PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE TROLLOriginally Posted by homo_cosmosicus
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PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE TROLL
Last edited by SpitfireIX; 2006-Jun-25 at 01:04 PM.
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This is factually incorrect, which is the whole point of the question.
Today’s effort to return to the Moon is funded at a much smaller annual rate. If NASA can afford to commit only half the resources then it should take about twice as long to accomplish a similar task. It is simple mathematics.
I don’t think they were smarter and I’m sure they didn’t have better technology, but the people who worked on Apollo most definitely worked more than is common today. Many of the Apollo people worked incredibly long and arduous hours for an extended period of time. This took a great personal toll on them and their families. We should admire what they did, not denigrate it as the HBs do.
Banned
Great, I was waiting on this!
You want to say, NASA started to work on Moon landing earier, in 1958?
Okay, I can say the same - NASA started to work on Moon landing in 1958,
we "landed" on the Moon already 6 times 30+ years ago,
but yet, with all that great experiance we have, from 1958 to 2004 (46 years)
we still need double the time to achieve the same "success" from 1960's
when we managed to land people on the Moon with only 8 years of R&D!
How is this possible??? With much greater experiance (since 1958)
better technology, etc, we need 16 years to do something
for what was needed only 8 years looong time ago?
I will tell you how:
WE NEVER LANDED ON THE MOON. And period -> .
No, its not simple mathematics... Folks in 1960's did a lots of R&D
(research and development) while today we don't need,
we have ready solutions, thanks to those who earier did R&D.
I do admire what they did, but do not want me, my friends, and others
to be fooled - its better to know the truth then to live with lies.
Bad Post-Doc
Really? In that case, why do you persist in claiming that the moon landings are a hoax, despite literally tons of evidence? Every "proof" that they were faked turns out to be such a simple misunderstanding of its field that someone outside that field can understand it once it's explained--if they're willing to listen.
_____________________________________________
Gillian
"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"
"You can't erase icing."
"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"
Senior Member
Aye...there's the rub.
edited to add...no, I have no idea why I'm suddenly talking like Scotty.
Established Member
Oh, I like this...sums it up very nicely. Yes, "willing to listen", "misunderstanding" of the science involved, the very crux of the matter, I'd say. Once some folks latch onto a belief it becomes one heck of a matter to dissuade them, even the application of literally "tons of reason" doesn't seem to have any effect.
A similar situation is currently taking place over here on Unexplained Mysteries.
It appears that even the application of a 'tongue in cheek' parody may have missed the mark!
I guess that old saying, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink (think?)" holds true even today.
Established Member
Already explained, the program is being funded at a more gingerly rate. The motivation to throw tremendous resources into a moon landing simply doesn't exist today. The type of annual funding Apollo received could never get approved in today's America. NASA therefore has to make do with a much smaller allocation of resources. As a result, the targeted date for the first landing is much further into the future than was necessary for the Apollo planners.
Over a period of decades practices change, so you can't simply apply a 40-year-old solution to today's problems. The concepts might still work, but the hardware has to be completely redesigned for the new application. Furthermore, the next moon landings include new goals -- i.e. extended stays on the Moon. This will involve R&D the Apollo planners didn't have to deal with.
The amount of resource loading is the most important factor in determining the schedule of a large industry project. To suggest that two projects should take the same amount of time without considering the disparity in the resource loading is extremely foolish and naive.
Established Member
Haven't we heard this argument many, many times before?
It's a pretty tired argument
Pete
Bad Post-Doc
Aren't they all?
_____________________________________________
Gillian
"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"
"You can't erase icing."
"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"
Order of Kilopi
we still need double the time to achieve the same "success" from 1960's
when we managed to land people on the Moon with only 8 years of R&D!
Again you are wrong. The design for the Saturn Rocket was approved in 1959 (Von Braun and his team had already been working on the design prior to that) and the CSM and LM design where given over to industry to work on in 1960, though ways to land had been explored previous to that resulting in the Lunar Rendezvous plan that was put into motion in 1959. This gave 10 and 9 years respectively. NASA was also aways looking at a 1970 (the date they gave Kennedy) landing, so they landed a year ahead of schedule.
