Heard too much and need to vent.

John Ordover wrote:
And of course there is water on the Moon if the science data is
correct, which is worth more than anything.


That is probably one of the more valuable items on the Moon

I am unclear how. Who, exactly, would you sell Moon water to? The
only place with customers has plenty of water of its own.

I dunno.
I'd pay $10 or so, for a lunar icecube.

Though that is only around $1/g

--
http://inquisitor.i.am/ | | Ian Stirling.
---------------------------+-------------------------+--------------------------
He who lives in a glass house should not invite he who is without sin.

On Sat, 26 Jul 2003 12:38:12 GMT, "Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)"
wrote:

"Cardman" wrote in message
.. .

Wow I am surprised how both the news sources and even documentary
people got it wrong then.

Let's just say it's easier to say, "the O-Ring failed" than a long drawn out
more accurate explanation.

And yet just saying that the O-Ring failed does not provide a valid
picture of what happened. As launching in too cold weather is just a
simple human mistake / management failure, but to ignore a long
history of putty failure falls close to unforgivable.

That still seems not how it should be, when there was then two
failures in this flight. So why did the putty fail on this flight and
not previous flights? Or did it and the O-Rings were just working
correctly in those cases?

Correct. Other flights showed O-ring burn thru, but not a complete
burn-thru. NASA basically screwed up by not fixing the root cause earlier.

And an extremely serious charge if you ask me, when based upon these
earlier results it is clear what could happen. As such a failure, even
at a different point, could still damage the ET.

I'd suggest reading the Rogers Commission report:
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/...-contents.html

Well I did think it an overkill, when I can already begin to see what
happened, but I got into it and read it all anyway.

And the appendix written by Richard Feynman.

Yes, SSMEs like cracks.

Why do I have a feeling that he missed out the thought that the time
between a crack developing to a flaw depends on *material properties*
given a small error margin.

Also his conclusion seems a little lacking in supporting facts.

And that sounds like a lot of failure to make you start to wonder if
someone stuck a screwdriver in it. I guess not though.

Nope, just poor design that was ignored on several previous flight.

Had such a thing been done in my country by a corporation, when the
managers would soon find themselves in court charged with "corporate
manslaughter".

but there was no detonating explosion, and the tanks did not
explode they merely broke up / fell apart.

Yes with fire and smoke all over the place.

Note there is a technical definition of explosion vs that of conflagaration.
In the technical sense it was not an explosion.

Well even this report used "massive, almost explosive" in its
description, then quite happily used the likes of "explosive burn"
later on.

And uncontrolled event like this counts as an explosion in my books.

This being a sci. group we
tend to use the technical terms more than the "general" terms.

I see.

That I find a bit unexpected, when I would have thought that it would
be a little more tolerant to such a change. Sure not a lot of change,
but there was very little time involved to do much.

Keep in mind the airstream at that point was above I believe Mach 5.

The report quotes 46,000 feet traveling at Mach 1.92.

Now look what happens when you give me facts... :-]

No aircraft yet designed can take this in a non-design orientation: ie. in
this case belly forward.

All well and nice, but your conclusion also does not match the
official report.

As immediately following this fuel and oxidizer mix (within the ET),
according to the report, the still whole Challenger was, as I quote,
"totally enveloped in the explosive burn".

Further more, as I also quote, "The Challenger's reaction control
system ruptured and a hypergolic burn of its propellants occurred as
it exited the oxygen-hydrogen flames" and "The reddish brown colors of
the hypergolic fuel burn are visible on the edge of the main
fireball".

That to me sounds very much like saying that the Challanger's airframe
had been damaged before it did the Mach 1.92 high speed turn.

So in the end both Challenger and Columbia went the same way, which is
failure of the air frame at hypersonic speed.

That is what destroyed the airframe, yes. What led to that obviously is
fairly different in either case.

Certainly, but the Shuttle won't take much abuse before it is game
over.

Does this not sound like a good case for a capsule design? As being
more rounded provides greater strength. If such a capsule could
survive a quick turn at hypersonic speed I don't know, but I could
foresee that it may.

That's on possible argument, yes.

Then I will add it to my "1001 reasons why a capsule is better than a
plane for the OSP project".

In fact as I have reached my own conclusion now, then I would
seriously question any NASA desire to use wings and wheels.

So did they survive the initial break-up or not?

Yes. PEAP (Personal Egress Air Packs) had been activated by the crew.

That would take a few seconds I presume.

However, as they are only air, not O2 and the face mask wasn't sealed (i.e.

I find it a bit odd if they could activate their PEAP, but could not
seal their face make. When again this should only take seconds.

