Saturday, February 22, 2003

NASA Is Held Down by Its Own Bureaucracy NASA Is Held Down by Its Own Bureaucracy http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/18/national/nationalspecial/18EROD.html February 18, 2003 NASA Is Held Down by Its Own Bureaucracy By JAMES GLANZ his article was reported by James Glanz, Edward Wong and William J. Broad and was written by Mr. Glanz. In the early morning hours of Feb. 1, 1958, William Pickering, director of the laboratory that had assembled America's answer to Sputnik, was waiting for word from a tracking station in California that the craft, the nation's first satellite, had gone around the Earth exactly once. Two scientists waited with him in a Pentagon office — Wernher von Braun, the former chief rocketeer for the Nazis who had become a leading American rocket innovator, and James Van Allen, a brilliant young astronomer. It had taken them just three months to match the Soviet Union's shocking achievement by firing a four-stage rocket jammed with sensing equipment into space. When the word finally came — "It is in orbit," Dr. Pickering said — the men were rushed to Washington, where they greeted reporters by lifting a model of the rocket over their heads like a trophy. The nation was electrified, the space race had begun, and Dr. Van Allen's instruments would revolutionize scientific understanding of Earth and the solar system. Within months, Congress declared that the space effort would be led by a new federal entity, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It was the kind of triumph that, many scientists say, today's NASA — with a declining technical base, an eroding pool of scientific and engineering talent and ever fewer patents and notable research papers — would not be able to match. For more than three decades, NASA defied all reasonable odds as it grew into a multibillion-dollar bureaucracy with tens of thousands of managers, scientists, engineers and technicians, yet somehow remained true to the intoxicating audacity and technical mastery that gave it life. NASA's young innovators did not just land men on the moon and explore the solar system, dropping probes onto Venus, Mars and Jupiter and visiting all the outer planets but Pluto. Together, they assembled and maintained a remarkable repository of technical and scientific talent. Today, though, NASA is dominated not by scientists and engineers who think big but by technical managers who rely largely on outside contractors who have themselves been rocked by consolidation, layoffs and lean economic times. As a result, NASA researchers are producing vastly fewer patents than they did in earlier years, and there has been a recent falloff in papers as well. Other scientists, many of whom questioned the value of the shuttle program from the start, are now surprised at the lack of scientific sophistication displayed by the NASA engineers charged with explaining the Columbia disaster publicly. A Changed Culture snip ---------> You may find this and interesting 4 section article. - LRK - 5:27:01 PM    comment []

More links Thanks again for the links MS Pioneer 10 Still Beats But No Lock http://www.spacedaily.com/news/pioneer10-03a.html One may want to watch the Pioneer 10 stats page.  We have had one more track since then and will report when press release clears. - LRK -  http://spaceprojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects/pioneer/PNStat.html Russia asks Europeans to help fund space station participation http://www.spacedaily.com/2003/030220165715.0s23u3mo.html Russia asks Europeans to help fund space station participation MOSCOW (AFP) Feb 20, 2003 Russia said Thursday it has appealed to the European Space Agency (ESA) to help fund the construction of new cargo vessels to the International Space Station after the suspension of US shuttle flights in the wake of the Columbia disaster. snip ----------- Will be interesting to see who wants to help keep the ISS going. - LRK - DOD Space Chief Outlines Priorities http://www.spacedaily.com/news/milspace-03a.html DOD Space Chief Outlines Priorities by Master Sgt. Scott Elliott for Air Force News Chantilly - Feb 20, 2003 Things are going well for the national security space program, but America needs a roadmap to ensure future success, the Defense Department's executive agent for space said Feb. 12. Peter B. Teets, undersecretary of the Air Force and director of the National Reconnaissance Office, discussed the country's top national security space priorities at a media roundtable conference at the NRO headquarters here. "Any discussion of priorities needs to start with the notion of ensuring mission success in space operations," he said. "Our space assets are now probably more important to warfighters, more