MSL reasons for delay |
MSL reasons for delay |
Mar 4 2009, 03:33 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2542 Joined: 13-September 05 Member No.: 497 |
I wanted to make sure that everyone interested sees Adrian Brown's articles at http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1319/1 and http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1318/1 about the technical and budgetary problems with MSL that led to the launch slip. While I can't claim to be privy to the budgetary and political issues at the mission level, the technical discussion seems like a fair summary of the situation as I understand it, at least as good a one as can be gathered from public sources.
People in other forums have complained about errors in these articles, but without giving specific examples or providing any factual basis for their objections. I don't find that very useful. If there are real flaws in this account, I'd be quite interested to know what they are. p.s. I guess we need to change the name of this subforum. -------------------- Disclaimer: This post is based on public information only. Any opinions are my own.
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Mar 6 2009, 03:27 AM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3419 Joined: 9-February 04 From: Minneapolis, MN, USA Member No.: 15 |
Let's face it, guys -- anything that has moving parts can fail. And a bunch of stuff without moving parts can fail, too.
There is a difference between equipment that fails because it's poorly designed and equipment that fails because it's poorly made or just because things happen that you can't prevent and wouldn't be expected to foresee. It's not, I don't think, that anyone thinks that any given organization is incompetent at making any given piece of equipment. I think Steve is right, we tend to get more nervous about devices with more moving parts than we do about devices with less moving parts (witness the greater worries about Sterling RTGs and their moving pistons vs. the more classic thermocouple-based RTGs with no moving parts). It is important to remember that almost all moving parts on almost every spacecraft we've ever launched have worked perfectly. My feel for it is that more spacecraft have died because of electronics failures than have died because a moving part broke or stuck. But we seem to remember and worry about the moving part failures more than about fried electronics... -the other Doug -------------------- “The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.” -Mark Twain
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