
The proposal has raised alarms for members of Congress and NASA safety advisers as the agency and SpaceX prepare to launch humans into orbit as early as this year. One watchdog group labeled load-and-go a "potential safety risk." A NASA advisory group warned in a letter that the method was "contrary to booster safety criteria that has been in place for over 50 years."
Concerns at NASA over the astronauts' safety hit a high point when, in September 2016, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blew up while it was being fueled ahead of an engine test. No one was hurt, but the payload, a multimillion-dollar satellite, was lost. The question on many people's minds at NASA instantly became: What if astronauts were on board?
The fueling issue is emerging as a point of tension between the safety-obsessed space agency and the maverick company run by Musk, a tech entrepreneur who is well known for his flair for the dramatic and for pushing boundaries of rocket science.
In this culture clash, SpaceX is the daring, Silicon Valley-style outfit led by a man who literally sells flamethrowers on the Internet and wholeheartedly embraces risk. Musk is reigniting interest in space with acrobatic rocket-booster landings and eye-popping stunts, such as launching a Tesla convertible toward Mars.
His sensibilities have collided with a bureaucratic system at NASA that has been accused of being overly conservative in the wake of two shuttle disasters that killed 14 astronauts. !!!!!!
The concerns from some at NASA are shared by others. John Mulholland, who oversees Boeing's contract to fly astronauts to the International Space Station and once worked on the space shuttle, said load-and-go fueling was rejected by NASA in the past because "we never could get comfortable with the safety risks that you would take with that approach. When you're loading densified propellants, it is not an inherently stable situation."
SpaceX supporters say tradition and old ways of thinking can be the enemy of innovation and thwart efforts to open the frontier of space.
Greg Autry, a business professor at the University of Southern California, said the load-and-go procedures were a heated issue when he served on Trump's NASA transition team.
"NASA is supposed to be a risk-taking organization," he said. "But every time we would mention accepting risk in human spaceflight, the NASA people would say, 'But, oh, you have to remember the scar tissue' — and they were talking about the two shuttle disasters. They seemed to have become victims of the past and unwilling to try anything new, because of that scar tissue."
In a recent speech, Robert Lightfoot, the former acting NASA administrator, lamented in candid terms how the agency, with society as a whole, has become too risk-averse. He charged the agency with recapturing some of the youthful swagger that sent men to the moon during the Apollo era.
"I worry, to be perfectly honest, if we would have ever launched Apollo in our environment here today,"
That's actually a Washington Post article. Which is owned by a certain person who happens to also own a rival rocket company. NASA advisers say SpaceX rocket technology could put lives at risk
When Elon Musk and his team at SpaceX were looking to make their Falcon 9 rocket even more powerful, they came up with a creative idea — keep the propellant at super-cold temperatures to shrink its size, allowing them to pack more of it into the tanks.
But the approach comes with a major risk, according to some safety experts. At those extreme temperatures, the propellant would need to be loaded just before takeoff — while astronauts are aboard. An accident, or a spark, during this maneuver, known as "load-and-go," could set off an explosion.
The proposal has raised alarms for members of Congress and NASA safety advisers as the agency and SpaceX prepare to launch humans into orbit as early as this year. One watchdog group labeled load-and-go a "potential safety risk." A NASA advisory group warned in a letter that the method was "contrary to booster safety criteria that has been in place for over 50 years."
Concerns at NASA over the astronauts' safety hit a high point when, in September 2016, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blew up while it was being fueled ahead of an engine test. No one was hurt, but the payload, a multimillion-dollar satellite, was lost. The question on many people's minds at NASA instantly became: What if astronauts were on board?
The fueling issue is emerging as a point of tension between the safety-obsessed space agency and the maverick company run by Musk, a tech entrepreneur who is well known for his flair for the dramatic and for pushing boundaries of rocket science.
In this culture clash, SpaceX is the daring, Silicon Valley-style outfit led by a man who literally sells flamethrowers on the Internet and wholeheartedly embraces risk. Musk is reigniting interest in space with acrobatic rocket-booster landings and eye-popping stunts, such as launching a Tesla convertible toward Mars.
His sensibilities have collided with a bureaucratic system at NASA that has been accused of being overly conservative in the wake of two shuttle disasters that killed 14 astronauts. !!!!!!
The concerns from some at NASA are shared by others. John Mulholland, who oversees Boeing's contract to fly astronauts to the International Space Station and once worked on the space shuttle, said load-and-go fueling was rejected by NASA in the past because "we never could get comfortable with the safety risks that you would take with that approach. When you're loading densified propellants, it is not an inherently stable situation."
SpaceX supporters say tradition and old ways of thinking can be the enemy of innovation and thwart efforts to open the frontier of space.
Greg Autry, a business professor at the University of Southern California, said the load-and-go procedures were a heated issue when he served on Trump's NASA transition team.
"NASA is supposed to be a risk-taking organization," he said. "But every time we would mention accepting risk in human spaceflight, the NASA people would say, 'But, oh, you have to remember the scar tissue' — and they were talking about the two shuttle disasters. They seemed to have become victims of the past and unwilling to try anything new, because of that scar tissue."
In a recent speech, Robert Lightfoot, the former acting NASA administrator, lamented in candid terms how the agency, with society as a whole, has become too risk-averse. He charged the agency with recapturing some of the youthful swagger that sent men to the moon during the Apollo era.
"I worry, to be perfectly honest, if we would have ever launched Apollo in our environment here today,"
Namely Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos.
They've been emailing it to various space journalists too in the hope that they'll lazily disseminate the "SpaceX bad" message I imagine.
https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/9935105...
All is fair in love and war I guess.
Hmm...
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/27/why-elon-musk-and-...
"Have you ever wanted to tell your boss exactly what's he's doing wrong? Or what's not working at the company?
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Bridgewater founder and co-chairman Ray Dalio both want their employees to do just that.
Though correcting a multibillionaire a tech titan or one of most powerful people in finance sounds intimidating, both Musk and Dalio have intentionally developed company cultures where employees feel they can speak up when something is broken, problematic or when the leadership is wrong.
That's because both men know that excellence requires hearing from everyone on your team.
"Evidence shows that minority opinions improve decision-making even when they are incorrect," says Adam Grant, organizational psychologist, top-rated professor at Wharton business school and author of The New York Times best-selling books "Give and Take," "Originals" and "Option B."
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/27/why-elon-musk-and-...
"Have you ever wanted to tell your boss exactly what's he's doing wrong? Or what's not working at the company?
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Bridgewater founder and co-chairman Ray Dalio both want their employees to do just that.
Though correcting a multibillionaire a tech titan or one of most powerful people in finance sounds intimidating, both Musk and Dalio have intentionally developed company cultures where employees feel they can speak up when something is broken, problematic or when the leadership is wrong.
That's because both men know that excellence requires hearing from everyone on your team.
"Evidence shows that minority opinions improve decision-making even when they are incorrect," says Adam Grant, organizational psychologist, top-rated professor at Wharton business school and author of The New York Times best-selling books "Give and Take," "Originals" and "Option B."
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