get it straight

Comment Threads

• FormerObamanaut commented on Ares: Obsolete, and Cancelled, Prior to Birth
  @warp: "...institutional inefficiencies..." bunch-o-theoretical-overedgeycated-perpetualstudent-hooey! current NASA hsf practices are why the bigillion things that can go wrong - like "forgetting to send a command ala SpaceX" - don't happen in hsf JO5H & moonman are correct: "Anyone looking clearly at the situation as far back as 2006 knew that Ares I would never fly. When Dr. Griffin said "Apollo on Steroids" it was obvious that NASA had just pulled another "SEI"." You are wrong. NASA's budget has been quite stable, and even Constellation received most of the funds it was promised. Griffin got a lot of them by raiding other...

• BrianM commented on Ares: Obsolete, and Cancelled, Prior to Birth
  Well said, very accurate....

• warp commented on Ares: Obsolete, and Cancelled, Prior to Birth
  Of course, I'm not talking about NASA being inefficient in that sense. Though I'd point out that there's a Shuttle sitting on the pad right now with an OMS HE2 Iso valve problem that was detected before roll-out, but where the paperwork process delayed mitigation/debug before the bird was on the pad, it was too late to fix. And now an orbiter will need to work in orbit with less margin. A potentially more worrying than a benign spin-start issue on the first true hotfire pad test of a new bird caused by a pad-specific software issue. Complex systems have...

• possum commented on Ares: Obsolete, and Cancelled, Prior to Birth
  moonman, you are absolutely correct. I work for NASA at KSC on CxP and saw the horrific program management and systems engineering on this program. It was doomed to failure from the outset, mainly because Griffin highjacked ESAS and chose his personal architecture. I truly don't believe that NASA is capable of this type of development anymore because decisions are made for personal or political reasons. Had we chose to clearly define requirements, flow them down properly, and trade off concepts and choose an architecture that was requirements-driven, then maybe we could have had a chance. It's not that there...

• hikingmike commented on Ares: Obsolete, and Cancelled, Prior to Birth
  Now that annoys me. How can that steel tower cost $500 million? If that costs $500 million, what does the VAB cost (if build today)??? Ok it's more than just a steel tower (even with Ares V capability), but come on, don't skyscraper buildings have more steel than that and a whole lot more and cost less? "The total cost for the Burj Khalifa (aka Burj Dubai) project was about US$1.5 billion." This building - if you call it that - is only 3 times the cost of the steel tower. Want to compare photos? - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Burj_Khalifa.jpg They had cheap...