Video Research, the Manhattan Project, and Blogging about More Than One Thing at Once November 24, 2010
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Collaboration, Other Stuff, Writing.Tags: Movies & TV
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Joe-1
According to a new widget in the right sidebar, our post entitled “On This Date: August 29 & 30” is the top post here at Lofty Ambitions. That’s one of the posts we consider extras, not a regular weekly Wednesday post, nor a guest blog feature. Maybe a lot of people with a birthday on those dates search to see what happened and look at Lofty Ambitions instead of Wikipedia, or maybe we have some important keyword combination we didn’t intend. We surmise, though, that the interest is in the piece’s opening content: the Cold War began on August 29, 1949, when the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb.
Last Thanksgiving, we visited the Atomic Testing Museum—a Smithsonian Institution Affiliate with extensive archives—when we were in Las Vegas. It’s just a mile off the strip. Doug’s father, an engineer, came along. We have plans to go back; Anna has an institutional grant to do museum and archival research there. Atomic testing was a hallmark of the Cold War that began in 1949, and is visually represented by Isao Hashimoto’s multimedia artwork “1945-1998” (click here and press the play button).
Trinity Test Fireball
Of course, as Hashimoto’s representation indicates, the testing program really began with the Trinity atomic test on July 16, 1945, and the massive Manhattan Project that led to those first three atomic weapons. Over the past week or so, we’ve refreshed our background knowledge, discovering and rediscovering narratives and details by watching documentary films.
One stop during our 2007 cross-country move was the Los Alamos Historical Museum. There, we purchased a copy of the video Remember Los Alamos: World War II. This 1993 production of the Los Alamos Historical Society depicts what life was like during the Manhattan Project. Dozens of project veterans were interviewed for the film, and the interviewees included project scientists, members of the Special Engineer Detachments (SEDs), Women’s Army Corp (WACs), homemakers, students, and local Native Americans—some of whom were living and working on the land prior to the project and at Los Alamos during the war.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
The film splits its time between the activities of the very well-known personages—J. Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves—and folks such as Jerry Roensch, an Army WAC who worked as a telephone operator from March 1944 until the middle of 1946. Jerri Stone Roensch’s story, also recounted in her book about her time at Los Alamos, Life Within Limits (published by the Los Alamos Historical Society in 1993 and reissued in 2002), is very typical of the second group of Manhattan Project personnel. She came to the high desert of New Mexico, fell in love with the landscape and a boy, Arno Roensch, a scientific glass blowing trumpet player, and never left.
Next up on our viewing list is an episode entitled “The Manhattan Project” from the History Channel’s Modern Marvels series. In standard History Channel style, the program attempts to wow you with a litany of facts and figures. With a project the size and scope of the Manhattan Engineer District—originally a district within the Army Corp of Engineers headquartered in Manhattan, New York—it’s relatively easy to overwhelm the viewer with details that reflect the projects Brobdingnagian reach. The Y-12 and K-25 plants at Oak Ridge are particularly apt examples of the outsized proportions of the Manhattan Project.
Y-12 Calutron Operators
These two plants functioned to separate and enrich Uranium 235 from Uranium 238, Y-12 using electromagnetic calutrons and K-25 through gaseous diffusion. The Y-12 plant required miles and miles of wire for its magnetic coils. When it became obvious that wartime demands made obtaining the necessary amounts of copper impossible, 15,000 tons of silver were borrowed from the U.S. Treasury (the silver was returned after the war). The K-25 plant is the largest single factory building ever created. Shaped like a U, each arm of the plant is a half-mile long by 1,000 feet wide. The building totals over 2,000,000 square feet. Together, Y-12 and K-25 consumed fully 10% of all of the electricity produced in the U.S. during 1944.
In that late August post that’s holding at the top of our rankings, we talk about some other occurrences, too. Space Shuttle Discovery first took flight on August 30, 1984. That’s an important happening for us because we recently traveled to Kennedy Space Center to see Discovery’s final launch, which was delayed (see our “Countdown to the Cape Series” on October 27–November 7).
Discovery on Launch Pad 39A
The Space Shuttle still sits on pad 39A, right where we left it. This afternoon, NASA held a press conference: they are not ready for the December 3-7 launch window. Cracks in stringers of the external fuel tank are troublesome because they are unexpected. NASA wonders whether stress was introduced in the manufacturing or transportation of the tank, only to show up later during cryo-loading of the fuel. Launch and ascent shift stress to different areas—what if cracks show up then? If one weakness got through the process, what else might have been missed? “We’re not quite there,” the representative at Johnson Space Center said. “We really need to understand our risk.”
