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tef
@tef

"spaceflight is risky business" explains the tweet. i mean, yes, space is a hostile environment, but so is nasa.

i think about how the apollo 1 astronauts sent a picture to their boss' boss, of them praying towards the capsule, a few months before they burned to death in a test.

during the investigation, one senator said NASA had an "evasiveness, ... lack of candor, ... patronizing attitude toward Congress ... refusal to respond fully and forthrightly to legitimate Congressional inquiries"

i also think about the challenger disaster. the one where the rocket contractor went "don't fly" and nasa went "are you suuuuuuuuuuure?" and the contractor went "shrug."

i think about how the investigation only found out the truth because someone leaked the reports to the commission—who then protected their sources by inviting feynman over for dinner, and theatrically working on their car and talking about o-rings, so he'd have an excuse to start looking.

"The commission concluded that the safety culture and management structure at NASA were insufficient to properly report, analyze, and prevent flight issues."

or columbia, where the the management cancelled attempts to look for debris, because it would ruin the schedule.

"the board determined that NASA lacked the appropriate communication and integration channels to allow problems to be discussed and effectively routed and addressed."

the thing that gets me, apart from nasa killing astronauts every twenty years, is that so many people see it as an acceptable cost of progress. if anything, they see it proving the difficulty and the merit of spaceflight.

i'll give you two guesses for how the people who make "self driving cars" think


lupi
@lupi

i was going to try to post something longer about that but then the core nugget of that thought fit in the title

it's politically motivated, to a fault sometimes. I'll sometimes talk (and i've done so before) about how the organizational structure of NASA as an offshoot of Johnson's Great Society initiative let it set down roots to evade political cancellation and how that allowed it to bring benefits to places across the country but like.

why did we approve the Challenger launch, instead of delaying it for better weather? They wanted it up ahead of Reagan's State of the Union address, so he could talk about it. It bears saying that they launched not just in temperatures outside their launch constraints, but upper level wind shear, and the combination of those is what led to the failure. SRBs had failed in that manner before, but the hot exhaust gases had ended up welding the seam shut when the o-ring failed. The wind shear practically "held the wound open," as it were.

why did they approve the Columbia launch, when the left bipod ramp insulation foam piece had been documented as coming off several times, including the mission one or two flights before? political pressure to have the station "Core Complete" by 2005 or whatever.

Why were we so gung-ho on Apollo that we were willing to take unforeseen levels of risk? Political pressure. Man, moon, decade, beat the soviets, et cetera.

more reasoning after the cut


Why weren't foam strikes or SRB blowby taken seriously, despite having been documented in their own respects from the onset of the shuttle program? Despite the near loss of STS-27 (a military mission) to debris falling onto the orbiter (granted, it was from the SRB nosecone, not the tank) just two flights after Challenger?

"they're just maintenance issues, the shuttle has survived them before, we 'understand the nature of the problem' sure. you understand it, until the debris hits somewhere critical or the "understood process" of SRBs blow-by being countered by exhaust heat-welding fails to seal the joint.

Why was the apollo CSM that killed the apollo 1 astronauts designed in that way? Because they were rushing, this was an early test version of the CSM (i think that's the right video) that was intended as a development stopgap while they finalized it. They thought the inward-opening hatch would be fine because they didn't plan on doing any EVAs yet, and hadn't thought about the necessity to evacuate the spacecraft in a pad emergency. The contractor for the CSM made decisions to meet the deadline that made the vehicle less safe before it was done.

I could talk in greater length about the original nugget here, about the whole "rockets are just well-behaved missiles," the militarization of space even as we play "i'm not touching you" with the weaponization of it, and the fact that it's all always the same contractors with little exception, and even when it's new blood it still has to play nice with the DoD. i could even talk about the consolidation of aerospace and defense companies and how that is.

But i've said a lot already i think.


hellojed
@hellojed

There was this one doc on the space shuttle I watched as a child where they interviewed one of the people that worked on the space shuttle engines and he goes "I'm surprised the thing doesn't blow itself up every time it launches" which haunted me and I think about constantly.


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in reply to @tef's post:

in reply to @lupi's post:

It is kinda amazing that the "Let's get nazis to build rockets for nukes" project got rebranded as "Space exploration for the betterment of mankind" thing.

That and someone saying "The commies were NASA's greatest ally. Nothing else could get Reagan to fund public works."

It's swords into plowshares, but we should never forget the swords part. Especially not when there are still active launch vehicles that are literally the swords.

