"John Doe" a écrit dans le message de news:
...
frédéric haessig wrote:
July launch has been known to be overly optimistic for quite some time.
Try October or November, IMO.... if all goes well.

Merci.

Do you know if there are known problems/issues with it ? Or is it just a
question of pleasing paperwork people , especially at NASA ?

A bit of both.

The qualification has revealed a few unforeseen problems ( that's what
testing is for, after all ) but all the ones I'm aware of ( which means all
on the docking - and refueling - system plus a bit on the rest of the
system ) required only changes in procedures or aditionnal analysis to
confirm that actual design margins were enough. There were talk to go
farther than that on a few points at the beginning of the year ( ie limited
SW changes ) but it has not proven necessary AFAIK.

Of course, there's always new requests on points which were not in the
original specifications and/or trying to sneak in new requirements ( aka
mission creep ) even as late as now ( and on a fixed cost contract )......


which have flown for decades ( like ADA ). Sometime, it feels like NASA
is using ATV to get knowledge on Progress and Soyouz ( or to discover
what NASA should have done with these in contingency cases ).

One of the articles I had read mentioned that the USA committes became more
weary after the NASA projects such as DART had failed. I guess there is
some logic to this. If NASA's quality assurance and testing failed to
prevent the DART failure, then those same standards and quality assurance
process would also not prevent failure of ATV.

Actually, I have seen this from three-four years ago, even before the DART
failure.

Not to mention that ATV quality assurance is under ESA standard, not NASA
and that ESA and the russian space agancy have much more input on ATV
testing than NASA.