The launch date remains up in the air. Officially, Discovery will launch no earlier than December 17, with a four-day window. “But a lot of data has to come together to support that,” another representative said. A launch that late in the year means reconfiguring the onboard computers during a “quiet” time in the mission, too, as we roll over into 2011. We’re not booking a flight to Florida in December—not yet.
Valiant Air Command Warbird Museum November 18, 2010
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation.Tags: Museums & Archives, WWII
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Located just a stone’s throw—or for us two weeks ago, a failed launch away—from the Astronauts’s Hall of Fame and the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex is the Valiant Air Command Warbird Museum (VAC). Because we’ve done research on how aviation museums represent World War II (published in the book Bombs Away! and the journal Curator), we stopped by VAC one morning during our trip to the Space Coast.
VAC Docent Ralph Arlin
We were greeted by docent Ralph Arlin, a volunteer with the local police department as well as a new volunteer at VAC. That’s one of the amazing things about aviation museums: the enthusiasm and knowledge of a cadre of volunteers. At VAC, most of the volunteers work to restore decrepit aircraft that sometimes arrive missing pieces or in pieces. Ralph pointed out not only some of the artifacts and aircraft in the memorabilia room and the main exhibition hangar, but also took us on a quick tour of the restoration hangar where two aircraft were being rebuilt. It’s rare to get such a close-up look at restorations in progress, to see the innards of aircraft. The at-arm’s-length view of these in-process planes reveals the juxtaposed references of solidity in a shiny steel wing structure and the seemingly chaotic complexity of half-finished wiring looms. We came away impressed by the machine’s ability to simultaneously embody sturdiness and fragility.
The memorabilia room, the main exhibition hangar, the restoration hangar, and the museum’s ground—its front and back yards—are jam-packed:
1930s-Era Flight Jacket
TBM Avenger
Retired Blue Angel
Shaped Sonic Boom Experiment F-5E
The one-of-a-kind aircraft among the collection is the F-5E used in NASA’s Shaped Sonic Boom Experiment. Initially, the project was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The fuselage was reshaped in hopes of demonstrating that its sonic boom could be reduced. Indeed, analysis of recordings from various positions indicated that the sonic boom was reduced by a third. Occasionally, an aviation museum will have a plane that is the last of its kind, or the last of its kind flying, but this version of the F-5E is the only one of its kind ever. It stands as a stark reminder of the power of museums and archives to preserve to unique.
VAC also hosts a three-day airshow. The next one is scheduled for March 11-14, 2011, and commemorates the 70th anniversary of the Flying Tigers, an American volunteer group in the Chinese Army that flew fighters painted with shark faces.
Guest Blog: Roger M. Boisjoly November 15, 2010
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Guest Blogs, Space Exploration.Tags: Space Shuttle
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Roger M. Boisjoly, a retired engineer, is this week’s Guest Blogger. Lest readers think that our Lofty Ambitions’ spectacles became too rose colored during our recent visit to Kennedy Space Center (see our “Countdown to the Cape” series October 27-November 7), we turn to Boisjoly for an examination of the NASA culture. Even Christopher Cowen, our first Guest Blogger (click here) and one of NASA’s biggest cheerleaders, admitted that he is compelled to point out when they make a mistake.
Challenger Explosion (NASA)
Roger Boisjoly worked at Morton Thiokol, the manufacturer of the Space Shuttle’s solid rocket boosters, when Challenger began its doomed STS-51L mission. He warned his superiors of an O-ring problem the year before, in 1985. Cold weather made the problem worse, as the O-rings took longer to adjust and make the necessary seal in the joint of the solid rocket booster. On January 28, 1986, Boisjoly and some of his coworkers raised specific concerns about the near-freezing overnight temperatures at the launch pad and recommended delaying the mission. After phone calls between his superiors and NASA, Challenger launched anyway, and disintegrated less than a minute into the flight. (Click here for our previous post that describes the video record of those moments.) Boisjoly became a witness during the investigation by the Presidential Committee.