important to our ability to win the global war on terrorism than they ever have been." snip -------------------- I think I would rather see EELVs used to launch us into space to build something useful all of mankind. - LRK - More Than One Piece of Debris Hit Shuttle at Liftoff http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/22/national/nationalspecial2/22SHUT.html?pagewanted=print&;position=top February 22, 2003 More Than One Piece of Debris Hit Shuttle at Liftoff By WILLIAM J. BROAD and KENNETH CHANG uring Columbia's liftoff, not one but three chunks of debris flew off the 15-story external fuel tank and hit the shuttle's left wing, according to a document NASA made public yesterday. Previously, the public inquiry into what caused the craft to break up on re-entry focused only on the largest chunk. The document, dated Jan. 24, is the third in a series of reports that analysts at Boeing, a major shuttle contractor, prepared to help NASA judge if the debris had endangered the shuttle and its crew of seven astronauts. The first report talked of "a large piece of debris," not three. All three reports, completed while Columbia was in orbit, reassured NASA that any damage from the debris would not threaten the flight. Officials of the space agency initially discounted speculation that debris damage could have been responsible for the shuttle's disintegration on Feb. 1. But the theory regained prominence this week as a panel independent of NASA has looked into possible causes of the disaster. NASA officials said yesterday that the new Boeing report was part of a number of documents being released slowly in response to Freedom of Information Act requests from journalists and others. NASA previously released the two other Boeing reports, dated Jan. 21 and Jan. 23, as early damage assessments. The increase to three chunks of debris in the Jan. 24 report, officials said, grew out of an evolution in the team's analysis and understanding of the liftoff videos. The cameras showed that some 80 seconds after Columbia blasted off on Jan. 16, debris struck the orbiter's left wing. Small teams of NASA engineers and the shuttle program's contractors calculated that the debris hit the wing's underside at about 500 miles an hour, smashing into fragile tiles that protected Columbia from searing heat. A small team of Boeing engineers in Houston was formed to evaluate the danger, using computer models to predict where the debris hit and the possible damage to thousands of tiles meant to shield the shuttle's belly from fiery heat during re-entry to the earth's atmosphere. The newly released report was by Carlos Ortiz, leader of the Jan. 21 analysis by five Boeing experts. It said the debris originated from the area of the fuel tank known as the bipod, where two large struts connect the shuttle and its external tank, or E.T. "Multiple pieces of debris were seen emanating from the E.T. bipod area and later seen impacting the orbiter lower surface," Mr. Ortiz said in the report. "Three pieces of debris were observed." The document, "Debris Transport Assessment of Debris Impacting Orbiter Lower Surface in STS-107 Mission," focused on just one chunk, the largest. It gave three estimates for its size — 20 by 16 by 6 inches, 20 by 10 by 6 inches, and 20 by 10 by 2 inches. Hinting at the continuing nature of the analysis, the report noted, "Film review continuing to better define impact area." SNIP -------------------------->  Will watch and see what the comes of the whole story.  Any ideas on how to better get to space? - LRK - 10:03:08 AM    comment []

Stuart's Event - NASA Solves Half-Century Old Moon Mystery ...congrats to all involved in the detective work!...good to see Clementine and even Lunar Orbiter mentioned again...q: what format are the LO images archived...negatives, digital,...?...do you suppose 50 years from now LunPros data will still be relevant? J Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas... Virgil =================================================================== Thanks John I hope you don't mind that I post your question and this response to the Larry Kellogg Radio Weblog http://radio.weblogs.com/0119030/ First LunPros data: I hope so. The Level 0 data is posted at the Planetary Data System and available on CD but requires and understanding of the data structure and is essentially raw data. http://wufs.wustl.edu/missions/lunarp/ Level 1 data for the spectrometers has been normalized by Dr. Feldman's folks at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The same kind of instruments are the ones saying we have water on Mars. http://www.lanl.gov/worldview/news/releases/archive/02-019.shtml For the Lunar Orbiters - Pictures were taken on the spacecraft, developed on the spacecraft