NASA puts jet propulsion lab on blast over Psyche mission failures
futurism.com
futurism.com
That's extremely disappointing. Venus is easily the 2nd most interesting planet "close" to us besides Mars. I was really looking forward to that one.
> From the standpoint of total mass delivered to Venus, the best launch opportunities occur in 2029 and 2031.
It's too bad Russia's ambitious space programs are mosty vaporware. They pinoeered Venus exploration and have their own (pretend) Venus program that AFAIK isn't going anywhere.
> a proposed Russian space mission to Venus that would include an orbiter and a lander to be launched in 2029.
Mars seems like an introductory class to Venus' horror story. But yes there's plenty to learn, especially from a statistical analysis for finding life in interstellar space type of thing.
Numerous materials can be extracted from the outside air, including oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, sulfur, nitrogen, and even some metals.
A day/night cycle is about 100 hours, depending on how close you are to a pole.
A nuclear reactor is as simple as a big fabric tube suspended vertically with a naked atomic pile hanging near the bottom, and a wind turbine turning in an opening at the top, the only moving part.
You need something non-solar because nights are long.
Alternatively, you can store energy with a weight on a cable attached to a generator. Play it out to discharge, winch it back up to charge.
Or maybe different layers of atmosphere circulate at different rates. If so, you can hang a wind turbine in the next layer below.
Getting 250 tons of high-strength steel cable (sheathed against corrosion) to Venus is left as an exercise for the reader. Likewise, a big enough balloon to hold that up. And a strong enough winch.
But in practice, you would make the cable of carbon extracted from atmospheric CO2, instead, and it could support itself all the way down to the surface, 50 mi below. You would need to protect the end against acid vapor corrosion at 470 C: another exercise for the reader.
https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/26/what-is-the...
That said, I’m not there’s any appreciable/perceptive difference to which way the sun sets for us anyway. It’s not like we have some internal compass that naturally grounds our cardinal direction. Our only frame of reference during the day on which way is east or west is the movement on the sun. If it suddenly started going the opposite direction it’d be weird if your were experiencing it in a familiar location. If you were somewhere where you’d never experienced a sunrise or sunset before (i.e., as little as a few miles away) I suspect you’d not even notice the difference. You’d have no frame of reference to suggest anything had changed.
I'm reminded of "Story of Your Life" [1] / "Arrival" [2] wherein a character's language shapes their thoughts. Those are fiction, but there's also some supporting non-fiction evidence.
Apparently there's a tribe of humans on Earth (in Australia) whose language primarily refers to cardinal directions when describing the location of things - as in "hand me the north cup on the table". I don't think that's the only one - there's also Tenejapan Mayans [4]. From the latter group there's cited examples of an experiment with blindfolded/dizzy Tenejapan in a darkened interior who can identify the cardinal directions accurately. All of this is to say that maybe in fact some humans actually can sense this as if they had an internal compass.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film)
[3] https://pages.ucsd.edu/~jhaviland/Publications/ETHOSw.Diags....
Strongly calling B.S. on this claim.
There is no physical reason humans could not have a latent magnetic sense. Other animals are known to have it. So, experiment is determinative.
I wonder if this is like an implanted memory that you have or what?
As pointed out below, it's because in my normal latitude (south UK) the sun moves from left to right (as you face South) and at a similar distance below the equator, it goes from right to left (as you face North). So at home when I look at the Sun I know that a couple of hours later it be quite a bit to the right of where it is now, and I can use this to assess where shadows will be.
I'm really curious what the temperature, atmospheric makeup, and density is at different altitudes on Venus. I had no idea there could be a theoretically habitable altitude on it.
At the right latitude, and a few meters deep, temperature would be comfortable. But energy would be a problem, with the season-long night.
Axial tilt is <2 degrees. There might be some volatiles frozen in polar craters.
Temperature at a pole would be low, but solar panels mounted vertically (or, better, a wavelength-selective mirror reflecting onto horizontal panels), rotating slowly, would offer continuous power. Constant temperature too low is a lot easier to handle than too high, or varying much. You need to dig down for protection from cosmic radiation.
Gravity is about like Mars, which might or might not be adequate, long term. Nobody knows.
It is remarkably hard to get to and from Mercury. Jupiter is easier.
... and the cloud is made of sulfuric acid droplets. Don't breathe in, and make sure that nothing important is ever exposed to the outside air.