Roger Boisjoly continues to lecture on workplace ethics and organizational culture. This past spring, he donated his papers—boxes and boxes from his Morton Thiokol years—to Leatherby Libraries at Chapman University. We met Roger and, with him, held one of those O-rings in our fingers.
U. S. PRODUCTIVITY IN PRIVATE AND GOVERNMENT SECTORS
My engineering career will be characterized as vigorously intrusive, as I purposely tried to learn about the contributions of supporting disciplines to product development. I hoped this knowledge would result in better cooperation between disciplines, short circuit bureaucracy, and produce good products. This type of work ethic matters because it is becoming extinct today as most managers focus only on short-term profits by disregarding product compliance to specifications, quality, or safety. For example, three of the 14 organizations for which I worked had approximately 1000 employees, and they all produced exceptional products for both commercial and government use. This resulted from teamwork and information flow, coupled with positive perceptions from observations of daily operations performed within the organization that enhanced everybody’s ability to contribute their talents to make great products without oppressive short-term profit management.
In contrast, the remaining 11 organizations in which I worked varied in management style from mild to severely dysfunctional, primarily due to a short-term profit focus, at the expense of employee moral and product excellence. Observations of organizations that treated their subordinate employees as a renewable resource and also would not listen to subordinate input concerning problem resolution were found to have a condition called Malicious Obedience throughout their organizations. This condition resulted in a visible downward spiraling of teamwork and information flow coupled with poor products and loss of market share. Malicious Obedience is the practice of subordinate employees doing only what they are told to do, even when they know that the flawed instructions received will not produce the desired results. When management treated them like replaceable mindless machines, subordinate employees got even this way. As a result, 25% of employees produced 75% of the real productive output, while 75% of employees produced mediocre or less output and became a drain on resources. This exact ratio was presented to a chief engineer at one of these companies; he agreed with my assessment, but did nothing to correct it.
Today, most, if not all, government contractors and commercial corporations are saturated with Malicious Obedience organizations, and the percentage of productive employees is rapidly decreasing. Before anyone concludes that all managers are basically bad and that all other employees are basically good, but are simply misled, it must be stated that the overwhelming majority of employees in management and other positions would like to do the best possible job in making products for the government or anyone else. However, a few upper managers who have the authority and power to promote their own agenda generally control what I call Unethical Oppressive Dictatorship management techniques. This results in daily negative subordinate perceptions that lead to mistrust of management and colleagues. Subsequently, the behavior norm becomes fear of loss of current position; averting the loss becomes the priority for all subordinate daily work decisions.
STS-51L (NASA)
Three mandatory organizational characteristics called Responsibility, Authority and Accoutability are required in any organization to promote ethical practices that produce good products. Responsibility to act within certain bounds must be clearly defined and must be given based upon a person’s ability and willingness to accept it. Once a person has accepted the responsibility for a work assignment, that person must be given the necessary Authority to carry out that work assignment. With Responsibility and Authority agreed upon, the purpose of Accountability must be clearly explained; one must expect to reap the benefits of positive accountability for doing a good job, as well as expecting to receive the blame or negative accountability for doing a poor job, especially for being involved in any type of cover-up of a faulty design or product. Some, and perhaps many, will say such a system cannot work because it is based upon simplistic and naïve principles. Perhaps, but having witnessed and participated in such an environment several times during my career, I know what creates success.
Perhaps many CEO’s in the private sector and administrators in the government sector will reject these and similar suggestions, but let’s ask them what, if anything, they have done in the way of leadership, increasing market share in a weak world economy, long-term stability for their organizations and employees, employee morale, increased productivity, etc. The silent answers to this would be very telling of the disregard for employee and customer welfare.
Apollo 11 Launches (NASA)
My points about Responsibility, Authority, and Accoutability are directly applicable to NASA and to other government agencies. Our government systems of procurement, bidding for contracts, contract specifications, financial contracts, oversight of contracts, and contractor accountability for a variety of misdeeds would be laughable, if it were not in such a mess. To name just a few specifics, all of the following have continued to be a financial disaster for the government for decades: lower-bidder contracting, cost-plus-incentive-fee contracting, combining the financial portion of a contract into the product specifications (thus preventing good oversight), lack of a financial contract consisting of not more than a dozen pages separate from specifications, and so on.
