This story is very misleading, in that it implies that the only problem with first-stage vibrations was astronauts’ inability to read displays. The solution described here does nothing to address the actual structural issues in the second stage that the resonance creates. That was no five-dollar fix.
15 thoughts on “The Rest Of The Ares Vibration Story”
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If didn’t know better I would think someone was providing the foundation to allow the Ares I to rise from the dead. Yes, there was a vibration problem, but we know how to solve it 🙂
Are they anticipating a win by Gov. Romney and a return of Dr. Griffin as NASA Administrator?
Cool, for five dollars, they resolved the legibility issue. Did they find a five dollar solution to unpithing the astronaut’s brains at the top of the ride. That’s what I want to know about.
Sometimes in the heat of the moment, it is hard to see that your “5 dollar fix” is just one of 500 Rube Goldberg kludges on a flawed design.
It is sad to waste good engineering on bad systems.
One has to wonder: why does the SpaceX dragon not need to strobe its instrument panel?
(Obligatory Simpson’s Show quote about over-engineering the solution to a problem)
So, Dr. Hibbing, what then happens to the gorillas?
Heh, heh, no problem, the gorillas just freeze to death in the winter . . .
Why didn’t they just have Data rotate the nutation on the inertial dampeners?
To train for these missions, were the astronauts going to ride ten-speed bikes up and down the steps of the Capitol building, or was it riding mini-bikes wide open across railroad ties?
My guides were only willing to take me up to 0.5 G’s
Funny how he then fails to mention the reason for the limitation. And I’m fairly sure that the folks at NASA JPL and Ames don’t cost $5 to employ. I suspect the chair modifications alone cost more than the writer’s lunch at McDonald’s over his lifetime to date.
Who planted the idea for a story that “there wasn’t anything ever really wrong with Ares I”? Take one guess – if not Mikey, then his fellow-travelers and deluded followers.
I don’t believe in conspiracies, just in no limit to human stubbornness and stupidity.
Expect more such stories in preparation for his triumphant return (directly or thru Scott Pace), when we dump ISS and take another 8 years to get to another Ares I test flight.
It’s just inherent in spaceflight folks. It will always cost too much until you give us the money to repeat Apollo, at which point our descendants may consider the anti-matter propulsion route to reducing costs in the next century.
Rand,
In addition to the points you and others have made, the most frustrating thing for me about this story was that it was *not* a $5 solution. They’re probably talking about a $1-5M system per capsule once you’ve factored in the need for accelerometers on the couches, computer code to drive it all, space rated electronics, redundancy, and all the other human space rating gobbledy gook that goes into putting such a system into operations on a NASA rocket/capsule.
Not to mention the burdened engineering cost of all the engineers doing the experiments, and creating the real flight system.
Just adding up the parts cost of the first proof-of-concept system while ignoring all the rest of the development costs is just plain bogus. If they had six aerospace engineers working on it, $5 would account for about 30 seconds of their combined time.
~Jon
Hell, NASA engineers would spend at least a millon dollars preparing the PowerPoint briefings alone, much less doing all that other stuff. The bureaucracy must be satisfied before any solution can be determined, don’t you know.
“In addition to the points you and others have made, the most frustrating thing for me about this story was that it was *not* a $5 solution.”
So it’s a jobs program?
It’s awfully close to the joke about the NASA zero-G pen versus the Soviet pencil.
Instead of using accelerometers and electronics to make the displays flash in time with the astronauts’ head jerks, the Russians would just use a smoother rocket and a set of analog dials.
People shouldn’t ride vehicles that would make a beer can explode.
And if the tip of the Soviet pencil broke off and lodged itself in the electronics?
How much would that have cost?
Soviet pencils never break, as was decided by the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The USSR had the advantage of being able to apply political solutions to engineering problems, ruling out certain failure modes by decree.
After the Ares 1-X launch, there were disingenuous claims that the thrust oscillation had been shown to be insignificant. Now we see that they still are coming up with fixes for that problem even after the Constellation program died.
It’s remarkable how much deeply cynical and costly rationalizations, dog-and-pony shows, and complicated fixes could have been eliminated, if only we cut ATK out of the loop.
Gotta make Liberty work you know.