Edit: maybe not fine. Resistance to H2SO4 corrosion falls off sharply as its concentration approaches 100%. On Venus, the clouds would be very nearly 100%.
https://www.gab-neumann.com/Corrosion-resistance-of-impervio...
Neither carbon fiber is affected by acids, nor some types of plastic with carbon-carbon bonds, like polyethylene (but polyesters and other polymers made by polycondensation may be hydrolyzed by acids).
At high concentrations, a sulfuric acid solution begins to have an oxidizing behavior, even if not so strong as nitric acid, so it can convert the carbon from carbon fibers or some plastics into carbon dioxide, damaging them.
The difference in behavior is because the sulfate ions have a very high affinity for water. At low concentrations, they are strongly hydrated, so the attached water shields them from making direct contact with an immersed material. At high concentrations, there is much less water available for hydration and the sulfate ions can make direct contact with an immersed material. Then the oxidized sulfur atoms from the sulfate ions can oxidize any less electronegative elements.
As your balloon drifts up or down through it, the sheen of moisture it collects on its surface is maximum strength sulfuric acid. I hope your balloon is not of a material subject to oxidation, because if it is, you will soon discover a place even worse than in that cloud.
Based on my experience, there's always that one astronaut who forgets and uses a metal spatula.
One alternative would be to make diamonds out of the extracted carbon and drop them to the ground. The released oxygen could then bind to crustal aluminum, iron, silicon, calcium, etc.
Venus has sadly little hydrogen, so you won't get oceans.
But, yes, it would be pointless to try terraforming Venus without von Neumann machines, and then it would end up thick with those, instead.
The Kuiper Belt offers more than the inner planets, provided energy is solved e.g. via aneutronic fusion.
You can use regular fission as a dense energy source. If you are worried about the waste, you can just blow it up. In space there's no fallout. The particles from the explosion will just move radially forever. Most of them (99.9999..%, too many nines to count) will keep moving for billions of years through empty space without encountering anything. Oh, and as a curiosity, if you blow up a nuke in space, there's no fireball. The fireball we see in movies of nuke detonations are due to the air absorbing the X-rays from the nuke and becoming overheated plasma. But there's no air in space, so a nuke explosion is invisible and silent.
Layered mirrors concentrating monochromatic solar irradiation into laser cavities, and beaming power to where needed, is the fallback until aneutronic fusion works.
There is plenty of un-oxidized material on the ground. Oxygen just needs to be kept off the carbon. And, it needs stirring. Big meteors could do a bit of that.
Earth gets its stirring from tectonics, which Venus lacks.
This occurred in stages.
At the same time I continuously question if the findings they make wit these rovers continue to justify the multi billion dollar expense we make on these missions. I’d much rather we spend our limited resources on Venus and Europa, and actually starting to send interstellar probes than continuing to double down on Mars. It’s become a vanity project for billionaires anyway so let them figure out putting a man there. NASA can start focusing on the next step in exploration of space.
That is one prominent billionaire's idea for stuff to do in the next decade yes... But he wasn't a major factor considered by NASA when the current projects were funded.
Otherwise I'd probably agree Mars might have gotten too much federal funding vs other projects in the last decade.
I would bet any amount of money none will.
Imagine the technical implications of copper, gold, platinum, etc becoming as cheap and abundant as tin foil.
You will already need substantial solar power and batteries, that’s not in question.
As a great filter candidate, this transition could either allow for those massive technologically advancements, but it could just as well have us end up in another stone-age.
Remember 2017? That's just as far as 2028 is.
Also here's the pdf link that's at the bottom of that page to the full set of comments along with NASA's responses: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/psyche_...
Unfortunately it's a PDF of raw image scans.
I could see Ars Technica making the same pun, and I wonder if they would get as much flak.
I really don’t like the other site (we’re not supposed to complain about that kind of thing, so I won’t).
> ... The lockdown conditions contributed significantly to the question of why Psyche and JPL leadership did not know of the severity of the problems with GNC and V&V until it was too late to correct course.
> ... The IRB recommends that, given these exceptional circumstances, the team should minimize remote work conditions.
JPL has been suffering a brain drain over the last few years, and it sounds like the remaining cadre of managers are not so competent. Remote work is a convenient scapegoat, but it is far more likely that the problem is an ossified chain of command and a lackluster set of communication tools (Webex, shudder).