Our aerospace programs are in a shambles at NASA, for all the above reasons and others that have not been mentioned in this piece. NASA started as a non-political non-bureaucratic organization—as demonstrated by the success of Apollo—but it has degenerated into the highly bureaucratic organization that currently exists. For this reason, there is no reasonable connectivity from program to program. This lack of connectivity has damaged our space program to the extent that it may never recover and be able to return NASA’s to former glory days.
Divide and Conquer November 10, 2010
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Collaboration, Writing.Tags: Books, Cognitive Science
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Poet Allison Joseph
Yesterday, we spent most of the day with poet Allison Joseph, who was here for the Tabula Poetica Reading Series. She mentioned her husband, Jon Tribble, several times. They met when they were both students in Indiana University’s MFA program and are, therefore, a writing couple like us. They both write creative pieces. They both teach, too, though Jon’s primary responsibilities, like Doug’s, are outside the classroom. They are both literary editors; Allison is Poetry Editor for Crab Orchard Review and Jon edits the Crab Orchard poetry book series.
Mary Lee Leahy Meets Ernie Banks
Anna’s parents shared the same career path, both attorneys who served in state government and then opened their own private practice. Dinner conversation sometimes involved their two minds working through a particular case together. Each had different strengths, somewhat different ways of looking at an issue, but they spent their professional lives looking at very much the same issues at the same time with roughly the same educational background. Anna’s parents, like Allison Joseph and Jon Tribble, built camaraderie out of shared passions and encouraged each other (despite their deeply held baseball rivalry).
We, too, have a lot in common, feel camaraderie, and share our passions. We both currently have large writing projects—big things, as our writer-friend Cathy Day would say—and jobs at the same academic institution. We share a lot of interests, are both generally curious, and spur each other on. But we work in different disciplines. In Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson writes, “encouragement does not necessarily lead to creativity. Collisions do—the collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space.” Our home, in some small way, creates collisions of ideas.
Even when we work on projects together, like Lofty Ambitions, we spend a good deal of time planning, strategizing, and organizing our pursuits so as to take advantage of the sum of our parts. One way that we accomplish this is through the time-honored tradition of divide-and-conquer. We do this with our reading; Anna just finished Final Countdown: NASA and the End of the Space Shuttle Program, and while it was a very good read, Doug probably won’t read it too (he’s reading a book about nuclear rockets). We do this with our professional development at shared conferences; last year at AWP, out of the dozens of sessions we each attended, we only attended two jointly. We do this even in our various campus commitments; today Doug attended a lecture on consciousness, even though this is an area that’s probably of greater interest to Anna.
Of course, it isn’t enough just to cover a lot of intellectual ground. We also must share the information that we have garnered separately, and try to help one another make sense of any newfound tidbits that have spurred our curiosity. Sometimes, we begin the shared process of working through our individual experiences in the immediate aftermath of an inspiring book or an insightful panel presentation. Other times, we won’t revisit the experiences until months later when a seemingly unrelated event stirs the memory of something we’ve read. Maybe that’s what Johnson calls the slow hunch, a kind of serendipity that requires time or accumulation.
We’ve begun to develop a working theory (or model) that tries to explain why we enjoy doing this. In part, we’ve come to feel that it’s because our respective intellectual disciplines—Creative Writing for Anna and Computer Science for Doug—rely heavily on the translation of concepts, ideas from one domain into another. Writers create narratives from experiences and ideas; poets create poems with words, using the skills and techniques of that genre. Programmers create software; for a program that allows computers to track the flow of money through a business, a computer scientist learns about a domain, like accounting, and then applies programming skills, techniques, and conventions to that domain.
Because both our fields depend heavily on craft, we share a set of working processes. This isn’t the first time that we’ve been struck by the similarities between creative writing and creating software—and we’re not the first to notice it. In fact, Richard Gabriel, known for his work on the Lisp programming language, earned his PhD in computer science and his MFA in poetry and published Writers’ Workshops and the Work of Making Things.
Collaboration—and writing as a couple—can mean different things in different situations. Anna’s parents may have worked on different cases, but they really were working side by side on the same projects. Doug’s parents chose separate career paths—Doug’s father is an engineer and his mother, a fourth-grade teacher. They cheered each other on, but didn’t collaborate professionally (though parenthood might be considered a profession when there are five kids).
