Beagle ... alas

Scott Lowther wrote:

Jeez. Just a few hours, and the probe has already surrendered.

How much of it was made in France?

It was British.




And how long before its loss is blamed on George Bush?


Blame it on Blair.


It's wrong that you are using this sad event to jump on your Freedom
Fries soap box. It smells bad.

--
Hop David
http://clowder.net/hop/index.html

amen curtis!

From the ESA website:

"The ESA project is also the start of an innovative way of developing
building
blocks for cheaper assembly of future European space missions. The
spacecraft
has been built and launched in record time and at a much lower cost than
previous, similar missions into outer space."

Henry Spencer wrote:
In article ,
joshua wrote:

Yes, FBC does not work. Spend the proper amount of money on missions
and TEST, TEST, TEST. When you are done testing, then test some more.
Then test a little more, and then test some more for the hell of it.


FBC works just fine. There is no contradiction between FBC and adequate
testing.

(And it's not like slower/worse/costlier has a conspicuously better track
record, especially at Mars...)

FBC seems almost inevitable so long as Moore's Law continues to hold.

Every year electronics become more powerful, less expensive, less
massive, less power hungry and take up less volume.



--
Hop David
http://clowder.net/hop/index.html

Kelly McDonald wrote:

However you make up for the failures with more projects.

Well, that's somewhat akin to selling something at a loss, and making
up the difference on volume. Flying ten cheap probes and loosing
three or four of them seems like a good idea, but what of the science
return?

D.
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Corrections, comments, and additions should be
e-mailed to , as well as posted to
sci.space.history and sci.space.shuttle for
discussion.

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.

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.

The correct statement is "faster, better, cheaper, same old management:
pick any three". Naturally, the same-old-management people like to shorten
that, on the assumption that there will never be a change in management.

To make FBC work, you have to do things *differently*. As rk perceptively
observed, "It's not the slogan, it's the execution." Proper execution is
almost impossible to do if the Same Old Management is in charge. You need
to build a new (sub-)organization, insulated from the failings of the old
one. Just chanting "faster, better, cheaper" every day, while doing the
same old things, is not enough.

(A big factor in the success of Mars Pathfinder and Sojourner was that the
Old Guard at JPL were convinced the mission would fail, so they stayed
away from it. A big factor in the failure of Mars Climate Observer, and
to a lesser extent in that of Mars Polar Lander, was that the Old Guard
enthusiastically climbed on board after the spectacular success of Mars
Pathfinder. NASA does FBC right only by accident.)

... _Complete_ testing of hardware and software should always be
considered an unavoidable overhead cost that is figured into the "C" portion
of the equation...

There is no such thing as "_complete_" testing. It is *always* necessary
to eventually call a halt to testing and fly the thing. Pretending
otherwise is dangerous self-delusion, which prevents discussions of the
tradeoffs and thus largely prevents rational decision-making about them.

There is always a balance between expenditure and risk, which will be
chosen differently for different missions. And never forget that there is
always some risk of surprises, of being blindsided from an area you judged
unimportant, so spending lots of money trying to drive risk to zero is
foolish. Once you have reduced known risks to a certain point, the
unknown risks dominate the problem, and further spending on reduction of
known risks buys almost no real improvement in mission reliability.

It's also important to remember that testing itself is not foolproof.
Galileo's atmosphere probe was tested in a centrifuge to ensure that its
G-switches worked. The test results were fine. But at Jupiter, the 20G
switch came on first, and the 5G switch second -- almost certainly, they
were wired backward *and so was the test harness*. The same thing
happened with ERS-1's magnetorquers. And these were cost-is-no-object
megaprojects.

Finally, schedule monthly reviews to ensure that the project is not
"wandering" away from the two goals that you have chosen.

Consider carefully just how much time is spent *preparing* for formal
reviews. A project which schedules them monthly almost certainly will
never get as far as flying anything, because its engineers will never have
time to do much real engineering.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

In article ,
Derek Lyons wrote:
However you make up for the failures with more projects.

Well, that's somewhat akin to selling something at a loss, and making
up the difference on volume. Flying ten cheap probes and loosing
three or four of them seems like a good idea, but what of the science
return?

What's the science return from one failed megaprobe? Megaprobes fail too,
remember. In fact, there is no actual evidence that FBC failure rates are
really significantly higher. That means that flying ten cheap probes is a
*whole* *lot* better than flying one expensive probe.

