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Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2010 2:59 pm
by ClymAngus
It's space travel, people are going to die doing it. Sign the waver for your place in history and get with the legend making. Did Christopher Columbus do a risk assessment? I doubt it. Sure don't go doing anything stupid but if the pros and cons balance out in a way that is to your liking then hell, why not?
The problem comes with retirement funding pet projects and gravy boating these are the 2 most dangerous unwritten design specifications that will assure an increased chance for the loss of human life.
Cut those out, everything else is just engineering and physics.
Selezen wrote:It's time NASA was downsized anyway. It costs too much, can't do anything properly and doesn't seem to learn its lessons very well.
In addition NASA spend too much time stretching red tape across everything and not putting enough red tape around the SAFETY aspects. That means they take three times as long as anyone else to get anything done.
Russians: "We need to go to space. Let's go."
NASA: "We need to go to space. Let's spend six months talking about what Greek god to name the project after, get loads of mission patches and project logos done, create fifteen websites about it, have hundreds of meetings about it, design another rocket to do the same as the one we had 40 years ago, THEN go."
A mate of mine at work knows a guy who works for ATK (the company designing the Ares rocket). They designed it, spend 6 months testing it and finally got it working properly...then NASA canned the programme.
Russia, love em or hate em, GET THINGS DONE. Look at their cold war attitude. They used to wait for the US / NATO to design something then get hold of the plans. Then they would spend a few weeks looking at the plans and making notes, then would come up with something BETTER. In a third of the time! Fantastic minds and utter pragramatists. "Why spend months designing something when the West can waste their time on that bit then we steal it and do it properly?"
So it makes sense to let the Russians fly. And it's marketing GOLD. No more having to explain why crashes happen. No more investigations and explaining to all and sundry why "we didn't notice that until it was too late." Now the US Space Program can take a step back from the Line of Blame and point at the Russians when everything goes wrong and they can bask in the glory when it all goes right!
I think Obama's done the right thing, much as I am saddened by the delays in space travel. The private sector has made more headway into reusable space planes in the last 5 years than they have in the last 40. NASA will be buying seats and cargo space on SpaceShip Three in 10 years time because it will be the most cost-effective way of achieving space travel.
Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2010 3:23 pm
by JensAyton
ClymAngus wrote:Did Christopher Columbus do a risk assessment? I doubt it. Sure don't go doing anything stupid but if the pros and cons balance out in a way that is to your liking then hell, why not?
Columbus isn’t a very apropos example of not doing anything stupid. He started out with a flawed hypothesis that was widely rejected on correct grounds, almost starved to death, and completely failed to find a shortcut to Asia.
I sincerely doubt a space expedition as catastrophically mismanaged as that voyage would happen to stumble upon a planet full of rich but defenceless people to exploit. :-)
Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2010 4:08 pm
by Disembodied
There's also the different approaches to spending public money in a democracy, as opposed to a military dictatorship. It's much easier to get things done if you can shoot anyone who tries to raise an objection. It also doesn't help if you have a pushy media, itself a fully paid-up member of the military-entertainment complex, squawking in the background all the time and for some reason actively hostile to any sort of scientific enquiry. Again, the military dictatorships are able to circumvent this sort of problem. Of course, they have their own issues, not least the tendency for their governments and/or economies to implode. Plus the whole dictatorship thing, which often results in them imprisoning, killing or otherwise mislaying their best scientific talent. Sergey Korolyov, for example, spent six years in jail following Stalin's purge in 1938. If he'd died there, like so many others, maybe the Soviet space programme wouldn't have been such an initial success. It's possible that his early death, at a crucial time (1966), was a result of the torture he suffered and/or the time he spent in a gulag.
Essentially what I'm saying is, it's swings and roundabouts. Inept swings and psychopathic roundabouts.
Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2010 4:11 pm
by ClymAngus
Ahruman wrote:ClymAngus wrote:Did Christopher Columbus do a risk assessment? I doubt it. Sure don't go doing anything stupid but if the pros and cons balance out in a way that is to your liking then hell, why not?
Columbus isn’t a very apropos example of not doing anything stupid. He started out with a flawed hypothesis that was widely rejected on correct grounds, almost starved to death, and completely failed to find a shortcut to Asia.
I sincerely doubt a space expedition as catastrophically mismanaged as that voyage would happen to stumble upon a planet full of rich but defenceless people to exploit.
I meant stupid with foresight not hindsight. With hindsight, even crawling out of the primordial ooze could be seen as a little foolhardy.
Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2010 4:41 pm
by Cmdr James
Columbus wasnt just foolhardy, he was an idiot who was extremely lucky to have survived. There is also some reasonably good evidence that he wasnt the first European to discover America.
To say he didnt do a risk assesment is something of an understatement, it appears that he didnt even look at a map
He was certainly stupid with foresight.
Risk assesment it utterly key in huge expensive projects. Not just for the lives of those involved, but would you really suggest we spend x billion dollars on a journey that has a 75% chance of bursting into flames half way there? The key point is
if the pros and cons balance out in a way that is to your liking then hell, why not?
this is the definition of a risk assesment.
Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2010 5:03 pm
by Gnudoll
Ahruman wrote:
Columbus isn’t a very apropos example of not doing anything stupid. He started out with a flawed hypothesis that was widely rejected on correct grounds, almost starved to death, and completely failed to find a shortcut to Asia.
And he got a holiday named after him. . . Good PR I guess.
Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2010 5:32 pm
by ClymAngus
I'm glad people noted the fifth sentence, it was put there to balance out the fantastic outrageousness of the 3rd.
We do suffer from an issue with risk assessment in the modern age however that does get in the way of our more headstrong endeavours. Dumb as minty **** or otherwise they tend to be the ones in history books like it or not.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qn6SxiIX ... re=related
To clarify (however people read it) I'm not advocating giving a billion to the first FUBAR in a space suit with a rocket shoved up his happy tunnel. Just maybe a little less hand wringing and a little more doing would be nice, some time before a slightly better aimed Apophis turns up.
Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2010 5:45 pm
by Cody
Gnudoll wrote:And he got a holiday named after him.
Strangely enough, there is also a Leif Erikson Day in the USA.
The Chinese probably beat Columbus to America, as well, by seventy odd years.
The Chinese will not worry so much about the risks of space travel... they'll probably 'colonise' Mars before anyone else.