It’s tricky to figure out how best to collaborate, and how to strike a balance between commonly shared knowledge and skills and differentiated knowledge and skills. Anna has collaborated with others, most recently with Larissa Szporluk on an essay in Mid-American Review and with Cathy Day and Stephanie Vanderslice on an essay under consideration. She’s actively cultivating the form she calls “the conversation essay.” Doug collaborated on his book, SQUEAK: A Quick Trip to Objectland. These projects allowed us to figure out some tricky things, get projects done, and discover how a project can exceed what an individual can accomplish. We didn’t always work together the way we do now, but we’ve always wanted to share our intellectual and creative lives. We’ve reached a stage that seems especially productive, and we’re starting to surmise why.
Countdown to the Cape: Home Again, Home Again November 7, 2010
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Collaboration, Space Exploration.Tags: Countdown to the Cape, Space Shuttle
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Charlie Duke and Alan Bean
On Saturday afternoon, we mingled with 35-some astronauts at Kennedy Space Center. By happenstance, we’d decided to make one last run through the Visitor Complex before we left Florida. Suddenly, we saw Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin. Serendipity! We followed Buzz Aldrin into a small conference room, filled with astronauts signing autographs for the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. In Steven Johnson’s terms, the adjacent possible!
Buzz Aldrin
Twelve men walked on the Moon. Yesterday, we saw six of them in person: Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, Gene Cernan, Charlie Duke, Ed Mitchell, and David Scott. We interviewed Charlie Duke (the youngest of the six at 75 years of age), several multi-mission Shuttle astronauts, and the first nurse to the astronauts. Each astronaut with whom we spoke was gracious and interested both in the past and in the future.
Just twenty-four hours earlier, we were lamenting—albeit half-heartedly because we’d had a fruitful week—the scrub of Discovery’s launch. The Space Shuttle is an incredibly complex machine. In fact, the hydrogen leak that scrubbed the launch was just one of two problems launch preparation teams noticed. A crack occurred in the foam insulation on the side of the external fuel tank to which the orbiter is bolted.
STS-133 Crack in Foam (NASA)
The tank is 154 feet tall as it stands on the pad—as tall as a fifteen-story building—and has a diameter of 27.6 feet. The slim split in the foam was just seven inches in length. It wasn’t even a crack in the tank itself. But this type of crack with misalignment can allow ice to form near the skin of the super-cool tank. One thing could lead to another. Accidents often have multiple causes, any of which on their own might not be a big deal. Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers, writes, “Plane crashes are much more likely to be the result of an accumulation of minor difficulties and seemingly trivial malfunctions.” On the shuttle orbiter, the ice could pop pieces of foam off during launch.
This leak and this crack are among the small problems of a host of things that could go wrong, because this machine has a lot of parts. Several online sources claim that the Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo program had six million parts (others say five million, or three million), so with a 99.9% reliability rate, 6000 things would go wrong. Really, it’s unreasonable to expect everything to go right all at the same time in these complex—and explosive—apparatuses. In the early days of the space program, the Atlas rocket used in the Mercury project had a 50% failure rate. That’s right, sometimes it exploded catastrophically on the launch pad. But we put John Glenn in a little capsule at the top of an Atlas, and he orbited the Earth three times. Risk can’t be eliminated completely, so we work to understand which risks we’re taking.
Sometimes, things don’t go as expected, but that’s okay. Steven Johnson talks about the role of error, too, in Where Good Ideas Come From. Sometimes, we know, what could be a disappointment creates the opportunity for something unexpectedly good, when you shift accordingly.
Ed Mitchell
Had Discovery begun her last mission on Monday, as originally planned, or even on Tuesday or Wednesday, we would have tried to go home early. Had the launch occurred on Friday, as we expected when we rose before dawn that morning, we might have spent Saturday working in the hotel room, our goal achieved. We had come to the Cape to see a Space Shuttle launch, and we have other—primary—responsibilities to which we needed to return. But as the week unfolded, serendipity dribbled in, and the adjacent possible became visible to us. (See earlier posts related to serendipity here and here.)
That’s how we ended up spending a few hours with real astronauts in the flesh the day before we departed for home. That’s how we formed the basis for a new Lofty Ambitions feature to begin in December: Guest Interviews.