I simply cannot explain the level of organizational dysfunction in that institution. In many cases there were thoughtful and talented people in the job roles, but there were many blinding, glaring failures of basic information storage and availability across the entire org. My favorite example is having a hard time finding all of the requested cargo transactions for resupply flights in the cargo database because the "desired flight" field was a free-text entry instead of a drop-down menu connected to a central list of NASA flight title strings. I hammered on that issue for fifteen months straight and got absolutely nowhere with it, and I had a list of similar issues about seventy items long. If all of my issues had been addressed we probably could have reduced the number of people in the loop in cargo logistics by half.
The article is talking about leadership "walking the floor"--we had something similar happen, where I couldn't convince any of the major ISS divisions to fix their cargo data so we didn't have to interact face-to-face, but their higher-ups would call and email me to double check the status of a cargo request. They were "walking the floor" and "staying in touch", but only because they wouldn't (or couldn't) adopt any policies to make a streamlined system work. I don't know if the same thing is happening at JPL, but I have to assume that it is, given the pathological nature of the repeated communication failures I saw.
A well-organized institution should be able to provide clear visibility into their data and projects just through smart organization of their digital assets. If they don't have that basic competence, then they would be extra screwed by remote work.
Smart is in no way an adequate replacement for having your shit together. It can temporarily mask it, long term, no way.
It's the best thing bosses have going for them in terms of scapegoats.
Although you can't blame them for being uncomfortable with this level of change. Remote work mainstreaming, without the COVID excuse anymore, is a whole new experiment being tried for the first time widely in society.
Until the pandemic, I visited headquarters every few months to catch up with the teams. I found that in informal chats (in the halls, walking into someone's office, having lunch) I discovered so much that never came up during video calls. It's similar to, but worse than, formal in-person meetings with agendas; there's an activation energy people need to overcome to bring up something that may seem small but is actually critical to the project.
Someone in a video meetings with their camera off is even worse; you have almost no emotional connection with them, and it's natural for them to only "speak if spoken to".
World GDP is ~100T per year. I'm guessing that estimate was just the amount of rare earth metals times the current price, but the magnitude it ignored economic realities is comedic.
16 Psyche is 2.3e19 kg, according to WP, so 10 quintillion dollars works out to 43¢ per kg. It's pretty plausible that any kind of metal would be worth at least 43¢ per kg, it wouldn't even have to be very rare. Even steel is worth abut that much. If you're going to use it on Earth you'd be better off mining iron ore on Earth, but you can't do that with platinum-group metals, and if you want to use steel for construction in space, it's a huge advantage if it's already there instead of having to be lifted out of a gravity well.
I don't think there's an obviously correct way to compare economic value across generations' worth of time. 100 years ago people didn't have antibiotics, so death from infected wounds was common, even wounds that would be minor today. But old-growth lumber was abundant.
It might take decades, even centuries to return that to Earth, and of course how would they be able to do that, the amount of fuel required itself would mean that the price of that would be huge.
I doubt solar sails would be that viable, and the idea of the oceans going dry in order to produce the fuel to return metals would be a tad far fetched.
* yes, they knew of the foam shedding, and knew it was out of spec. But they didn’t realize it could puncture the tiles in that manner.
They saw hundreds of spots of damage and decided it was just a nuisance, they never considered that there could be spots that wouldn't just be a nuisance. Beancounters unwilling to acknowledge a problem until it was decisively proven--and the only proof was a loss of the orbiter.
It wasn’t really a “beancounter” issue. It came from the fact that we have imperfect models of physical systems and sometimes we encounter issues outside the boundaries of those model assumptions.
The story as it is often told is that an engineer raised issue X, management dismissed it, issue X caused multiple deaths.
And when told like that it is obvious that management should not have ignored X. But what were the managements’ experience with warnings like that before?
Obviously they should have evaluated every warning on their merrits, but if the organisation was “crying wolf” all the time, one can imagine that can influence the decision making.
Still, to try and give you some examples, Google Glass was known to be a failed product early on due to technical and practical problems voiced by engineers. But there was a culture of optimism or wilful ignorance at Google about Glass, so the project continued until it died due to these problems. And there are some articles on Hacker News about it. Right now there are murmurs online that Meta engineers are very aware that the metaverse is not engaging and VR efforts should pivot elsewhere. Yet the management seems to ignore this, even at tremendous cost to the company value. The whole VR effort at Meta could die because of this.
The interesting aspect of this culture is that it's not a "hindsight is 20-20" situation. In complete contrast, it's that engineers bring up problems that will significantly harm a project or a company in the future, but are ignored.