Also I would have thought that they would have gone up with sealed
face marks, just in case of decompression. After all hitting a high
flying bird would not be good.

it could not deliver air above ambient pressure) they would have blacked out
very quickly at the cabin soared to over 100,000 ft.

Now I am not an expert in these matters, but I cannot see how an
unaerodynamic piece of broken Shuttle could travel another 54,000 feet
unpowered given the Mach 1.92 initial boost.

It seems to me that the more likely event is that the hypersonic
airflow would cause this Shuttle section to slow its upwards assent
very quickly.

Had that happened, then I could foresee a blackout either due to this
sudden high energy slowing. Then the final option would be if they
quickly slowed in a forwards direction, then they would encounter
serious issues with their seat constraints.

Still, as this can be all calculated, then maybe I will see about
doing so.

Whether they regained consciousness before hitting the ocean is unknown.

That can also be calculated.

Well news sources reported tapes and they are usually reliable enough
to confirm it with NASA first. They usually start with the likes of "A
NASA spokes person said earlier today...".

All recording stopped at the time of loss of cabin power.

Certainly, when these reporting devices would be flying in different
directions.

There is a hoax that Weekly World News ran years ago claiming to be a
recording from Christa McAuliffe's personal tape recorder, but as the person
who basically wrote the hoax has admitted it, it's a known hoax.

Well I never heard about that.

Since, I have a good memory, then this was a news report on how these
astronauts could well have survived this initial break-up. Where sure
enough they mentioned cabin tapes and how NASA had locked them away.

As mentioned such news organizations like to confirm their stories
first.

Elsewhere? Certainly they should be somewhere near where all the
electronic equipment is.

No, since the reactants are stored near the tail of the cargo bay.

Then they had better hope that this point never gets damaged, when
losing all power would not be good. I guess that they were more
concerned with powering the SSMEs.

Also I would have thought that flight recording black box hardware and
even video in the cabin, would have had a backup power. After all it
is their job to study the break-up as it happens in such a worse case
situation.

There is no black-box on the shuttle. It's not a commercial aircraft.

Yes, I am aware of that fact...

Sure, NASA receives all this data on the ground, but this is no good
when the communication stops during a break-up. As the only thing left
to record the final seconds is the in-flight recorder.

For example with the Columbia they were suffering severe communication
problems later on, which means for example that you will never know
what they were discussing during these blackouts.

Then had there been an in-flight recorder, then maybe that would have
made this investigation easier.

So I can certainly see how one could be useful.

When it broke up, the power failed completely.

Yes, but it would have been recording up to that point.

Yes, and they have data up to that point.

And yet, when it broke, these large sections would have continued on
to break up even more. So although I heard that NASA had about 30
seconds of garbled data after communications failed, but I expect that
there was more to be had.

Anyway, I would be very surprised if they was no video recording at
all from the cabin during this flight.

Then be surprised.

And there I was thinking that not only does NASA like to talk to their
Astronauts, but they like to see them as well.

I am surprised though.

Cardman.

On Sat, 26 Jul 2003 06:10:29 -0600, Charles Buckley
wrote:

Cardman wrote:

Yes, but each engine you add also increases your possibility of an
engine failure.

1 engine = 100 flights.
2 engines = 50 flights.
3 engines = 33 flights.
4 engines = 25 flights.
5 engines = 20 flights.

Which is why they don't fly any given engine out that far.

Yes, I can see.

Still, the likes of the SSME inspections looking for cracks is a
sizable overhead.

Maybe one day they can get more reliable and just give their future
engines a quick browse over. Not unlike an airplane engine I guess,
but then it would have to be really reliable and well understood.

If you have a MTBF of 100 flights, you generally would rotate
out those engines at some prescribed number of flights
lower than that amount. For something with lower levels of redundancy,
you would cycle them out at a much lower percentage of life.
So, if your MTBF is 100 flights. you would cycle out at 80% (as
an example) for something with little, or no, redundancy.

All well and nice, but these engines tend to spring up surprises,
which is why they give these SSMEs a very good check.

But, you would use the same part out to 95% of it's life in
something non-critical.

If only failure could be predicted so well...

Also with a five engine system you would suffer the loss of two
engines each 400 flights. Not to mention that you can suffer unnatural
failure as well.

No. That's a linear equation only if you use the same engines out to
their MTBF limit.

Well actually I was also thinking along the lines of these use once
and throw away engines, when they won't all start that first time.

Very true, but these new high reliability engines are tempting to
design a rocket to go on.

new engines? Has someone come up with a reliable engine that is
not based on 40 year old tech?