Countdown to the Cape: Meaning in the No-Go November 6, 2010
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Collaboration, Space Exploration.Tags: Countdown to the Cape, Museums & Archives, Space Shuttle
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Bird at Space View Park
Yesterday, Anna was at Kennedy Space Center by 7:30am, scheduled to wave to the astronauts a few hours later as they departed for the launch pad. By 8:30am, word trickled out that the launch had been scrubbed at 8:11am for at least three more days. Doug headed out for a saunter to the Space Walk of Fame, where he would have watched the launch in the afternoon. Instead, he watched birds, a small shark, and a manatee, then walked back to the motel.
By 1:00pm, the Post Launch Scrub News Conference began. Discovery won’t go up until at least November 30 (and we’re plenty busy elsewhere then). A ground umbilical carrier panel (GUCP) leaked as the tank was fast-filling, violating both ground safety and launch criteria. Right after the Mission Management Team had made the decision to scrub and take their time understanding and fixing the GUCP—a piece of hardware they thought they had fixed after leaks later in tanking on STS-119 and STS-127—somebody said they noticed a crack in the foam on the external fuel tank. If it hadn’t been one thing, it would have been another.
Gantry Arm from Pad 39A for Apollo Crew to Enter Capsule
It’s as if Discovery is in no mood to leave. She’s not in a hurry to get to the National Air & Space Museum. No, she’s just sitting there on Launch Pad 39A, holding her breath, until she’s reassured that, if her service must end, something new will follow in her flight path.
During Tuesday’s Countdown Status Briefing, Chair of the Pre-launch Mission Management Team Mike Moses and Shuttle Launch Director Mike Leinbach expressed mixed feelings. They wanted Discovery to launch, of course, and to accomplish her mission. But they knew they were going through this pre-launch process with this Space Shuttle for the last time. They didn’t come out and say, she doesn’t want to go. But the words they chose and their intonations made it clear that Discovery’s delays this week were part of the story of the beginning of the end for the Space Transportation System (STS) program.
Mike Leinbach said on Tuesday, “You fly when you’re ready, and if you’re not, you don’t go.” In a sense, everyone who’s worked on, flown in, or watched Discovery here at Kennedy Space Center wasn’t quite ready to see her go, even though they want her to succeed. On Friday, Leinbach said, “We want to do the right thing for this vehicle.” The delays give her a little more time in service.
In a one-on-one interview, three-time Discovery astronaut and current Director of Johnson Space Center Mike Coats told us that she is “the work horse” of the fleet and admitted he’s more fond of her than of the others. Discovery has flown more missions than any other Space Shuttle. STS-133 will be her 39th mission. Discovery was the Return To Flight orbiter after both the Challenger and Columbia accidents. She was the first shuttle to rendezvous with the Russian Mir Space Station, she took the Hubble Telescope into space, and she added the Japanese Kibo science laboratory to the International Space Station.
On Tuesday, Mike Moses quipped, “It’s another day in paradise.” Certainly, part of his meaning was sarcastic. They’d already missed three launch days—and would miss another because of weather, then Friday’s—and the weekend’s—because of the leaky GUCP. On Friday, Moses said, “It’s the way the space business works.”
Discovery Remains on the Pad
We think what he also meant was that, even when things don’t go as planned, even when there’s a blip and a glitch—or even an accident—putting human beings into space is an undertaking in which he’s fortunate to participate. We think he meant, too, that NASA knows that every launch is a new scenario, a challenge, a risk, and that’s why they do it. As he put it, the launch schedule is their work schedule.
Mike Leinbach said on Friday afternoon, “It’s a machine, and every now and then, machines break. […] We’re not jinxed at all.” We feel the same way about our trip to the Cape. We thought seeing the launch was the story we were seeking, but we’re not disappointed that it was a no-go. On the contrary, we feel lucky. In fact, we spent several hours today talking in person with astronauts—we’ll have more on that in future posts!
The end eventually will begin, and then Discovery will have eleven days left in space.
Countdown to the Cape: Holding (Back Tears) November 5, 2010
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Space Exploration.Tags: Countdown to the Cape, Space Shuttle
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This morning at 8:11am, the launch of Discovery was scrubbed for the day. Here’s the new problem: a leaky ground umbilical carrier plate.
GUCP on External Fuel Tank
This problem has occurred twice before (STS-119 and STS-127), each time taking four days to fix. The external fuel tanks are being drained right now, and the team will go in tomorrow, after all remaining hydrogen is purged. There exists hope that the greater magnitude of this GUCP leak means the cause will be all the more obvious, once they take a look. If the cause is immediately obvious tomorrow afternoon, the thinking is that the GUCP can be fixed and tested more quickly than before—that a three-day turn-around is possible.
