He said “I suspect that most of the NASA bureaucracy (and former-administrator Mike Griffin himself) would dearly love to kill Ares I now and replace it” .. that’s what I was replying to.

crackpipe, smoking.

Mike Griffin is no longer NASA Administrator. The new man has his own ideas.

Note: The McAfee Siteadvisor does not like your website. You may want to run a virus checker over it.

I can tell that by your continual repetition of shit that don’t make any sense.

“Hopefully, some very good model improvement and validation is taking place, but I seriously doubt that was the main purpose of the test.”

Yes it was.. what evidence do you have to say it wasn’t?

“I content that the main purpose of Ares 1-x was to fly something as soon as possible.”

And yet it was late…

“I’m not sure that Ares 1-x was even in the original plan for Constellation, but it became necessary as Ares I proved to be much harder to develop than was initially believed.”

What evidence do you have for this? Why are you telling me about your “gut feel”? Why do you expect to achieve anything other than reassure me that you’re a bone-head?

“I personally think that Ares I is something of an afterthought.”

Maybe that’s because you’ve never read any of the literature that led to the Constellation program? Maybe, your personal opinion gets less and less relevant with every comment you make?

“I suspect that most of the NASA bureaucracy (and former-administrator Mike Griffin himself) would dearly love to kill Ares I now and replace it”

WOW.. that’s umm.. WOW.. I’m shocked and confused that *anyone* would suggest Mike Griffin would even entertain the notion of killing Ares I, let alone “dearly love” to do so. Put down the crack pipe.

And it worked too! In the aftermath of that flight, what did Time magazine name as invention of the year?

Argument by repeated assertion is really not that convincing. While Ares 1-x *may* not originally have been intended as a PR stunt, that is certainly what it looked like and turned into. I really don’t see why it is hard to believe that some good PR was hoped for.

As an engineer, I am sure that most of the engineers working on Ares 1-x have tried hard to come up with something useful from this flight. Hopefully, some very good model improvement and validation is taking place, but I seriously doubt that was the main purpose of the test.

I content that the main purpose of Ares 1-x was to fly something as soon as possible. The hope was that this would reassure Congress, the American people, and NASA itself that they could develop and fly a rocket that wasn’t the Shuttle but was derived from it and looked something like the final vehicle. I’m not sure that Ares 1-x was even in the original plan for Constellation, but it became necessary as Ares I proved to be much harder to develop than was initially believed.

I personally think that Ares I is something of an afterthought. Ares V was what Mike Griffin and the NASA Bureaucracy really wanted so that they could send people to Mars (or at least the Moon), but they couldn’t see how to pay for its development while continuing to fly the Shuttle. Ares I was mainly intended to be a “safe, simple, and soon” way of keeping the US astronauts flying and NASA workers employed in the gap between the Shuttle and Ares V.

Unfortunately, Ares I has gained a life and following of its own that looks likely to kill any hope of developing Ares V. It looks extremely unlikely that NASA will be given enough resources to develop both Ares I and Ares V. I suspect that most of the NASA bureaucracy (and former-administrator Mike Griffin himself) would dearly love to kill Ares I now and replace it with something like the “Jupiter” shuttle-derived vehicle, but that may not even be possible now politically.

But it would seem that at least a few people here are starting to actually acknowledge the fact that the motivation for the Ares I-X was to test the computer modeling software.. not to test a single possible launch vehicle configuration.. if you believe me when I tell you this, please stop contrasting the Ares I-X with the Ares I design.

Lastly, I know you all so desperately want to hold on to the “It was PR!!” nonsense, so I guess I’ll have to pull out some of the other, minor, arguments why that makes no sense.

First, the Ares I-X flight test was well underway when the program was completely funded (as much as it ever was) and was driven to launch by engineering needs. At the current time, the Ares I-Y flight is seen as unnecessary.. if that attitude continues and management pushes for the flight anyway, that would be a PR thing.. maybe.. but that simply wasn’t the case with Ares I-X. In fact, management at NASA wanted to cancel Ares I-X. I seriously doubt that any engineers went to their managers and said “hey bob, if we go ahead with the Ares I-X flight it’ll be fantastic PR!”

Second, the Ares I-X flight had received so much bad press by the time it flew that everyone, including space geeks like yourself who should know better, thought it was a colossal waste of time and money. So many people thought it was pointless that they didn’t even tune in. The viewing areas were mostly empty.

The press review was lackluster after wards.. popular science stupidity not withstanding. None of the media cared enough to send a science writer to talk with the engineers and get more than sound bites about what the purpose of the test was. Even now you hear the press referring to mumblings about Ares I being canceled as evidence that they were right in saying the Ares I-X test was a waste of money. Like it was an ordinary test flight of a potential rocket. If this is a PR effort, it’s a terrible one.

If it was a PR effort, the risk was substantial.. the Ares I-X had a good chance of blowing up, colliding in mid air, having bits fall off at the wrong time, or just being so incredibly dull that the public thinks the Ares I will be boring too. If you ask some people *cough*NASAWatch*cough* there was a mid-air collision and it was incredibly dull. The media attention after the launch focused on the big dent in the side of the SRB due to one of the parachutes failing to open. This clearly has no effect on the stated goal of the test, so why focus on it? Oh, because its the only pictures that clearly show that something went wrong. The media love disaster and that’s all they want to report.. so what is this PR effort supposed to achieve?