Also, Google Watch is basically Google Glass on a wrist, so building it out wasn't a complete waste.
https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/tech/google-glass-powered-m...
I think that you hit the nail on the head with the word "trust" - in many companies there should be more trust from management that engineers understand the context within which they work, and could have very unique and valid insights into how their software and hardware will be received by the consumer.
It is ignored because something else came up and that one was forgotten.
They might not even be able to differentiate from risks and deliverables. Tasks falling off any list shows that the relative importance of the task is not known, only recency is.
There isn’t a culture of trust, where people are encouraged to bring up problems and can instead be labeled as slowing a project down. There is also a culture of deliberately avoiding acknowledging issues in hopes they will just go away. This leads to a lack of decisiveness because nobody wants to stick their neck out to either say “no we don’t think that’s a credible risk” but also don’t want to invest resources in mitigating that risk.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781...
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/03/21/470870426...
If I were Ebeling, I'd've punched my manager.
Obviously this title is word play, taken from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, his first novel. As I recall, the protagonist becomes so popular he can't get any work done.
> When news of Orlean's sex scandal with her Supreme Court nominee Sheriff Conlon is exposed, she distracts from the bad publicity by finally confirming the threat and announcing a project to strike and divert the comet using nuclear weapons.
>The mission successfully launches, but Orlean abruptly aborts it when Peter Isherwell, the billionaire CEO of BASH Cellular and another top donor, discovers that the comet contains trillions of dollars worth of rare-earth elements. The White House agrees to commercially exploit the comet by fragmenting and recovering it from the ocean, using technology proposed by BASH in a scheme that has not undergone peer review.
>Orlean cuts Russia, India, and China out of the comet-mining deal, so they prepare a joint effort to deflect the comet, only for their spacecraft to explode. BASH's attempt at breaking the comet apart also goes awry and everyone realizes that humanity is doomed.
Never heard this idiom.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Harmontown/comments/80z0w6/episode_...
put me on blast on MTV
"Yeah, he's cute, but I think he's married to Kim, hee-hee!"
From an eminem song, from ~the year 2000. That's the only place I'd heard it before
Also, current slang in headlines seems like an odd choice anyway. I get there's a not-great pun there and all, but the article doesn't seem like it's written for an audience that already knows what "on blast" means.
I'm curious if there's any sort of pattern here, and how much of the blame can fall on the director.
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/02/03/multiple-suic...
I was impressed with the report, it seemed comprehensive. I think all of the answers are in there if you read carefully and read a little into what is said.
The depletion and lack of availability of experienced technical personnel is repeatedly cited as the leading cause of the failure to develop quality software on schedule. The paper's authors don't explicitly discuss the possibility that the issues might not just be administrative problems, but that there could also be technical and system design issues with the project. On a superficial level, the report's recommendations are evaluating and solving problems in administrative ways: hire more people, improve communication, reduce remote work, improve retention (hard to do those last two at the same time).
If the overall lack of experienced technical personnel were such an issue, why are the project failures on the software side, with zero issues reported on the mechanical side?
From a system design perspective, a key issue is running into a problem and deciding to "deal with it with the software". This is done without thinking through the issue, effectively kicking the can down the road. Problem solving is postponed. Once the software is being written, it's too late to solve the problem at a system design level.
Another way to see it is that deep structural system design flaws, or any other reason to suspect that the project would fail, could have prompted an exodus of experienced personnel that saw project failure coming early on in the project. The report doesn't explicitly evaluate the system design, but has a good overview of the project fundamentals. One hint is the slide talking about how they shouldn't be trying to integrate a third-party commercial orbiter designed for Earth operations for their deep-space operation. That would be an example of a top-down system design flaw, where it would be (and probably was for many) easier to just get another job or transfer to a different department than to try to fix the holes.
One of the most telling comments is calling for a more rigorous annual review of the JPL Director's performance, right there in the report. I cannot believe they did that, talk about speaking truth to power. Good for them! Then the JPL director's signature is on the document, right at the top. It's an unfortunate situation, I'm sure they all know exactly what convening a 15-person council and releasing a public report will do to project and organizational morale.
Here are my suggestions: 1. Project leaders (and organization leaders) should able to convince everyone around them that success will be achieved, see "Reality Distortion Field" 2. Complex and dynamic functionality needs to be replaced where possible with simple and static functionality. 3. It sounds like there are cultural issues coming from the top (and unfortunately, probably from above the top). 4. Technicians and leaders should be competent first and experienced or senior second. 5. If no one competent and experienced with a Reality Distortion Field wants to touch a project, then probably better to just cancel it. 6. On any project aspect, individual contributors would work best with clearly defined requirements and without distractions. Writing the requirements properly is probably most of the work.