In the two decades before Mars Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor, the US
flew a total of one Mars mission -- the Mars Observer megaprobe, a
complete failure. In the seven years following, it's flown five, with two
humiliating failures and three spectacular successes (not counting the
MERs, the jury still being out on them). There's no question which
approach has given better science return.

There are examples of this going back to the dawn of the space age. Why
did Explorer fly before Vanguard? Ultimately, because Vanguard was a
megasat (by the standards of the day), loaded up with a whole bunch of
different experiments, and thus was too heavy to fly on a simple
derivative of existing rockets. The Vanguard launcher's first and second
stages were sold as being more or less a Viking and an Aerobee-Hi, but in
fact they had to be distant derivatives thereof, and their development was
long and painful. Why? Because although a launcher built with the
off-the-shelf rockets would have been available at least a year earlier,
it couldn't have orbited the Vanguard megasat. It could have orbited an
Explorer-class mission, but that wasn't good enough.

In the end, Vanguard's results were obscure and unimportant by comparison
to Explorer's, because three generations of faster/better/cheaper
Explorers flew before the Vanguard megasat did. The initial superiority
of Vanguard's instrument set was totally trumped by the way each Explorer
success led to improvements in the instruments for the next one. And yes,
this too has modern analogs: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was the result
of a major change of plans after the success of MGS's camera showed the
scientific importance of improved imaging.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

(Henry Spencer) writes:

In the two decades before Mars Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor, the US
flew a total of one Mars mission -- the Mars Observer megaprobe, a
complete failure.

Hey, they got one picture (at least). But yeah, complete failure is
accurate.

MO wasn't a megaprobe in the same way as some others, though, I think
you'll agree. In particular, they did try not to develop everything
from scratch. Like with Galileo's antenna and Contour's rocket, that
led to problems when the hardware was used outside its design envelope.
Interestingly, the Russians (Soviets), in at least some cases, have
developed hardware with an eye toward multiple missions: the RD-170
engine family was designed from the start to be reusable, restartable
multiple times in flight, and throttlable to ease launcher stress
(including flying humans). All this capability wasn't needed for years
after it first started flying on Zenit launchers, and some of it may
never get used (reusability seems least likely), but it's an impressive
engine and flying on two or three launchers (I don't know if Zenits
still fly, but Sea Launch and Atlas 5 do) today, and it powered
Energia's strapons too.

In the seven years following, it's flown five, with two
humiliating failures and three spectacular successes (not counting the
MERs, the jury still being out on them). There's no question which
approach has given better science return.

Really, the only other US megaprobes to Mars were the Viking missions,
both (with 4 spacecraft total) successes. I'd call the Mariners
something between FBC and a megaprobe, closer to the FBC side. Their
science return was very good to excellent, but only because they came in
pairs (3/4, 6/7, 8/9, with 3 and 8 total failures and the others
complete successes).

In article ,
says...
FBC seems almost inevitable so long as Moore's Law continues to hold.

?? A spacecraft is a lot more than just some chips.


Every year electronics become more powerful, less expensive, less
massive, less power hungry and take up less volume.

One corollary of Moore's Law that is well known within the software
industry: as the capabilities of computer hardware increase, the
difficulty of writing the software to exploite these capabilties
increases exponentially. A more powerful computers can be a liability as
it encourages a much more complex system with many more points of
failure.
--
Kevin Willoughby lid

Imagine that, a FROG ON-OFF switch, hardly the work
for test pilots. -- Mike Collins

In article ,
says...
Also, what do you get from these monthly reviews? Good reviews are
valuable (actually invaluable) but many reviews consist of people
coming in and seeing the information cold, sight reading it, and
then doing real-time analysis.

I can't count the number of times I've seen this in my own career. The
key is to get reviewers who take the task of reviewing seriously. (Hint:
a reviewer knows, deep in his bones, that the task is to to review the
work, not the worker -- if a reviewer ever personally attacks the
author, the reviewer should be educated or reassigned.)

Personally, I'm a big fan of a reviewer submitting his comments to the
review team by email several days in advance of the face-to-face
meeting. Most review comments are trivial. Some are as simple as
pointing out a grammatical or typographical error. Any reviewer who
wastes the time of a review team by pointing out these issues in
committee needs to learn more about how to review.
--
Kevin Willoughby lid

Imagine that, a FROG ON-OFF switch, hardly the work
for test pilots. -- Mike Collins

"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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