That’s blatantly unrealistic. 500 million could have bought you a thousands of flights of small sounding rockets of a variety of propulsion technologies. That’s much more likely to generate useful information for a modeling/simulation technology that you claim will make crew killing accidents “impossible” (hah!). A one-time test flight that just so happens to be dubbed an “Ares-1″ flight, isn’t going to suffice.

Here’s my take. Ares 1-X was planned and done precisely to put political pressure on Congress to continue to fund Ares. Any other benefits like partial proving of the Ares 1 design or simulation models were merely coincidental.

Further, those simulations have so far been used merely to rationalize the program of record rather than a objective evaluation of the relative risks of various launch vehicle choices. For example, any simulation that comes up with a 1 in 3700 failure rate for the SRB which has a historical failure rate of more like 1 in 250, is just wrong.

The simulation could well be right, but we don’t have confidence in the simulation where it matters, namely the projection of failure rates. A single launch test doesn’t change that. You need a number of tests on the order of the failure rate (N tests for claims of 1 in N failure rate) to prove the software to that degree.

In the mean time, without that confidence, the software is just a tool for justifying the approaches that NASA wants to take. Paper rockets like the Ares I are always safer than real rockets like the EELVs. The simulations show that, of course.

It may sound like a plausible engineering excuse, but I don’t buy for a second that there was no PR angle in it. It doesn’t take conspiracy theories to say that–it just takes knowing engineers and engineering managers and understanding their incentives. They knew they needed something to get buy-in from the new administration post-Bush. Had Ares I-X flown on time it would’ve been flying before the new administration came in.

We’ve had flights before at MSS that while we had to find at least a contrived engineering excuse for running them were really for a PR reason. That’s not evil or even dishonest. It’s just the reality that no engineer works in a vacuum with respect to funding and PR, and that non-engineering decisions always have an effect on engineering. To think otherwise demonstrates severe naivety.

~Jon

There has been a slow but steady shift away from flight testing (build a little, test a little) at NASA and the big aerospace corporations for the last couple of decades. As computational simulations have become more capable, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that it is much more cost effective to do most of the early design and analysis work on the computer. It will always be cheaper to do a simulation than to do an experiment, and a simulation will also generate a tremendous amount of data at much higher resolution than any experiment would ever be capable of. Thus, simulations provide engineers with the ability to inspect the physical responses of nearly any point in the simulation without altering those responses with the presence of instrumentation.

The important thing to keep in mind, though, is that every model (computational or otherwise) must be experimentally verified if it is to be trusted. For the flight regimes that traditional aviation experiences, there is a quite large corpus of experimental data to draw from, and most commercial CFD codes have been extensively verified in the regimes where they are most commonly used. However, for the flight regimes that NASA vehicles experience, there is very little experimental data available. Hence, the need for a flight test to get some ‘ground truth’ for their simulation models.

And in this respect, the Ares I-X was apparently a resounding success. As a hardware demonstrator, there probably was only superficial resemblance to the eventual Ares I. But as a flight test unit, gathering crucial verification data on their modeling and simulation techniques, the test seems to have met its objectives.

Was it worth half a billion dollars to obtain this data? Maybe. Maybe not. But that half a billion dollars probably supported thousands of engineers for the better part of five years, in addition to the cost of the hardware and related transport, assembly, range, and logistics expenses.

Also keep in mind that these modeling and simulation techniques can be applied to design any number of potential rocket configurations. If Ares I is an infeasible design, as many of you seem to believe, then we should be able to figure that out with these simulations long before they start bending metal on the actual Ares I hardware. But as Trent says, if they (we) are successful at developing this simulation capability, then that will fundamentally change how future space craft are designed. Such a shift may even make it possible to eventually design fully reusable launch vehicles.

But, to repeat myself, NASA thinks they’re pioneering a new way of developing launch vehicles and, at the same time, new methods for making aircraft and other high performance vehicles. The Ares I-X flight was part of a program to develop a *methodology* which will make it possible to design and test a variety of vehicles inside a computer, and then make those vehicles perfectly the first time. This fantastic new technology will make it so crew killing accidents are *impossible*, or at least put a number of how *improbable* they are.

Just think about how wonderful and fantastic that is.. clearly it is worth a few billion, let alone half a billion. Jesus, I don’t even remember how many 9′s they’re talking about now? 46? Something like that.

Of course, if you think that NASA are just loony with their crazy design-and-test-it-in-the-computer nonsense then yeah, you would think Ares I-X is a waste of money.. but direct your scorn at their philosophy.. after actually knowing what that is.. not at the *single* test they’ve done in the development of this revolutionary new technology.

Oh yeah, and if they pull it off we’re all going to look dumb building rockets the same way we did in the 60s. Not that they’ll be giving a copy of this software to me, and even if they did I wouldn’t have the supercomputers to run it on anyway.