eugene@ames.UUCP (Eugene Miya) (07/18/84)
For Henry Spencer,
You hit the nail on the head with one of those problems: because of
'budgetary constraints' NASA has gone to 'success the first time.'
NASA is certainly guilty of this, but that is partially the nature of men
like Hans Mark and Werner von Braun. I have met Mark, and he is a man
who "shoots crap" in his words.
As another point, remember, I mentioned that a lot of space technology
unlike electronics for example, does not scale: e.g., there are limits
to 'how thin you can make metal walls' and 'how much fuel a missile
needs to carry.' In some cases, the problems are geometric: consider,
you have a payload and fuel, but you have to use more fuel to carry the
weight of the fuel and so on.
A local firm tried a test of their rocket the other day (not a launch, but
testing engines not big enough for orbital flight): for the test it was
successful, but only the developers (as opposed to spectators and press)
took it with a grain of salt. Good luck to all private developers!
To correct a minor point, the Shuttle did have a number of prototypes before,
launch. The steps to the first Shuttle were not as fine as the Soviet space
plane and Soviet Shuttle, but they were still prototypes. A lots of testing
was done in Hypersonic wind tunnels and using computer simulation
(lots of this work was done here at Ames, I recently learned).
Second, since Al Globius posted a note on our space station work:
Dr. Barney Oliver (formerly of HP, and now retired and working at Ames),
head of the Ames Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program,
is potentially looking for volunteers. SETI is not a heavily funded
program, but they could use the labor to help build a very wide band
spectrum analyzer for analysis of possible signals. They need EEs
as well as software types. Interested Bay Area individuals can send
mailer to me.
--eugene miya
NASA Ames Res. Ctr.
{hplabs,hao,menlo70,dual}!ames!aurora!eugene
emiya@ames-vmsb [note uucp name changes]