The little Rocket that Can’t.
Its Monday night: 11:45 PM. Just got home from work. It’s going to be a weird week. I’m sure a lot of you have noticed I haven’t written much lately. I’ve been exhausted. Work went crazy back in Feb. Specifics: well, Eh…. you know the middle-middle manager position I hold doesn’t make much sense to outsiders. But I can tell you, lately, I feel a bit like the launch director at NASA. In general, I work on the mission to put a people on Mars. Some guy from Texas thought that one up few years back. Called it “Lightspeed.” Thought it would catch the attention of public. Said we needed a goal to strive for. My real job: assemble the rocket, attach the payload, final test it, and roll it out onto the launch pad, and say “10, 9 8 ….”
Being a former rocket scientist type, I can tell you it never works that way. Back in the late 80’s were trying to prep a vehicle for launch. After we got everything out on the launch pad we noticed a hydrazine leak on one of the fuel lines. (BTW hydrazine is highly corrosive, toxic and explosive. You really want to avoid putting it on your cereal in the morning.) We goofed around for a week, emptying tanks and refitting fuel lines. Each time we did, a new leak sprung somewhere and ate holes in more fuel lines. We were going nuts working lots of overtime. Then someone did a little out of the box thinking and got a can of Bondo out of his car trunk, mixed it, spread it all over the fuel line couplings, pressure tested it, and “Houston, we have achieved seal.”.
Work’s been a lot like that lately. My group has been trying to prep a rocket for launch. Course, it’s not the rocket of our choice. Back about 18 months ago, we were supporting an ongoing series of missions and noticed the thrust nozzles on the rockets had some small problems. They were wasting fuel getting payloads into orbit. They’re good rockets, --Just a little fuel inefficient. We made a proposal to pull the thrust nozzles off, do a little machining and put them back on. We’d have to do this for all the nozzles we had in inventory, so it would take about 10,000 hours, or $600,000. It was a straight forward proposal. The fuel efficiency would pay for the machining in about two missions.
The proposal turned out turned out to be my big mistake. Once I wrote down hard numbers, they could be scrutinized. That’s when the upper-middles and politicians from Texas got to thinking. Somewhere years ago, someone, a NARS (Not a Rocket Scientist) had written a paper on how we were using too many different rocket types at NASA. This was a waste of money and rocket scientist time. The paper said, the NARS had looked at all the rocket types that had ever been in our inventory, and the old Redstone from the Mercury Program was the best in class, it was low cost, and could complete any basic mission. We should go back to using it exclusively. Total cost to retrofit all the old Redstones as general launch vehicle for NASA: 16,000 hours or just under $1,000,000. The Texan’s loved it. Never mind the paper was written by a marketing person from the manufacture of the old Redstone. Never mind the fact the Redstone had never lifted anything heavier than a single astronaut in motorcycle side-car sized capsule. Never mind that I was launching parts of the Space Station the size of mansion into orbit. –And most of all, never mind the fact the Redstone was really old technology and had of proclivity for blowing up on the launch pad, seven times out of ten. The politicians and the upper middles of NASA wanted me to move to using the Redstone for my missions.
I had one of those “use hippo’s as your draft animal in a chariot race” conversations with my boss, the Upper Middle manager. (See Monday, January 24, 2005, the hippopotami review) I explained that I thought this was a bad idea. Retrofitting a Redstone to handle the space station component launches, here in California seemed, like it might be more complicated than the paper presented. I pointed to the last white paper project he had stuck my team on, putting rockets in sling shots to save fuel had finally worked but we’d wasted millions of dollars and killed a lot of astronauts. He just looked at me with one of those glassy-eyed Upper Middle looks, the kind they have when they already made up their mind. “Now, Stan, you know this isn’t as complicated as the Sling Shot Project.”
I looked back with one of those stern furrowed eyebrow looks I give him, when he’s more worried about where he’s going to lunch next than how many people might get killed or hurt by a Texas politician’s project. “And you know the person that wrote this paper, and the people that just made this decision are a bunch of NARS.”
"Hey, he said, giving me one of those managerial I use to be a beautiful frat boy, you were a geek in high school smiles. "Give the project a good name too like, 'MARS Optional Lift Project' '' He seemed quite proud of thinking that one up on his own.
