U.S. Air Force overstepped bounds in SpaceX certification: report
reuters.com
reuters.com
The Air Force took a pretty silly position on the whole thing IMO.
Still the case with most government procurement processes.
If you manage to jump through all the "certification" hoops, you can mark up your product to an insane rate and then lobby for certification to be expanded.
Then the government has a list of "approved" vendors who are basically in the "certification" club and sometimes you can only find a product of a particular type only by a particular company and when you ask them for the price, your jaw drops (especially if there is a 20x cheaper COTS one on the market at the same time).
Second, I'm sure big corporations take advantage of certification process to keep smaller players out but certification is extremely important, suppliers would not follow many of the safety requirements otherwise.
That buckle is a standard UI across every commercial aircraft in the World. That is very important in emergency situations. Billions of people know pull-to-release.
There is really no advantage to changing the design unless we also change to three-point harnesses as in cars. But that won't happen for cost reasons ( ' safety is our number one priority, profit is our zeroth' ).
What a marvelously tame way of describing such a thing.
Insurance also doesn't come free. The US government can also take on more risk than any particular insurer, so by purchasing those contracts would be in effect wasting taxpayer money.
The consequences of something like a failed launch can be hard to quantify economically. There is clearly opportunity cost for missed intelligence not having the satellite in orbit when it is needed. What happens if the satellite crashes in an unfriendly place, losing the exclusivity to a bit of technology could be very damaging as well. I think you would find it hard to place a particular insurable value on those; but minimizing that risk obviously costs money.
How much that risk minimization is worth is a question that I can't answer.
I don't buy that. Process is CYA first and foremost. If something happens, you get to say, "We adhere to the strictest processes and best practices... blah, blah, blah."
Was there a lack of process in the space shuttle disasters? The flight 9525 crash? The Titanic?
You want safety? Get a third party (insurer, certification body, etc.) to assume responsibility (financial, legal, political, etc.) if anything goes wrong, regardless of the root cause. You might not get perfect safety, but you'll get responsibility, which is the next best thing.
Rigid processes are about diffusing responsibility, not taking it.
challanger: http://www.onlineethics.org/cms/12722.aspx http://www.engineering.com/Library/ArticlesPage/tabid/85/Art...
columbia: http://www.aero-news.net/index.cfm?do=main.textpost&id=9fe7f...
(notice that engineering requested hard photographic data to assess the damage, and her used gut feeling)
Well, as mgmt said, there was no evidence the O-rings were unsafe outside their operating limitations - because they'd never been tested at those temperatures before. I know, it's Twilight Zone material, but they found a hole in the launch rules (process) and ran with it. Previous O-ring failures had been within specs, so as far as they were concerned, it wasn't a temp issue, it was a known design flaw to be lived with.
> columbia
As for that article, pictures really didn't matter at that point so it wasn't "one decision." Rescue would have been a foolhardy venture more likely to kill both crews.
Columbia wasn't about mgmt, it was about engineering folks being placated by decades of success and making wrong assumptions about debris. There wasn't any workable solution anyway, it was a design flaw of the launch stack. The only solution was to never fly, and engineers weren't lined up to kill their own program.
Engineering knew pretty well that wasn't the case, and that is not how tolerance works.
Feynman in his reports goes a long way to list all the overrides management did and how much the whole shuttle program was built on wishful thinking.
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger...
Having been in the service I now see similar traits at my work and in the words of others as their place of work. For many the job is to get the task done and do so only through the established framework
1 year on ISS is launching on Soyuz in 40 minutes!
That sounds unbelievable to me, like one of those findings of issues that come out of a review that is given to parties that have done very little actually wrong --but something is needed as a sop so the other guy doesn't feel picked on. I cannot imagine that SpaceX went into a review expecting no issues or feedback, I can easily imagine them hitting the roof when a list of 400 issues came back.
Of course the system isn't perfect, and politics still plays a major in role in program funding. But it could be worse.
It's a difficult problem that only gets made more so as visibility and pressure on the project increase.
SpaceX is dramatically more vertically integrated as a company than the ULA (their competitor for government launches).
In EVERY instance of a company needing to get some sort of certification from the government for a job I've seen it's been so far from perfect that saying "system isn't perfect" isn't even a funny joke. It's HORRIBLY broken and results in incumbent companies getting contracts that they don't meet deadlines or budgets on yet continue to get new contracts because they are certified. Government procurement is total shit IMHO and needs to change badly. I don't even think "Well it take a long time (procurement processes) but it's safer/needed", from what I've seen it's not. It's a massive waste of time for everyone involved and does nothing to filter out the bad apples. It needs a massive overhaul so that we quit shoveling money into shit companies and start giving it to people who CAN do the job and do it well.
What's this about? Is there any substance to it? Or is it congress members upset the engines weren't bought from one of their buddies?
The basic summary is that yes, Russia has been supplying these engines and this wasn't a 'problem' until recent events (Ukraine etc.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180#2014_availability_concer...
Plus, if the Pentagon's goal is independence from a Russian supply chain, buying parts from Russia kind of works against that.
[1]: http://spacenews.com/40431court-bars-ula-from-buying-russian...
[2]: http://www.ulalaunch.com/preliminary-injunction-lifted--ula....
While NASA used to be almost all of their business, SpaceX now has quite a few commercial customers. In fact, it's been a long time since any US launcher was cost-competitive in the global market.
It's illegal for SpaceX to work with foreign governments or companies without State Department approval.
Perhaps they should re-domicile in a nice equatorial country, say, Guyana.
Since many generals leaving AirForce join the major firms as basically lobbyists, you can see where that's headed.
It's not REALLY the AirForce that's making it hard. It's the established space launch firms, using their newly hired lobbyists.
Why should the Air Force have any say in a company's organizational structure?
The Falcon 9 is already good enough for NASA cargo missions.
The air force has been dragging their feet through this whole process and their regulations seem to be created to be so narrow that only ULA (United Launch Alliance) is able to achieve certification.
I found this to be the most important point in the entire article because I'm sure the USAF is very "old guard" with a mentality of "if it isn't broken don't fix it" while on the other hand, SpaceX is the new kid on the block with the newest and coolest tech
Yesterdays article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269760 got me thinking, there were several newly registered users voicing doubts in American Democracy and showing support for Russsa (c_los, M8, ibi7) and now borgia is chipping in for Russian rocket engines.
You're looking for Russian trolls now, instead of considering the obvious, that Russian rocket engines have been the main way to send stuff into space for decades.
You personally linked the discussion of Russian rocket usage to Russian sock puppet accounts, instead of realizing that Americans have used russian rockets for a long time.
If you have nothing against RUSSIAN rocket engines (interesting that you called them "Soviet" engines when the USSR ended over 20 years ago) then why are over-eager to attribute discussion to them to Russian trolls and to describe them as "Soviet" (invoking Cold War era ideas) erroneously?
Astroturfing is a problem on the internet, but destroying civil discourse by smearing users you disagree with is no way to address it.