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" One of the headaches of high-tech test programmes is having to debug the test arrangements before you can start debugging the things you're trying to test. "
Henry Spencer
Test
Start
Before
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" In the long run, it's impossible to make progress without sometimes having setbacks, although people who get lucky on their first attempt sometimes forget this. "
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" The Moon may not be quite as appealing as Mars, but it's still a complex and poorly understood world, with many questions still unanswered. "
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" Spaceflight, especially in the Mercury spacecraft, clearly wasn't going to be much like flying an airplane. "
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" Technically and financially, it might still make sense to give up on Ares I and simply write off the money spent on it, but politically, that's probably impossible. "
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" Sometimes a malfunctioning test setup actually gives the tested system a chance to show what it can do in an unrehearsed emergency. During a test of an Apollo escape system in the 1960s, the escape system successfully got the capsule clear of a malfunctioning test rocket. "
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" NASA has never had a problem finding capable people to be astronauts. NASA's problem was, and still is, finding ways to cut the list of capable applicants down to a manageable length. "
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" If your goal is to change the world, you can't start by doing things the same old way because it sells better. "
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World
" Claiming that solid rockets are necessary for a heavy-lift launcher is obvious nonsense. "
Henry Spencer
Solid
Necessary
Nonsense
" In a small spacecraft, it was hard for the other two guys to sleep when the on-duty man was talking to Mission Control regularly. "
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Mission
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" Sometimes people wonder why aeroplanes are so cheap and rockets are so expensive. Even the most superficial comparison shows one obvious difference: aeroplane engines use outside air to burn their fuel, while rockets have to carry their own oxidisers along. "
Henry Spencer
Wonder
Burn
Space
" Liquid oxygen is one of the cheapest manufactured substances on Earth. In large quantities, it costs pennies per kilogram - cheaper than milk or beer. "
Henry Spencer
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" Is manned space exploration important? Yes - not least because it simply works much better than sending robots. "
Henry Spencer
Important
Space
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" Past experience, on the shuttle and the Titan rockets, suggests that large multi-segment solid rockets have a probability of failure of 0.5 to 1 per cent. "
Henry Spencer
Probability
Past
Failure
" Foul-ups in testing are not uncommon, especially when the test setup is being tried for the first time. "
Henry Spencer
First Time
Test
Testing
" SpaceX does seem to have had a run of bad luck, with its first three launches all failing. "
Henry Spencer
Bad Luck
First
Three
" Speaking of photography, while the Apollo 8 crew shot hundreds of photos, there was one that got everybody's attention: a blue-and-white Earth rising over a gray moonscape. "
Henry Spencer
Earth
Gray
Attention
" Whether solid rockets are more or less likely to fail than liquid-fuel rockets is debatable. More serious, though, is that when they do fail, it's usually violent and spectacular. "
Henry Spencer
Serious
Spectacular
Fail
" My one concern is that when money gets tight, it's easy to cut R&D funding that isn't tied to a specific project - look at what's happened to NASA's aviation research. "
Henry Spencer
Money
Easy
Look
" An experienced designer with more freedom to act might have realised that there was just too much optimism in the Ares I concept: that a shuttle SRB was simply too small as a first stage for a rocket carrying the relatively heavy Orion spacecraft. "
Henry Spencer
Optimism
Too Much
Small
" Sure, there were hopes that Constellation's systems could later be adapted to support more ambitious goals. But Apollo had those hopes, too. It didn't work in 1970, and it wasn't going to work in 2020. "
Henry Spencer
Work
Goals
Support
" Supplying fuel for a Mars expedition from the lunar surface is often suggested, but it's hard to make it pay off - Moon bases are expensive, and just buying more rockets to launch fuel from Earth is relatively cheap. "
Henry Spencer
Space
Moon
Cheap
" It's true that Apollo 10's lander was overweight. Late in the craft's development, it became clear that its ballooning weight was endangering the whole mission. "
Henry Spencer
True
Development
Craft
" Progress requires setbacks; the only sure way to avoid failure is not to try. "
Henry Spencer
Progress
Failure
Way
" Historically, the U.S.'s big launchers fly seldom enough that their costs are dominated by annual upkeep of facilities and staff, not by the actual cost of each launch. The expensive part is maintaining the launch capability, not actually conducting launches. "
Henry Spencer
Big
Cost
Costs
" The Apollo programme of the 1960s had some weight problems, too; in particular, the lunar lander needed some fairly drastic weight-reduction work. "
Henry Spencer
Apollo
Work
Weight
" The demise of Constellation is not the death of a dream. It's just the end of an illusion. "
Henry Spencer
Just
Illusion
End
" In 1960-61, a small group of female pilots went through many of the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts and scored very well on them - in fact, better than some of the astronauts did. "
Henry Spencer
Group
Tests
Small
" Reusable rockets promise much easier testing because you should usually get them back, and you can debug as you go rather than having to get everything perfect the first time. "
Henry Spencer
You
Space
Perfect
" In the first few years, it was at least plausible to come in in the morning and read all the Usenet traffic that had come in, and 15 minutes later be off doing something useful. "
Henry Spencer
First
Doing
Years
" Solid-fuel rockets can't easily be shut down on command. "
Henry Spencer
Command
Shut
Down