But a Monday launch sounds iffy. Besides, our flight leaves Orlando on Sunday, and we have obligations on Monday and Tuesday.
Discovery, still ready to go
If Discovery doesn’t go up on Monday, the next launch window opens December 1, or maybe November 30 (they’ll run the numbers to try to get an extra day). No one wants to talk much about that here at Kennedy Space Center. The place is buzzing, but it’s a numbing kind of buzz now. The press has resorted to taking photos of each other in the News Center. Discovery remains on Launch Pad 39A.
Countdown to the Cape…Holding at 1…Still November 4, 2010
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Space Exploration.Tags: Countdown to the Cape, Space Shuttle
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We woke this morning to heavy cloud cover and rain, and to the news that the Mission Management Team (MMT) had decided not to tank (fill the large external tank) this morning because there looked to be no break in the front through the day. They were correct.
The launch of STS-133, Discovery‘s last mission, is now scheduled for tomorrow (Friday) at about 3:04pm. The countdown clock yesterday was in its usual hold at 11 hours to launch, and they ran the clock up again to 11 hours today for a do-over tomorrow.
Here are some photos of the goings-on, including last night’s rollback of the Rotating Service Structure. Discovery, attached to the orange external fuel tank, with the solid rocket boosters on either side, was revealed before our eyes.
The Usual Hold (the speck of light on the right is Discovery on Launch Pad 39A)
Ditch at KSC with Two Alligators
Discovery Before Rollback of RSS (Nov. 3)
Discovery after Rollback of RSS
Proof that We Were There!
Discovery Attached to Fixed Service Structure
Reason for Delay Moves In
The White Room Attached to Shuttle (where astronauts enter on launch day)
Discovery's Nose Against External Fuel Tank Flanked by Solid Rocket Boosters
Discovery Ready To Go!
Countdown Clock Holds Again (Discovery is in the middle background)
Countdown to the Cape…Holding at 1… November 3, 2010
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Collaboration, Space Exploration.Tags: Countdown to the Cape, Movies & TV, Space Shuttle
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Photo by NASA/Jack Pfaller
Our experience at the Cape has become a lesson in patience. When we booked our flight and lodging, we planned for a week, just in case. Though Discovery’s launch was scheduled for Monday, there existed launch windows every afternoon November 1 through November 7. By the time we left for Florida, the launch had been delayed until Tuesday, in order to fix a few leaks. By the time we arrived at the motel in Titusville, the launch had slipped to Wednesday. A slip in launch is our new, insider lingo.
It is now Wednesday, and the launch of Discovery is delayed until Thursday, November 4, 2010, at 3:29:42pm or within roughly ten minutes of that earliest time. The countdown clock usually holds at -11:00:00, but it’s now holding through a 24-hour scrub. The reason: a main engine controller.
The “little glitch” (that’s what NASA called it in yesterday’s status briefing) occurred yesterday during power checks. One of the three phases in the computer dedicated to the third main engine didn’t come up, but it was in the redundant, not the primary, system. Besides, it came on later, and then they scrubbed whatever oil or carbon had built up by power-cycling the circuit breaker five times. No biggie. But later, the team saw “a little blip in all three phases” of the same circuit: “dribbling.”
Apollo 8 Control Room
Mike Moses, the Launch Integration Manager, called for the 24-hour time-out of sorts in the launch schedule because he wants to be careful “not to craft a solution based on what we think is the problem.” The events themselves, had they happened during launch, would not have presented a problem. Still, he wants his teams to take a day to “polish that story and bring some history” to the explanation. They need a narrative—mathematical and physical explanations—to connect and explain the two events and predict any risk. That’s a good lesson too: build a narrative to get to your conclusions, instead of merely jumping.
Even though the countdown is holding, time doesn’t stand still here. NASA is busy, the Cape is crowded, KSC is buzzing. We’re busy, too. In fact, our divide-and-conquer approach to preparation and research for this trip to the Cape has worked well since our arrival.
Doug in Apollo 8 Control Room
Doug has spent a lot of his time at Kennedy Space Center’s Visitor Complex, which is part historic site, part museum, and part theme park. He’s viewed one of the three remaining Saturn V rockets (originally intended for Apollo 19), preserved only because the last three Apollo missions were cancelled. He’s visited defunct launch pads, once buzzing with preparations for Mercury and Gemini missions. On the tenth anniversary of continuous human residency in space, he watched the IMAX film about the International Space Station. He’s still going. There’s more to see, more to research.
