Comment by pas

6 days ago

Safety culture requires the ability to learn from mistakes, the capability to ground planes (without that turning into a political problem), and someone to foot the bill. (Which did not always happen, Boeing MCAS with a SPoF AoA sensor without retraining. A chain of cost-cutting decisions. And of course there were usual problems with market distorting subsidies to both Boeing and Airbus.)

NASA's missions are way too big, because the science payloads are unique, so they "can't do" launch early, launch often. And then things sit in storage for years, waiting for budget. (And manned flights are in an even worse situation of course, because they are two-way.)

And there's too much sequential dependency in the marquee projects (without enough slack to be able to absorb problems if some earlier dependent outcome is unfavorable), or in other words because of time and cost constraints the projects did not include enough proper development, testing, verification.

NASA is doing too many things, and too much of it is politics. It should be more like a grant organization, rewarding cost-efficient scientific (and engineering) progress, in a specific broad area ("spaaace!"), like the NIH (but hopefully not like the NIH).

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pas

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DennisP  5 days ago

But SpaceX launches manned missions, with a perfect safety record so far, plus a fantastic success rate for their unmanned Falcon flights. They "launch early, launch often" for their test flights.

The main reason NASA can't do that with Artemis is that every SLS launch costs at least $2 billion.

gus_massa  6 days ago

> without enough slack to be able to absorb problems if some earlier dependent outcome is unfavorable

It's strange because unmanned mission are heavy in the "under promise and over deliver" territory. They may say something like "we are sending a car to Mars for a month", but everything is over engineered to last for a year. Then it miraculously work for eleven month and it's a huge success.

  • pas  5 days ago

    I guess the conclusion is that the manned missions since the Moon landing were for Cold War reasons. (With that kind of mentality.) And when that ended they made even less sense.

    For example when they had to go up to refill the wiper fluid on the Hubble in '93 it was no biggie, because as shitty as the shuttle was, it was at least reuse-minded, and there were regular missions (and budget for that). The ISS assembly coasted on the Clinton era budget surplus, but then it was evident that prancing in LEO is great for hijacking Soviet satellites, but not much else.

    And compared to the Hubble the JWST was a classic Eminem mission (one shot, one opportunity ... no, wait! that's on Mars!), even if it took 5-10 more years than planned, it seems it was completely worth it.