No, but new materials like for anti-coking goes to improve
reliability. Keeping it simple and yet well designed seems to be a
good model for a rocket engine these days.

Well the space shuttle made it to orbit after losing one engine late
into the flight.

It was already there, for all intents.

I see.

So why does NASA now buy their hardware from very expensive space
companies like boing? As I cannot see how they can charge $56 million
an engine if they are cloning them one after the other.

Highly technical yes, but still sounds too much.

And your point is?

That NASA's suppliers need to be in a competitive market including
price competition. Maybe space has not gone that far yet, but this is
all adding a couple of extra zeros to the price tag.

Seriously.. You can write down right now the names of companies
that NASA looks to on a matchbook. And have room left over for three
email addresses, an application for an art school, and that one phone
number that is really important to you..

Then that explains where a large chunk of NASA's budget goes to, but
hey congress is always willing to cough up more.

Cardman.

On Sat, 26 Jul 2003 12:45:12 GMT, "Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)"
wrote:


"Cardman" wrote in message
.. .

So how does the SRBs affect all this? When I am starting to feel that
I should start counting the Shuttle as a five engine system. After all
it is aimed to only make orbit just about using all it has including
the SRBs.

Don't go there.

Ok...

Loss of thrust on either SRB (such as failure to ignite) is
a "Bad Day". i.e. non-survivable.

I don't see how you can be so hard on the SRBs, when apart from that
design fault glitch, then they have always worked perfectly

Personally I would prefer to put my hands in a simple and well
understood chemical reaction, when you light them and off you go.

The SSMEs on the other hand, which have had a couple of close misses
already, could well fail far more often due to their complex and high
performance design.

So as long as they know how to correctly make their solid rocket fuel,
then I am perfectly happy with them. Sure you would like to be able to
ditch them in an emergency situation and turn these things on and off,
but that is just a design thing.

As to lighting them, then it is not like they are holding a mitch to
them in a strong wind trying to get them to light. So of course they
will light, when the whole launch system aims to make that happen
without question.

And yes if one did ever not light, not that this is going to happen in
a million launches, then sure it would be time to write off another
Shuttle.

Cardman.

On Sat, 26 Jul 2003 12:42:21 GMT, "Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)"
wrote:

Actually there are at this time no known major concentrations of ore on the
Moon.

Not that I doubt that it has ever been looked down far very far.

Any sizable meteorite impact breaks up the meteorite and distributes
it fairly evenly.

Worst case scenario then would be to get yourself a real metal rich
asteroid, but I cannot see that mining the moon would be as useless as
you believe.

Secondly, study basic economics. If you saturated the world market with say
1000 tons of gold, the price would drop so much that you'd be losing money.

Well of course if you sold it all at one time it would, but doing so
slowly over time and though different sources would keep the price
reasonable.

And well if you are getting this stuff on the cheap, then that price
would have to go really low to not make it worth it.

Also you should not just work on Gold, when by mining many of the
other metals would produce worthwhile funds, which would ease up on
the Gold market.

We should also not forget that we only need a few tens or hundreds of
billions to fund our space programme, where you can save the rest and
just sell it as and when needed.

In all one of the best things to do is to turn out your own ingots and
to pay people in Gold. As one of the first things that I would buy
with my wealth is an entire country on this planet.

Accept Gold do you?

And of course there is water on the Moon if the science data is
correct, which is worth more than anything.

That is probably one of the more valuable items on the Moon

Yes for humans, air and rocket fuel.

Well we can always claim it all, bottle it and them sell it to the
Chinese astronauts. ;-]

Anyway, yes this water is important to my moon base plan.

So if they don't want to go to the Moon and become as rich as
anything, then they are obviously crazy.

Or they understand the economics better than you do.

I understand economics, where you can indeed get lots of funding out
of it.

Also China will be on the Moon one day soon, where not only will they
steal your He3, but they will get all these valuable asteroids as
well.

I wouldn't hold my breath for the Chinese. They've been planning on
orbiting a human for 20 years now.

Yes, where they have only got serious in recent years. And this is
only costing them about $2 billion I recall.

Looks like they might actually do it.

Yes, only about 3 months away now.

What is most interesting is that no matter how much funding congress
puts into NASA in the future, they won't beat the Chinese. Cheap asian
labour, communism, the brute force approach and certainly the desire
to do it.

If the Chinese builds the infrastructure, then so will you Americans
pay them to ride it.

Well there is always the space elevator, but then China will get their
own one and still beat you in space.