It gives us tangible benefits to our way of life but doing so is in large part a scheme that involves making money for defense contractors.

Hubble was (never explicitly confirmed to be, but y'know.) a military KH-11 spy satellite pointed outward.

The upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope IS explicitly confirmed to be a spy satellite pointing outward, it's being built out of a "charitable donation" the NRO made to NASA with old hardware they deemed "obsolete"

In the US, our launch vehicles and satellites are built by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, et cetera, or companies that get merged into them over the onward march of hypercapitalist industry consolidation.

Even the ones built by SpaceX are subject to DoD requirements, like they just bid on the new National Security Space Launch contract and the DoD is on their asses about not delivering on requirements for vertical payload integration.

Like, don't get me wrong, this is my passion in life, I moved to live just ten-fifteen miles away from the launchpads and this morning i got woken up at 3am but some more of elon musk's bullshit sky-ruining space glitter as the launch made it real loud in my house.

But nothing is beyond reproach and loving something doesn't mean blinding oneself to its apparent faults and problems.

I don't know if I'd say mad, I don't constantly fume on this, more... ruminant. It's something that sits in my mind as a facet of this passion.

"let's build rockets for nukes" was a form of hard power. Like parking an aircraft carrier off someone's shore, or building a military base.

Spaceflight and space activities have since transitioned to a form of soft power, one that's more diplomatic in nature.

As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, the US State Department went to NASA and to our aerospace industry and voluntold them to do what they could to prop the post-soviet space industry up, to keep the people skilled in aerospace technology from leaving once the money dried up, out of fear they'd go to "american adversaries" like idk, north korea.

That's how we got things like SeaLaunch, where Boeing partnered with several soviet design bureaus turned companies to launch Zenit rockets off a barge in the middle of the ocean.

Like the partnership between Lockheed Martin and some of those design bureaus that resulted in the formation of International Launch Services to provide commercial launch services on Russia's Proton rocket, and on the new Atlas III and Atlas V rockets Lockheed had designed to use russian-designed engines.

And following on from that, Shuttle-Mir and the International Space Station.

The International Space Station is the ultimate example of what is humanly possible with multinational collaboration in space, with contributions from so many member countries, yes. But it's also a spectacular example of spaceflight's tactical use as soft power for diplomacy and international relationships.

It's a great model of the way we trade political favors and spaceflight activities, whether that's in the form of "we'll fly your astronauts if you build a module" or "the ESA member countries will get a fixed percentage of JWST's observation time if you provide the launch on Ariane V" or "we'll fly your astronauts to the moon if the ESA keeps providing service modules" or seat-exchange policy between the US and Russia during the Shuttle and Station era.

The International Space Station is a wonderful thing and it's a feat of humanity that it even exists and continues to exist, but to assume it exists altruistically, like anything else in spaceflight, is farcical.

...both of these comments could have been full posts.

..and yes, i used the word ruminant on purpose, because i'm endlessly cow-pun-brained

also addendum you know the source who tipped Feynman off was none other than Sally Ride, who was worried the men in the committee wouldn't take her seriously so she went to him over it

and i can't remember if it was a good faith thing or a "trick him into thinking he came up with it" thing but regardless of which case it might've been

lesbians were critical to the accident investigations for space shuttles

I believe that Ride showed the report to Kutnya, who then dropped large hints to feynman

One day [early in the investigation] Sally Ride and I were walking together. She was on my right side and was looking straight ahead. She opened up her notebook and with her left hand, still looking straight ahead, gave me a piece of paper. Didn't say a single word. I look at the piece of paper. It's a NASA document. It's got two columns on it. The first column is temperature, the second column is resiliency of O-rings as a function of temperature. It shows that they get stiff when it gets cold. Sally and I were really good buddies. She figured she could trust me to give me that piece of paper and not implicate her or the people at NASA who gave it to her, because they could all get fired. I wondered how I could introduce this information Sally had given me. So I had Feynman at my house for dinner. I have a 1973 Opel GT, a really cute car. We went out to the garage, and I'm bragging about the car, but he could care less [sic] about cars. I had taken the carburetor out. And Feynman said, "What's this?" And I said, "Oh, just a carburetor. I'm cleaning it." Then I said, "Professor, these carburetors have O-rings in them. And when it gets cold, they leak. Do you suppose that has anything to do with our situation?" He did not say a word. We finished the night, and the next Tuesday, at the first public meeting, is when he did his O-ring demonstration ... I never talked with Sally about it later ... I kept it a secret that she had given me that piece of paper until she died [in 2012].