Ed Mango, Launch Director for Ares 1-X Rocket, at Launch Pad 39B
Meanwhile, Anna has been to a press conference about the International Space Station, where she asked a question, and to two countdown status briefings. She’s been hauled out to Launch Pad 39B, which is currently being refurbished in hopes of a future manned space program and heavy lift launches. She’s interviewed three-time Discovery astronaut and current Director of Johnson Space Center Mike Coats, who said that all three Shuttles are technically the same, but that he sort of likes Discovery best. If the countdown clock starts up again later today, Anna is off to the retraction of the Rotating Service Structure from the Shuttle on Launch Pad 39A.
The slip in launch, then, is an opportunity for Lofty Ambitions, and we’re taking full advantage of it. We’re worried that tomorrow’s launch time is unrealistic, as showers, winds, and thunderstorms move in, leaving only a 20-30% chance of launch. We won’t be at the Cape indefinitely, and we’ve heard others lament their necessity to leave before Thursday.
Saturn V for Apollo 19
But at least in public, NASA talks one day at a time, knowing that there are launch windows for three more days—and then again in December. They’ve tanked—filled the external fuel tank—under similar weather predictions and launched fine. The launch is a go, until it’s not. In the words of Mike Leinbach, the Shuttle Launch Director, “You fly when you’re ready, and if you’re not ready, you don’t go.” In the words of Mike Moses, “It’s another day in paradise.”
We keep expecting exhaustion to overtake us. But we can’t let our guard down. There are poisonous snake colonies in the wet ditches surrounding the KSC Visitor Complex (warning signs are posted), and we keep our eyes out for alligators. We see at least a couple of gators every day.
November 2: Countdown to the Cape…2-1… November 2, 2010
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Space Exploration.Tags: Countdown to the Cape, Space Shuttle
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Ten years ago today, humanity inaugurated its first permanent home above the clouds. On November 2, 2000, the International Space Station (ISS) was declared open for business and has been continuously occupied ever since. In these intervening years, the ISS has been home to more than 200 astronauts from 15 nations.
Originally, ISS was a studio compartment. After 34 Shuttle flights and dozens more by Soyuz, ISS has, with the addition of numerous pre-built units, morphed into a luxurious Tudor manor in which to live and work in space. The major drawback is the infrequent garbage pick-up by visiting spacecraft.
The astronauts, cosmonauts, and other space residents perform a range of spaceborne research, such as the nine experiments scheduled to take flight tomorrow on Discovery for their implementation on ISS. The ISS residents also perform the more mundane activities, like cleaning air filters, that necessary to keep their home happy and free of the fungus and spontaneous fires that plagued Mir in its last days.
Some of these tasks will be take over shortly by Robonaut 2, which is already loaded in the Shuttle’s cargo hold. Robonaut 2 is an adaptable humanoid robot that can use tools designed for humans in space suits. Its arms and hands are like those of humans, with similar range of motion and strength, a four-jointed thumb, and a light enough touch to move an envelope or piece of fabric. In fact, because the Robonaut 2 can be told force expectations ahead of time and then uses only the force necessary for the task. As opposed to its predecessor, Robonaut 1, this new iteration has redundant systems so that incorrect data will stop its motion.
Robonaut 2 will be mounted on a track that runs along a task board. The task board is loaded with knobs, switches, and panels representing what NASA’s Robonaut project manager Ron Diftler calls “an indicative set of tasks.” Because the task board is modular, the work can “grow in complexity over the first year,” said Diftler in yesterday’s briefing at Kennedy Space Center. NASA on the ground will work with the ISS crew to determine new tasks and swap out panels accordingly. Eventually, NASA wants to have an Extra-Vehicular Activity Robonaut as well, always at the ready for a repair spacewalk.
HERE IT IS! Discovery on Launch ad 39A!
NASA refers to ISS as a permanent home in low-Earth orbit and the first step in the expansion of space exploration to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.. It’s currently 220 miles above us, circling the Earth every 90 minutes. Click here or here to find out when to view it in your sky. In L.A., the next visible pass is on November 11 at 6:02:22pm, for less than a minute low in the northern sky.
