Re:After a decade, NASA’s big rocket fails its first real test
by dmix on Sunday January 17, 2021 @02:21PM
(#25813936)
Wasn’t this simply a byproduct of Congress trying to control the process? The idea of hard deadlines and low risk.
Apparently they only have until Feb to try to test it again to make sure they can launch this year. That sounds like pure political pressure instead of organizational culture.
Congress tried to cancel this whole test to speed things up so they were apparently fortunate to have done this test at all.
Re:After a decade, NASA’s big rocket fails its first real test
by akiselev on Sunday January 17, 2021 @02:32PM
(#25814044)
No, it's a pathological NASA problem. It does involve Congress and the public indirectly, since they're both terrible at statistics and mission failures have a huge impact on NASA's budget. Mission success has diminishing returns at about 80% chance of success so (as an example), NASA can spend $250 million on a mission with an 80% chance or $500 million for a 95% chance. The probability of two $250 million missions failing is 4% but the public only looks at the absolute number of failures instead of absolute number of successful missions or their cost so NASA decades ago learned to err on the side of extreme caution for self survival.
This style of risk management has trickled down across the entire agency, compounded by pork barreling, so now pretty much everything NASA does is done as a one off trying to optimize for least number of total failures at the expense of productivity.
NASA is not like that, they are more conservative, spend a lot of time and money making sure things work the first time, so when they don't, then it is a problem.
This, BTW, is one thing that killed Armadillo Aerospace.
> Carmack said another mistake the company made was not to go into series production, making several versions of the STIG rockets simultaneously so that the loss of a single vehicle would not be as traumatic. “That was our critical mistake in the last few years, because we should have been able to put more of these together,” he said.
It is not that NASA doesn't have the right to fail, but in their case, it is a major setback, and it is a bit disappointing considering how much SLS went overboard.