Currently, the US is looking at 2018 (not 2020) which gives them 14 years. That is 2 years longer than the time projected in the 1960's and it involves bigger missions with longer stays on a far smaller budget. NASA has projected this time that if all goes well, they could be going as soon as 2015, so in a best case senario, they would take 11 years from planning start to missions, exactly the same as in the 1960's, again with bigger missions, more complex spacecraft, harsher safety requirements, smaller budgets, and no pressure of a massive space race pushing them.
Perhaps you need to actually read up on the Apolllo and coming missions a little more and do that little thing called learning, before you open your mouth and look somewhat foolish.
Established Member
Okay, I can say the same - NASA started to work on Moon landing in 1958, we "landed" on the Moon already 6 times 30+ years ago, but yet, with all that great experiance we have, from 1958 to 2004 (46 years)
In those 46 years, most of the people who have the experience of solving the problems unique to manned flight beyond Earth orbit have retired and/or died. While the principles remain the same, "know-how" for such a mission is not simply a matter of reading the books and drawings; it's a matter of actually doing it yourself.
we still need double the time to achieve the same "success" from 1960's
when we managed to land people on the Moon with only 8 years of R&D!
Wrong twice. It was more than eight years - as was already explained to you - and the new program will do far more than Apollo in terms of mission length, landing area flexibility, and development of a long-term human presence on the Moon.
How is this possible???
Already explained to you.
I will tell you how:
WE NEVER LANDED ON THE MOON. And period -> .
Repeating your premise is not evidence.
No, its not simple mathematics... Folks in 1960's did a lots of R&D
(research and development) while today we don't need,
we have ready solutions, thanks to those who earier did R&D.
Please, tell me about all the things we can do so readily in today's world. Spare no detail; I'm an aerospace engineer and would love to hear how you propose to quickly build all-new hardware while finishing out the Shuttle program and ISS construction in today's political and fiscal environment.
I do admire what they did, but do not want me, my friends, and others
to be fooled - its better to know the truth then to live with lies.
Absolutely. So what about Apollo would you like explained so that the conspiracy con men like Sibrel, Percy and so on don't fool you?
Order of Kilopi
Yep, and I'm quite sure that if there was a reason why we had to get to the moon in a hurry, where great expense and loss of life was acceptable (instead of having a good chance of killing the program) we could move quite fast indeed, even given the trained personnel issue.
Just because we don't have the same motivation doesn't mean we lack the ability.
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?
The Leif Ericson Cruiser
Order of Kilopi
...with all that great experiance we have, from 1958 to 2004 (46 years)
Experience doing other things. Building permanent manned space stations and reusable space shuttles and cost-effective private access to key points in cislunar space has little to do with sustaining a manned lunar landing capability.
Some of us actually work in that industry and aren't impressed by your frantic handwaving and pretense of knowledge.
we still need double the time to achieve the same "success" from 1960's
No, we're not trying to do the same thing. We're trying to do much more than we did previously. The current plan is based on the notion that many things learned from Apollo will be easily reprised. We will then extend and augment that capability to carry out the next step in lunar exploration.
This time it's not a race, and a smaller segment of our national resources will be devoted to it.
In World War II airplanes went from drawing board to combat in a couple of years. Great effort was expended to do this, and a great deal of prudent engineering was put aside in order to deploy the aircraft quickly. These days, in relative peacetime, military aircraft spend several years on the drawing board and several years in test. There is no presumption that an industry always works at the same pace under all circumstances.
With much greater experiance (since 1958)
Little of it relevant.
better technology
Little of it relevant. And with better technology comes greater responsibility. The creators of space technology today have much greater regulation than Apollo did, and also much greater expectation of success.
I will tell you how: WE NEVER LANDED ON THE MOON. And period
Non sequitur. Subsequent disinterest does not negate prior ability.
Folks in 1960's did a lots of R&D (research and development) while today we don't need, we have ready solutions, thanks to those who earier did R&D.
LOL! I work in the aerospace industry. You don't have the faintest clue what you're talking about. If we had "ready solutions" then people wouldn't need me or my services.
its better to know the truth then to live with lies.
Yes. Unfortunately you've been spoon-fed a pack of lies by people who are only interested in how much money you'll give them to do it. Whether you want to slice it as a matter of expertise or a matter of motive, you have been "had".
Established Member
Heh. Jay beat me to it, again.
