Beagle ... alas

"rk" wrote in message
...
Henry Spencer wrote:

In article ,
Vincent D. DeSimone wrote:
(And it's not like slower/worse/costlier has a conspicuously
better track record, especially at Mars...)

I agree with your response, but there have been too many
examples brought up in this newsgroup, as well as the news
feeds, that FBC is just plain flawed.

The media is often way too simplistic. Do you feel that the concept
is flawed or the execution? Actually, if you read the Spear report,
you will find that part of the execution problem was that there was
no good definition of what FBC was, let alone a doctrine to
implement. I think doctrine is the right word there. Now, I know
this was dicussed in this newsgroup for quite a looooooong time.


Which are those? Mars Pathfinder? Mars Global Surveyor?
Clementine? Lunar Prospector? Mars Odyssey? NEAR? Chipsat?
MOST? Mars Express?

My belief that the opinion voiced earlier this year that you
can get get two of these options by only sacrificing the third,
is the way to go. It was called "FBC: Pick 2". I like to
rhyme it by saying "FBC: 2 Out Of 3".

That's certainly the party line among the dinosaurs of the
space business. And for *them*, it's true: you cannot get a
mammal by putting a dinosaur on a starvation diet.

And you can not move from a dinosaur to a mammal, or more precisely
an intelligent manual without doing the most important thing: think.
There are no shortage of engineers in industry who do things because
"that's the way they've always been done" irregardless of how
technology or missions change.

I used to be a security guard at a sewage plant- and there were far more
interesting things going on than that describes- and on the rare break I wou
ld peruse the environmental engineering magazines. One whose name escapes me
after all these years had a regular column: "Boneheaded Engineering".
Although the column limited itself to examples in the environmental world,
the same people that populated the column exist in NASA, and no doubt Copy
Boy chats with them regularly. The one example of boneheaded engineering
that stands out was a moron who decided to use 4 u-joints, each at 90
degrees, on a drive shaft from a motor to a pump to get around an existing
pipe (there were good reasons, explained in the article, why the motor had
to go where it did and why the existing pipe couldn't be moved). Without any
engineering training whatsoever at the time, even I was able to figure out
an immediately better solution (place the motor on a tower to raise it, use
3 u-joints, which, since the motor was on a tower, the drive shaft is much
longer and the angles would be much shallower). I'm certain there are even
better solutions. How this managed to get past the inspectors is a different
matter. Needless to say, the motor couldn't possibly have enough torque to
work, because if it did, the materials of the drive shaft would come apart.
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