A history, over at Ars Technica. In addition to the balloon tanks, there were concerns with the common bulkhead between the LOX and LH2 tanks (though AFAIK this has never caused a Centaur failure).
As I’ve written before, there was an alternative approach, that NASA never considered.
Tom Vilsack: “I wish there were scientific facts.”
Pro tip to Vilsack. An “informed opinion” not based on scientific facts is an uninformed opinion.
And here’s a nice bit of illogic:
Lawmakers also noted that federal nutrition guidelines could be considered a failure because of the country’s high obesity rates. But Burwell fought back, arguing that obesity would be much worse had the guidelines not been in place.
“We are on the wrong trajectory, but would the trajectory have been worse?” Burwell said, acknowledging there was an obesity problem.
Since it was the original crap low-fat guidelines from the government that caused the problem, no, there’s no reason to consider them a success, or to not end the insanity.
I didn’t live tweet it, but here are some tweets from Jeff Foust on Gibson’s #ISPCS comments yesterday:
Jay Gibson, XCOR: we don’t have the benefit of a wealthy backer; that makes us very feisty and innovative. #ispcs
— Jeff Foust (@jeff_foust) October 7, 2015
Gibson: we’re building a platform that is frequent, affordable and capable; we’ll let the free market determine how to use it. #ispcs
— Jeff Foust (@jeff_foust) October 7, 2015
Gibson: our focus right now is getting ready to fly, “and we will soon.” #ispcs
— Jeff Foust (@jeff_foust) October 7, 2015
This looks like an interesting event tomorrow.
aA
I got up early this morning, flew to El Paso, and then drove up to Alamagordo to the space history museum. In Las Cruces now. I’ll check in from the event tomorrow.
[Monday-afternoon update]
Even the film-makers had doubts:
“If you had told me two years ago when we were walking into Fox to pitch the approach and what this movie would be, if you told me I’d be on the phone talking about how this is a big spectacle movie, I would have been delighted,” he tells Esquire. “At the time, we knew it was going to be expensive, but we thought it would be more niche than Ridley made it.” Nope.
What made The Martian unique also made it a difficult sell. It was not an action movie. The film’s star would spend his time farming potatoes harvested from his co-astronaut’s feces. The Rock would not show up to blow away aliens halfway through the second act. Mind would prevail over muscle. And that’s not easy to write for the masses.
I hope it will break some of the stereotypes, and make it easier to make these kinds of films.
[Bumped]
Michael Listner explains in excruciating space-law detail why Mark Watney isn’t one.
Thoughts from Wayne Hale (who I hope I’ll see tomorrow in Las Cruces) on how to avoid them:
I have a cheap seat view of the Orion/SLS development. My basic observation: those efforts are drowning in ‘process’. The biggest threat to their success is not technical; it is schedule and cost. If the design and development processes drag the projects out too far, Congress or a new Administration will throw up their hands and call a halt to the whole thing. They did once before; my intuition is that they will again unless something significant happens.
The secret of a good program – as a very senior spacecraft designer once told me – is knowing how much is enough and then not doing anything more.
Right now, inside NASA, we have trained our workforce to do it perfectly. And perfection is very costly and takes a long time. Over in the Commercial Crew Program, the senior leadership is making some progress in toning down the drive for perfection. It is a slow effort and uphill at all times. Over in the Exploration systems area, it all seems to be going the other way. Whatever anybody calls necessary for safety or improvement – without evaluating the real cost or schedule or other impact – seems to be adopted.
So I am guardedly optimistic about the commercial teams actually succeeding in flying humans in space in the next couple of years.
Not so much optimism for the exploration systems, drowning in ‘process’.
The sooner it’s canceled, the better, but I’m sure we’ll waste more billions on it before it happens.
Decades before Tsiolkowski, a Canadian physicist described rocketry.