I was going to say ... We have 46 years of experience in landing on the Moon? Wow! Please show me some of the hardware and pictures, tell me the names of all those intrepid folk that have been shuttling back and forth from the 70's to this present decade!
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The problem, of course, is that the layman's understanding of aerospace engineering doesn't differentiate between different tasks or specializations. It assumes (wrongly) that skills developed toward one goal can be applied indiscriminately toward some other goal. There is only "technology" in the general sense, not specialized techniques or sub-fields.
So people presume, for example, that the revolution in computing makes it a piece of cake to get to the moon now, only because they don't understand specifically how computing applies to various topics. A spaceship doesn't compute its way to the moon any more than a washing machine computes its way to clean socks.
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Well I DON'T work in the aerospace industry, I work in the IT industry and I am still waiting for those "ready made solutions" our current HB is talking about
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I work in the IT industry and I am still waiting for those "ready made solutions"
Hehe. So do I. I remember one of my leturers telling us, "Don't reinvent the wheel, there is always a bit of code out there that you can steal to use." Yeah right. No one does it the way you want and 9 times out of 10, you have to redo their code so much you might as well have just written it from scratch yourself.
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And besides, there's a name for a program that use 90% borrowed and boilerplate code...ill-fitting round pegs crammed into square holes and patched until they perform...
Windows.
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In order for engineering to be reusable it has to be designed from the start with reuse in mind. Heritage engineering can be a great time-saver, but as you say, it's not often immediately applicable to some other purpose. The space shuttle SRB was a heritage design adapted to a new purpose and scaled up. The scaling up partly cause the improper joint rotation in the SRM field joints.
Even worse, the use of heritage engineering often lulls you into a false sense of security. You don't test something as rigorously as you should if you believe it has been successfully deployed elsewhere. And so you sometimes have the case where it was broken in Product A and equally broken in Product B.
Established Member
That reminds me of a problem report I got from a user. He gave me the fix in Fortran because he took a course in it once. I sent it back and thanked him. Never could get it to integrate into our Java code for some reason.
Member
What "ready solutions"??
As far as I know, nobody is manufacturing Saturns, Apollo capsules or landers.
We could try to build some from blueprints, but they will probably need several components that just aren't available today, stuff that was declared obsolete and droped from the manufacterer's product lines, or that was made by companies that are gone today.
So, could you please tell us what are those "ready solutions" that you speak of?
Come on, don't be shy, this is your chance to show everybody that you're not a troll and that you actually have a good idea of how long should a return to the moon take, and how much it would cost.
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Oh if only I were so lucky. I just had two of my engineers standing in line to ask me questions. One was a Java question and the other was a Fortran question. What tangled webs we weave.
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We could try to build some from blueprints, but they will probably need several components that just aren't available today, stuff that was declared obsolete and droped from the manufacterer's product lines, or that was made by companies that are gone today.
Check out the Spacecraft Films Saturn V DVD set. It contains quarterly film reports from the development of the Saturn V, and really brings home just how speacialised the tooling needed to build the thing was. You just couldn't readily adapt it to any other purpose, so the tooling would be gone now, hence no ability to make a Saturn V. They used some very innovative techniques as well. The two companies building the LOX tank forward bulkheads for the S-II and S-IC stages, sections broadly similar in size, shape and requirements for structure and insulation, developed two totally different methods to form the sections. If I recall correctly, one lot used a system of air bladders to force the metal plate into shape, while the other used explosives underwater to blast the metal sheet to the right shape.
It's amazing how much specialised equipment is needed to build something, and frustrating to see the number of conspiracy theorists who think everything can be done with off-the-shelf tooling that can be easily adapted to make anything you need.
Established Member
Would it be appropriate to characterize this as an optimization problem? Assuming that you allow safety and reliability to be gathered into the idea of optimization, of course.
I just know from my own experience that a good 80% of what we do relies on stock solutions -- either literal stock from the warehouse or out-of-the-book empirical solutions. These work because the book methods are overdesigned, giving us a nice margin in most directions, and because stock is intentionally designed (again by from a book of empirical solutions developed over literally hundreds of years) to be "plugged-in" to fit the needs of the moment.