As we went from orbiting a person to landing them on the Moon in less than
10 years and their manned space program is well over 20 years old,

Yes, but your rocket technology also came from WWII, which means that
you took around 15 years to develop it.

And Russia was laughing at you from orbit all the time that your
rockets were going bang. Remember?

at this rate I suspect they'll be landing on a man on the Moon by
say 2203. :-)

Laugh all you want, but you may want to catch up on your Chinese
language course. Still as long as you can say "oh glorious masters
please give me a space job" in chinese, then you should get by. ;-]

And I am willing to bet you now that the Chinese will have a Moon Base
before you do. And the first person on Mars will be Chinese.

Hell if I had the money to form my own space organization, then I
would be off to the Moon in no time to claim my fortune. Even have a
throne of diamonds and call myself the Moon King. ;-]

Go for it.

So got a few billion to spare? :-]

Trust me, I could make it work.

Trust me, most folks here would be thrilled to go to the Moon. But we also
know the unfortunate reality of the economics.

Then maybe you should learn the imperial might of communism instead?

Cardman.

On Sun, 27 Jul 2003 01:55:55 +0100, in a place far, far away, Cardman
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:


What is most interesting is that no matter how much funding congress
puts into NASA in the future, they won't beat the Chinese.

No, NASA won't, but the Americans will. Capitalism beats socialism
every time.

--
simberg.interglobal.org * 310 372-7963 (CA) 307 739-1296 (Jackson Hole)
interglobal space lines * 307 733-1715 (Fax) http://www.interglobal.org

"Extraordinary launch vehicles require extraordinary markets..."
Swap the first . and @ and throw out the ".trash" to email me.
Here's my email address for autospammers:

"Cardman" wrote in message
...

Certainly, where putting people on the Moon and Mars can make the
global population feel a bit more happy, which as a result can provide
great improvement in the economy.

Yeah, the US economy boomed after July 1969. People were ecstatic. They
were beating down the gates of the White House demanding more trips to the
Moon.

Oh wait...

"Cardman" wrote in message
...

Loss of thrust on either SRB (such as failure to ignite) is
a "Bad Day". i.e. non-survivable.

I don't see how you can be so hard on the SRBs, when apart from that
design fault glitch, then they have always worked perfectly

"Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln."

Large SRB's have about a 1-2% catastrophic failure rate.

While simple, when they fail, it tends to be catastrophic.


Personally I would prefer to put my hands in a simple and well
understood chemical reaction, when you light them and off you go.

The SSMEs on the other hand, which have had a couple of close misses
already, could well fail far more often due to their complex and high
performance design.

Possibly. But they can also fail more gracefully. The SSMEs on Challenger
began an orderly shutdown due to fuel starvation.



So as long as they know how to correctly make their solid rocket fuel,
then I am perfectly happy with them. Sure you would like to be able to
ditch them in an emergency situation and turn these things on and off,
but that is just a design thing.

"just a design thing." Pretty big "design thing". Some early designs for
the SRBs for the Shuttle did include thrust termination ports. It was
determined the sudden decrease in thrust would rip the stack apart. Not a
great design.


As to lighting them, then it is not like they are holding a mitch to
them in a strong wind trying to get them to light. So of course they
will light, when the whole launch system aims to make that happen
without question.


True. It's an extremely reliable and at least doubly redundant design they
have.

And yes if one did ever not light, not that this is going to happen in
a million launches, then sure it would be time to write off another
Shuttle.

"Not that this is going to happen in a million launches... " Not that foam
block could damage RCC...

It's a design issue. Perhaps one that folks are willing to live with. But
a design issue nonetheless and can not be treated cavalierly.

Cardman.

Paul F. Dietz wrote:
Charles Buckley wrote:

Which is why they don't fly any given engine out that far.
If you have a MTBF of 100 flights, you generally would rotate
out those engines at some prescribed number of flights
lower than that amount.


By this reasoning, discarding the engines after just one use
would make the engines extremely reliable. However, many failures
occur early in the life of a device ('infant mortality'), not
later.

Paul




Nonsense. He was implying leaving the engines in for the whole
life. You cut out the part where I specified a 80% or 95% of
projected life cycle of the engine. There is a blip early in
the cycle as you state. But, the only point you can be *sure* that
the engine will likely fail is when you start hitting it's
end-of-life.

You read way to much into whatever you were wanting to read into
the post. It states rotating out engines based upon a set formula.
That is standard practice in aviation.

Cardman wrote:
On Sat, 26 Jul 2003 06:10:29 -0600, Charles Buckley
wrote:


Cardman wrote:


Yes, but each engine you add also increases your possibility of an
engine failure.

