Paul Breed notes in comments that the decision to require permits or waivers for tethered testing didn’t originate with AST (though I never claimed it did), but with the FAA chief counsel’s office. To me, this is just one more argument for making the office independent of the FAA and report directly to the SecDot, as it did from its inception until the Clinton administration “streamlined” it into the FAA.
Category Archives: Space
They Never Learn
NASA just lost two hypersonic test vehicles on an untested sounding rocket, built by ATK, the same company that is slated to build the paint shaker first stage for the Ares I. It’s not clear whether it was destroyed by the range, or it if just blew up on its own.
Sigh…expendables, and particularly solid expendables. Gotta love the continuing notion of putting things into space on modified munitions.
PITA
Alan’s a great science and tech reporter, but I wish that he’d asked George Nield about this:
We have poured a pad for tethered hover testing at our new location, but there was a recent FAA re-interpretation of the law that absurdly states that testing under a tether, as we have been doing for over eight years, is now considered a suborbital launch, and requires a permit or waiver just as a free flight would. This is retarded and counterproductive in so many ways, and the entire industry is lashing back over it, but it is an issue we have to deal with in the next couple months.
Maybe I will.
Happy Birthday, FAA
I hadn’t realized that it’s about the same age as NASA. I’d thought it went back further than that. For the occasions, Alan Boyle interviews the current head of the space side of the agency, George Nield.
Oopsie
Some folks have been criticizing the recent Orion parachute test failure as just one more screwup at NASA that they’ve been covering up, and made a bigger deal of it than it is, but Henry Spencer has a more nuanced, and correct view:
Foul-ups in testing are not uncommon, especially when the test setup is being tried for the first time. One of the headaches of high-tech test programmes is having to debug the test arrangements before you can start debugging the things you’re trying to test.
Sometimes a malfunctioning test setup actually gives the tested system a chance to show what it can do in an unrehearsed emergency. During a test of an Apollo escape-system in the 1960s, the escape system successfully got the capsule clear of a malfunctioning test rocket.
But sometimes the test conditions are so unrealistically severe that there’s no hope of correct functioning. Unpleasant though the result often looks, this isn’t properly considered a failure of the tested system. That seems to have been what happened here.
As I’ve noted before, requirements verification is where the real cost of a development program comes from, particularly when the only useful verification method is test.
More On Oscillation Mitigation
NASASpaceFlight has technical details of yesterday’s briefing. It still looks nuts to me.
A Milestone For New Space
XCOR has attracted the funding of an institutional investor. It’s not just angels any more.
Tehran Failure
Jim Oberg has the story on Iran’s failed attempt to launch a satellite.
Our Screwed-Up Space Policy
You know, the more I think about this, the more I think it should always have been a no brainer.
The first rule of wing walking is to not let go of the airplane with one hand until you have a firm new grip with the other. It’s pretty simple: don’t shut down the Shuttle until you have a replacement in place (and preferably redundantly).
The only reason we’re undertaking such a dumb policy is because of the panic after the loss of Columbia causing a desire to end the program ASAP, and an unwillingness to pay what it cost to fund the new development at the same time we were continuing to spend billions annually on keeping the Shuttle going. The notion that we can take the savings from ending the Shuttle to develop the new systems seems appealing, but it essentially guarantees a “gap.”
And it’s all a result of the fact that space isn’t important. Is there any other government activity where we arbitrarily assign a budget number to it, and then demand that its endeavors fit within that budget? But that’s the way Congress has always viewed NASA–that there’s a certain level of spending that’s politically acceptable, and no more. If space were important, we’d do what we did in Apollo–establish a goal, and then provide the funding necessary to achieve it. But it’s not, other than for pork and prestige. It’s important that we have a space program, but it’s not at all important that it accomplish anything of value. Until that attitude changes, we’re unlikely to get sensible policy.
Shake, Rattle and Roll
Keith Cowing has a report on today’s telecon to discuss the Ares 1 vibration issue. Apparently they’ve settled on a solution before they really understand the problem.
[Late afternoon update]
Bobby Block and Todd Halvorson have blog posts up as well. But I think that Halvorson’s reporting is a little garbled here:
Gravitation forces on the astronauts will be reduced to 0.25 Gs from around 5 to 6 Gs, the latter of which is about double the force exerted on shuttle crews.
I think that he’s confusing the steady-state acceleration resulting from thrust with the vibration acceleration ostensibly being mitigated by the springs and dampers. Also, it’s not a “gravitation force.” I’m assuming that NASA meant that they can reduce the oscillations on the crew couch from high gees to a quarter of a gee, but that’s independent of the gees imposed by thrust. If they’re only accelerating at a quarter of a gee, that would result in horrific gravity losses during ascent.