Well, I have a mortgage to pay. So, I had to do the MOLP project. Oh yeah, and I still had to support the ongoing missions with the current rockets. Because of that, I was given the budget for the 10,000 hour nozzle project which has long since been done and paid for itself. (Every Texas politician and Upper-Middle manager knows the best way to save money is to spend twice as much.)
But that’s why I’m writing this. The MOLP project is not doing so well. We are working a lot of overtime. Redstones are supposed to be the single rocket used for launches starting in August. We’ve been trying just to do engine ignition testing on the refurbished Redstones since February. The manufacture has made a hundred and fifty changes to the Redstone, and delivered 88 different versions of the retrofitted rocket. They all have blown up on the launch pad. The manufacture calls this “final readiness testing.” Each time after the rocket disembowels itself all over the landscape, I send my workers out to look at the pieces and figure out what went wrong this time. We send e-mails to the manufacture, pointing out that they’re have not insulated their wires, and this is causing electrical arcs. We noted that the hydrazine is leaking from fuel lines they haven’t sealed. We point out, that a lot of times when they do seal leaks, they seem to create others. Sometimes they forget to tighten down the bolts holding the thruster nozzles on. But most of all I point out, that all these explosions are causing me to do way too much support work on the clean up. I have to hire bull dozer crews and fireman that weren’t in my original budget projections. –And while I can clean the launch pad up in a few days now, and put up the latest version of rocket out there for test, we are no closer to safely igniting the engines than we were in February. We are getting way behind schedule and can’t probably recover. When we send these messages we get very strange answers back like: “That will never happen in flight.”
“You need to think out of the box.”
“We specialize in designing rocket concepts not launching or flying them.”
“We’ll have a new version of the Redstone to you in a day or so. Try that one.”
“We’re fine down here in Texas, how you all doin?”
Today, the manufacture sent me a list of brainstorming ideas on how I can get the rockets to blow up quicker. They figure the problem with the schedule is my inability to ignite the engines, blow up rockets, and clean up the mess quick enough. One of their ideas suggested I not limit myself to testing one rocket at a time, I should try and ignite the engines on thirteen rockets all at once. That way if they all blow up, at least we’d probably have a good sample of all the problems that were unlikely to occur on real flight.
I have sent them a response on the logistics and costs of running thirteen simultaneous explosions at once. I even pointed out the concurrent explosions might mask the problems from one rocket to another as they obliterate each other. We are having a meeting on this subject tomorrow.
Being a former rocket scientist type, I can tell you it never works that way. Back in the late 80’s were trying to prep a vehicle for launch. After we got everything out on the launch pad we noticed a hydrazine leak on one of the fuel lines. (BTW hydrazine is highly corrosive, toxic and explosive. You really want to avoid putting it on your cereal in the morning.) We goofed around for a week, emptying tanks and refitting fuel lines. Each time we did, a new leak sprung somewhere and ate holes in more fuel lines. We were going nuts working lots of overtime. Then someone did a little out of the box thinking and got a can of Bondo out of his car trunk, mixed it, spread it all over the fuel line couplings, pressure tested it, and “Houston, we have achieved seal.”.
Work’s been a lot like that lately. My group has been trying to prep a rocket for launch. Course, it’s not the rocket of our choice. Back about 18 months ago, we were supporting an ongoing series of missions and noticed the thrust nozzles on the rockets had some small problems. They were wasting fuel getting payloads into orbit. They’re good rockets, --Just a little fuel inefficient. We made a proposal to pull the thrust nozzles off, do a little machining and put them back on. We’d have to do this for all the nozzles we had in inventory, so it would take about 10,000 hours, or $600,000. It was a straight forward proposal. The fuel efficiency would pay for the machining in about two missions.