1 engine = 100 flights.
2 engines = 50 flights.
3 engines = 33 flights.
4 engines = 25 flights.
5 engines = 20 flights.

Which is why they don't fly any given engine out that far.


Yes, I can see.

Still, the likes of the SSME inspections looking for cracks is a
sizable overhead.

Maybe one day they can get more reliable and just give their future
engines a quick browse over. Not unlike an airplane engine I guess,
but then it would have to be really reliable and well understood.



Not really. The SSME's fail one major core design flaw. They are at
the edge of the materials properties. The best way to improve
reliability is to never really challenge the material's core properties.
If it fails at 3000 degrees, stay at a lower temp. If it fails at a
certain chamber pressure, stay away from that pressure.

With the SSME's, their superficial design flaws tend to obscure their
fundamental design flaws.


If you have a MTBF of 100 flights, you generally would rotate
out those engines at some prescribed number of flights
lower than that amount. For something with lower levels of redundancy,
you would cycle them out at a much lower percentage of life.
So, if your MTBF is 100 flights. you would cycle out at 80% (as
an example) for something with little, or no, redundancy.


All well and nice, but these engines tend to spring up surprises,
which is why they give these SSMEs a very good check.


Definately inspect, but if you have an engine like the RL-10, you
usually have an engine that can essentially run indefinately. I think
the longest burn on an RL-10 was something like 45 minutes and
ceased because they ran out of fuel for the test stand as opposed
to the engine having problems.


But, you would use the same part out to 95% of it's life in
something non-critical.


If only failure could be predicted so well...



Every part has a projected design life. Standard aviation practice
to pull an engine after a certain amount of hours. I see no real
reason why such a procedure would not be used here.

Also with a five engine system you would suffer the loss of two
engines each 400 flights. Not to mention that you can suffer unnatural
failure as well.

No. That's a linear equation only if you use the same engines out to
their MTBF limit.


Well actually I was also thinking along the lines of these use once
and throw away engines, when they won't all start that first time.



Well, use-once gains you nothing. You are more likely to encounter
manufacturing issues if you have a lot of engines cycle through.


Very true, but these new high reliability engines are tempting to
design a rocket to go on.

new engines? Has someone come up with a reliable engine that is
not based on 40 year old tech?


No, but new materials like for anti-coking goes to improve
reliability. Keeping it simple and yet well designed seems to be a
good model for a rocket engine these days.



Not really. Essentially they are spending a lot of money to re-invent
the wheel for the most part. You can get the same rough class of
performance with proven engines as anything new. The older engines
has thousands of runs to build up a reliability database and
incorporated improvements. The best way to improve reliability is to
not add a lot of performance parts to get around the fact that you
are unnecessarily trying to get an engine to do more than it can do
safely without those improvements. A marginal improvement in performance
rarely has an improvement reliability. Quite often the loss in
reliability outweighs the performance upgrades.

Well the space shuttle made it to orbit after losing one engine late
into the flight.

It was already there, for all intents.


I see.


So why does NASA now buy their hardware from very expensive space
companies like boing? As I cannot see how they can charge $56 million
an engine if they are cloning them one after the other.

Highly technical yes, but still sounds too much.

And your point is?


That NASA's suppliers need to be in a competitive market including
price competition. Maybe space has not gone that far yet, but this is
all adding a couple of extra zeros to the price tag.


Chicken and egg sort of equation. They have designs that have been
paid off and in service for 30 years now. The price plateau is one
of the major barriers to entry into the field. It is very difficult
to actually determine the manufacturing cost of some of those engines.
But, one the bright side, there are a lot of guerilla movements that
are stressing some basic tech. If you want cheap and reliable, try
looking at nitrous and rubber. I suspect that when someone like XCOR
actually kicks out an engine that lands major contracts, we'll see
the same sort of price drop that we saw when AMD jumped into the
lead in chip development. The big advantage that a number of established
manufacturers have is that they have amortized off their development
costs before a large number of people on this group was even born.


Seriously.. You can write down right now the names of companies
that NASA looks to on a matchbook. And have room left over for three
email addresses, an application for an art school, and that one phone
number that is really important to you..


Then that explains where a large chunk of NASA's budget goes to, but
hey congress is always willing to cough up more.


Not always. This whole X-Prize thing is getting interesting in that
regard. The major players have all come in with designs at 10% of
the NASA cost estimates. If it had only been one of them, it would
be a fluke. But, it is *all* of them coming in much lower and that
sort of thing is hard to overlook. NASA is a bit to public and
unpopular enough in Congress that there is likely to be someone who
use this for ammo.