Re: Taylor Dinerman nails it

In article <43946d16.5830710@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Derek Lyons <fairwater@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>His only point seems to be the same as the same mistaken viewpoint so
>often espoused here: 'we could build crude prototypes in a few years
>forty years ago - so modern operational craft that are vastly more
>capable and complex with much longer lifespans shouldn't take much
>more than a week or two'.

Another nasty sound bite from Derek, oversimplified to the point of
outright error yet again.

The article makes considerable sense. His main point is the same one a
lot of increasingly-exasperated people in Congress and elsewhere have
been making lately: programs aimed at building operational spacecraft,
especially ones with hard deadlines because their predecessors have
limited remaining life, should be built with (at most) minor stretching of
existing technology, rather than aiming for radical improvements. There
is quite enough potential difficulty and delay in putting together a
reliable, long-lived operational bird *without* also stuffing it with
bleeding-edge technology.

It may well make sense to fly a new, experimental sensor or two on an
operational spacecraft... but the spacecraft should be able to accomplish
its primary mission without the new sensors, and it should be explicitly
understood that they are standby passengers, required to accept what
accommodations they can get and not allowed to control the launch
schedule. Similarly, some things may need updating because the old
version is becoming impossible to support, but this shouldn't be an excuse
to drastically crank up the specs and do a wholesale redesign.

Part of the problem is that it's difficult to get funding for R&D birds to
test new technology. So there is a lot of temptation to embed what are
really R&D efforts in operational programs. This has to stop.

That does lead to the question: how is the R&D going to get done? The
answer may well be that DoD and NASA are headed for a culture change here,
that there simply isn't going to *be* a way to get hundreds of millions of
dollars for a decade-long effort to develop a new spacecraft instrument.
They're going to have to learn how to do it, or at least do the most
essential parts of it, more quickly and on much smaller budgets, because
the money just isn't there any more for Business As Usual.

They might even find that there are some people who could give them
pointers on how it's done.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. | henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Amazon used lisp & C exclusively?
    ... If you had a vision of a cheap non-polluting single engine plane ... decide to work on that rather than your idea for a spacecraft. ... "At first, I thought of making a Lisp-based system, but I realized ... whatever technology he thought the coolest. ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: another definition of SF....
    ... True, but since it takes technology (i.e. spacecraft beyond what we have today) to get our heroes to the action, it would then be science fiction. ... if the resolution of the story depends upon the ... To that end, yeah, I guess Star Wars' Jedi going around and problem solving with "The Force" would be more fantasy than SF; but then we have technology and spacecraft that are beyond what we have today so that pulls it back into SF. ...
    (rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated)
  • Re: Looking for sources on day to day life aboard ship
    ... spacecraft. ... The key difference, to which Sean alluded and Shawn violently rejected ... isn't the operating enviroment or the technology or any of the things ...
    (sci.military.naval)
  • Re: Timelines
    ... develop from scratch, not invent new technology, but build using ... good for assembling new types of spacecraft out of existing technology ...
    (rec.arts.sf.science)