What takes a different set of tools are those places where restrictions of space, budget, safety, load, or visual appearance make the stock solutions impractical if not impossible. (And it takes a fair amount of skill to realize when you've hit that boundary and have to put down the book and pick up a slide rule). In my line of work, that's roughly 20%. It strikes me that aerospace, with much closer tolerances and much larger risks, that percentage is going to grow substantially.
When some very small percentage of what you need can be pulled out of ready-mades or drawn from a book of well-tested previous solutions, you are going to have a lot of work to do. And since aerospace items are not wood and nails, you can't even get your tools off the shelf. You have to build the tools themselves....or even build the tools to build the tools.
Order of Kilopi
Would it be appropriate to characterize this as an optimization problem?
Yes. Where safety, cost, complexity, and requirement satisfaction are considered as variables, many common solutions are simply optimizations of this problem. This is "optimization" in the classical system engineering sense, which has a mathematical definition.
Stock building materials are sized appropriately for many standard design practices and elements, which can be readily obtained in books and executed by relatively unskilled workers. Joist members of a certain size and length spaced a certain distance easily satisfy safety concerns, and mass production solves cost problems. The margins in these cases scale roughly linearly with iteration.
This works because the design vocabulary toward which stock solutions are aimed is actually extremely limited, although it accounts for a very large proportion of total construction.
Aerospace requires a much richer design vocabulary. And its tolerances are indeed much, much tighter. One cannot afford to overdesign randomly by arbitrary factors in order to reduce the expertise needed for design.
Order of Kilopi
I suppose it depends on what you mean. Yes, you still have to do *a lot* of coding, but these days for many graphics, sound, music, etc. functions you don't write to the hardware yourself (writing the routines yourself), but use an API. It's not that programming has become easier, but the scope of what you can do has increased, at least in some arenas. (Sound, graphics, looks nicer.)
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?
The Leif Ericson Cruiser
Order of Kilopi
I suppose it depends on what you mean.
I tend to end up doing projects that only mad people take on.
For example a client wanted an HTML web program that would run on a MS Server, connecting to an MS Server 7.0 database. The data was to be displayed on the screen and then allow the user to select and deselect lines of data.
This wouldn't be too bad except that we're talking well over 500,000 lines of data, something that not only resulted in a modification to the WebServer Buffer but broke the limit for Javascript Arrays, something every manual I could locate said was unthinkable.
We then discovered that looking through a half million element JS array to see what has been selected takes a very long time, so I ended up writing my very own JS pointer system which allowed me to instantly collect the lines the user has selected.
The resulting ASP page was a hideious mixture of ASP, VB Script, and JavaScript, and it did things that the books claimed were impossible (and even several the editor I was using wouldn't actually let me do, with it claiming they were errors, and meaning I had to do it in Notepad) but the result was a fast and very effective page which the client loved.
Established Member
Although I still remember a little Fortran, I don't think I could still program in it without alot of study. The application I work on only performs simple math.
Established Member
The space shuttle SRB was a heritage design adapted to a new purpose and scaled up. The scaling up partly cause the improper joint rotation in the SRM field joints.
Presumably the design of the five-segment SRM which will form the core of the new Crew Launch Vehicle, and is scaled up from the four-segment Shuttle SRM, will incorporate such lessons.
Even worse, the use of heritage engineering often lulls you into a false sense of security. You don't test something as rigorously as you should if you believe it has been successfully deployed elsewhere. And so you sometimes have the case where it was broken in Product A and equally broken in Product B.
Or even not broken in Product A... Ariane 4 code, Ariane 5 use, buffer overflow. 'Nuff said.
Order of Kilopi
Presumably the design of the five-segment SRM which will form the core of the new Crew Launch Vehicle, and is scaled up from the four-segment Shuttle SRM, will incorporate such lessons.
ATK is my customer. My computers are cranking through the CSD codes even as we speak.
Ariane 4 code, Ariane 5 use, buffer overflow. 'Nuff said.
Or the Genesis spacecraft (NASA's, not Dr. Marcus'). Heritage design ELS was improperly validated in the design and insufficiently tested under the FBC proposition that it had already worked once before.
My own anecdote involves "feed 'n' speed" code generators for one CNC rig improperly applied to another, launching a spinning 100 pound billet of steel through the guard panels, past the head of a terrified machinist, and through two 3/4-inch thicknesses of drywall. Oops.
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