and then read and sent back digitally. - LRK - Some links and snips below: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2003/23.cfm NASA Solves Half-Century Old Moon Mystery February 20, 2003 http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lpi/resources.shtml  Lunar Atlases http://www.lpi.usra.edu/research/la_home.html Lunar Orbiter Atlas of the Moon, Consolidated Lunar Atlas, and Apollo Image Atlas http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarorb.html Lunar Orbiter (1966 - 1967) Five Lunar Orbiter missions were launched in 1966 through 1967 with the purpose of mapping the lunar surface before the Apollo landings. All five missions were successful, and 99% of the Moon was photographed with a resolution of 60 m or better. The first three missions were dedicated to imaging 20 potential lunar landing sites, selected based on Earth-based observations. These were flown at low inclination orbits. The fourth and fifth missions were devoted to broader scientific objectives and were flown in high altitude polar orbits. Lunar Orbiter 4 photographed the entire nearside and 95% of the farside, and Lunar Orbiter 5 completed the farside coverage and acquired medium (20 m) and high (2 m) resolution images of 36 pre-selected areas. The images at the top of the page show the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft with the high and medium resolution cameras at the center, and an image of the crater Tycho taken with the Lunar Orbiter 5 medium resolution -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For detailed information on the experiments and data sets held at NSSDC, click on the mission name. Lunar Orbiter 1 http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarorb1data.html Launched 10 August 1966 Imaged Moon: 18-29 August 1966 Apollo landing site survey mission Lunar Orbiter 2 http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarorb2data.html Launched 06 November 1966 Imaged Moon: 18-25 November 1966 Apollo landing site survey mission Lunar Orbiter 3 http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarorb3data.html Launched 05 February 1967 Imaged Moon: 15-23 February 1967 Apollo landing site survey mission Lunar Orbiter 4 http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarorb4data.html Launched 04 May 1967 Imaged Moon: 11-26 May 1967 Lunar mapping mission Lunar Orbiter 5 http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarorb5data.html Launched 01 August 1967 Imaged Moon: 06-18 August 1967 Lunar mapping and hi-res survey mission -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Lunar Orbiters had an ingenious imaging system, which consisted of a dual-lens camera, a film processing unit, a readout scanner, and a film handling apparatus. Both lenses, a 610-mm narrow angle high-resolution (HR) lens and an 80-mm wide-angle medium resolution (MR) lens, placed their frame exposures on a single roll of 70 mm film. The axes of the two cameras were coincident so the area imaged in the HR frames were centered within the MR frame areas. The film was moved during exposure to compensate for the spacecraft velocity, which was estimated by an electric-optical sensor. The film was then processed, scanned, and the images transmitted back to Earth. 9:07:23 AM    comment []

OSP requirements Dr. Kellogg, I have been receiving your Lunar-Update newsletter for some time now, and am generally very pleased to be getting it - I love to hear about innovations and discoveries in space and space science. But - the Orbital Space Plane is entirely uninspiring. NASA has been flying the boondoggle which is the STS for at least fifteen years too long - I call it that because it carries a maximum of seven people and twenty tons of cargo to LEO, which is unsatisfactory as a people mover, and a distinct step back from our heavy lift capabilities of the early 70's. The OSP seems to be even worse - seven people, no appreciable cargo, and the exact same losing formula of vertical ELV launch and horizontal glide-in landing. Making matters worse is the apparent absence for a heavy lift vehicle of any type - while NASA received practical recommendations to use the STS launch stack without the orbiter to launch 100 ton payloads to LEO as long ago as the 1990's. I love the idea of colonizing space NOW, and think that much significant work (Gerald O'Neills - not the white elephant ISS) has been done to make it possible. I agree wholeheartedly that improved access to space is crucial to this goal, but NASAs track record in developing new launch systems in the past twenty years has been perfect - they have canceled every single program. I hate to bury my head in the sand, but please - can we NOT hear about the OSP? Thanks, Joe. 8:12:30 AM    comment []