Slide 38 explicitly lists staffing challenges in GNC (guidance, navigation, and control), FSW (flight software), avionics, and systems engineer.
Slide 41 also talks about external factors: "...this has required the experienced cadre to be spread thin... the rise of the commercial space industry in recent years has resulted in competition for experienced personnel, particularly in the systems engineering, GNC, and FSW areas."
With that said, my perspective as a former NASA insider is that JPL is known for the exact opposite, underperforming and overdelivering.
I mean, they have a nearly perfect track record of mission success (sorry Beagle) and when the missions do succeed they often persist for many times over the original lifetime requirement.
Additionally, and yes this is a vast oversimplification, if you just look generally at space exploration missions, they are far more prolific than any other NASA center.
Any war stories you want to share?
I did get to be present and watch the telemetry stream cut out as Cassini (purposely) crashed into the Saturnian atmosphere and was obliterated. Lots of people had spent two decades of their lives with that spacecraft. Many cheered and many cried.
I remember this well, I saw the footage of the footage they shot during the event on the lawn at CalTech as it happened in a presentation I attended with one of the members of the program at CU Boulder a few days/weeks after the 'end of mission.'
It looked incredibly emotive, did you decide to leave JPL for private Industry?
I can't imagine you wanted to stay in the public sector (NASA) if that is how you felt about it; I say that despite having conflicting views from two who worked at the AIMS program: Josiah Zayner (Biohacker) was disgruntled, whereas Shannon Rupert (Director of MDRS) has continued her work with both Mars Society and NASA.
JPL’s culture is very academic in nature. I mean JPL is literally an arm of Caltech that contracts exclusively to NASA and a limited set of other federal bodies. My experience was that there wasn’t a huge focus there on career growth. Many people there seemed to be happy to spend decades doing basically the same job. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a great place to work. A lot of incredible technical talent and extremely interesting people work there just because it’s JPL. The campus is gorgeous, Pasadena is an insanely nice place to live. Downside is JPL salaries are on the low end even for aerospace and Pasadena is expensive.
Personally I just wanted a more dynamic work environment.
Ore on Earth is worth a lot more, and is right here, ready to be dug up.
Source? At this point we can't know for sure, which this mission is supposed to determine. But we know its size, and estimating its composition puts it into trillion or quadrillion dollar territory, which is still a crazy amount.
And we're talking about a _single_ asteroid. The possible value found in the asteroid belt is—literally—astronomical.
> Ore on Earth is worth a lot more, and is right here, ready to be dug up.
Not quite. Ore on Earth is limited, and increasingly difficult to mine, requiring costly processing, deep sea expeditions, and producing toxic side effects for the environment. It's also politically problematic, as countries control access and exportation.
Asteroid mining would be much more expensive, but the ROI could potentially be much more lucrative. Once the space operation is setup, costs would eventually come down, and it opens up many further space exploration opportunities.
SpaceX is in a unique position to be one of the first companies to launch such missions, that I'm also surprised that Musk is not jumping at the opportunity.
It would still be a political challenge, and it creates new conflict arenas, but this is inescapable human nature.
Asteroid mining is inevitable and we'll get there eventually. Beltalowda!
Asteroid material will become important once orbital construction has seriously taken off, after Musk is long dead. In the meantime, the only valuable exports will be the engines that got supplies out there. With their bells cut off.
Only to point out that it's not "worth a lot more", nor that it's "ready to be dug up".
> Asteroid material will become important once orbital construction has seriously taken off, after Musk is long dead.
Possibly, but Mars exploration is an even longer-term bet, which has little to no financial benefits.
Considering Musk has experience in boring, space, and starting outlandish ventures, asteroid mining seems like a good fit. It could be a lucrative shorter-term project, that could fund his Mars and beyond exploration goals. It might even be achievable within his lifetime, by focusing on near-Earth objects.
Granted, this is all speculation from a layperson, but I'm curious if this has ever been considered.
- no responsibility
- overpaid with free money
The society you deserve..
This team of former NASA employees are a relic of the past unfortunately, they should investigate other companies too, including Microsoft, that would be fun :)
Pages 32, 33
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/psyche_...