The proposal turned out turned out to be my big mistake. Once I wrote down hard numbers, they could be scrutinized. That’s when the upper-middles and politicians from Texas got to thinking. Somewhere years ago, someone, a NARS (Not a Rocket Scientist) had written a paper on how we were using too many different rocket types at NASA. This was a waste of money and rocket scientist time. The paper said, the NARS had looked at all the rocket types that had ever been in our inventory, and the old Redstone from the Mercury Program was the best in class, it was low cost, and could complete any basic mission. We should go back to using it exclusively. Total cost to retrofit all the old Redstones as general launch vehicle for NASA: 16,000 hours or just under $1,000,000. The Texan’s loved it. Never mind the paper was written by a marketing person from the manufacture of the old Redstone. Never mind the fact the Redstone had never lifted anything heavier than a single astronaut in motorcycle side-car sized capsule. Never mind that I was launching parts of the Space Station the size of mansion into orbit. –And most of all, never mind the fact the Redstone was really old technology and had of proclivity for blowing up on the launch pad, seven times out of ten. The politicians and the upper middles of NASA wanted me to move to using the Redstone for my missions.
I had one of those “use hippo’s as your draft animal in a chariot race” conversations with my boss, the Upper Middle manager. (See Monday, January 24, 2005, the hippopotami review) I explained that I thought this was a bad idea. Retrofitting a Redstone to handle the space station component launches, here in California seemed, like it might be more complicated than the paper presented. I pointed to the last white paper project he had stuck my team on, putting rockets in sling shots to save fuel had finally worked but we’d wasted millions of dollars and killed a lot of astronauts. He just looked at me with one of those glassy-eyed Upper Middle looks, the kind they have when they already made up their mind. “Now, Stan, you know this isn’t as complicated as the Sling Shot Project.”
I looked back with one of those stern furrowed eyebrow looks I give him, when he’s more worried about where he’s going to lunch next than how many people might get killed or hurt by a Texas politician’s project. “And you know the person that wrote this paper, and the people that just made this decision are a bunch of NARS.”
"Hey, he said, giving me one of those managerial I use to be a beautiful frat boy, you were a geek in high school smiles. "Give the project a good name too like, 'MARS Optional Lift Project' '' He seemed quite proud of thinking that one up on his own.
Well, I have a mortgage to pay. So, I had to do the MOLP project. Oh yeah, and I still had to support the ongoing missions with the current rockets. Because of that, I was given the budget for the 10,000 hour nozzle project which has long since been done and paid for itself. (Every Texas politician and Upper-Middle manager knows the best way to save money is to spend twice as much.)
But that’s why I’m writing this. The MOLP project is not doing so well. We are working a lot of overtime. Redstones are supposed to be the single rocket used for launches starting in August. We’ve been trying just to do engine ignition testing on the refurbished Redstones since February. The manufacture has made a hundred and fifty changes to the Redstone, and delivered 88 different versions of the retrofitted rocket. They all have blown up on the launch pad. The manufacture calls this “final readiness testing.” Each time after the rocket disembowels itself all over the landscape, I send my workers out to look at the pieces and figure out what went wrong this time. We send e-mails to the manufacture, pointing out that they’re have not insulated their wires, and this is causing electrical arcs. We noted that the hydrazine is leaking from fuel lines they haven’t sealed. We point out, that a lot of times when they do seal leaks, they seem to create others. Sometimes they forget to tighten down the bolts holding the thruster nozzles on. But most of all I point out, that all these explosions are causing me to do way too much support work on the clean up. I have to hire bull dozer crews and fireman that weren’t in my original budget projections. –And while I can clean the launch pad up in a few days now, and put up the latest version of rocket out there for test, we are no closer to safely igniting the engines than we were in February. We are getting way behind schedule and can’t probably recover. When we send these messages we get very strange answers back like: “That will never happen in flight.”
“You need to think out of the box.”
“We specialize in designing rocket concepts not launching or flying them.”
“We’ll have a new version of the Redstone to you in a day or so. Try that one.”
“We’re fine down here in Texas, how you all doin?”
Today, the manufacture sent me a list of brainstorming ideas on how I can get the rockets to blow up quicker. They figure the problem with the schedule is my inability to ignite the engines, blow up rockets, and clean up the mess quick enough. One of their ideas suggested I not limit myself to testing one rocket at a time, I should try and ignite the engines on thirteen rockets all at once. That way if they all blow up, at least we’d probably have a good sample of all the problems that were unlikely to occur on real flight.
I have sent them a response on the logistics and costs of running thirteen simultaneous explosions at once. I even pointed out the concurrent explosions might mask the problems from one rocket to another as they obliterate each other. We are having a meeting on this subject tomorrow.
posted by Stan at 2:32 AM
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