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Per Aspera (Space Agency Plan Quest)

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KNakamura said:
... it took 6 years for NASA to stop selecting on that. You can kinda see why I do not think our first class should be neglecting this.

It wasn't until Group *6*, the people who would never fly due to budget cuts (but did form the core of the Space Shuttle program) that the test requirement was dropped. In 1967
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Within the decade is quite quickly, I'd argue.

Anyway, military pilots are far more radioactive in this environment than IRL.

These are the people who personally unleashed the apocalypse, after all. I like the non military mature of pur little spaceprogram, and want to keep it that way.
If we have to delay our first manned flight by a year to accomplish that, that's fine by me.

There is no deadline, no americans or soviets ready to steal a first.
 
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10ebbor10 said:
These are the people who personally unleashed the apocalypse, after all. I like the non military mature of pur little spaceprogram, and want to keep it that way.
If we have to delay our first manned flight by a year to accomplish that, that's fine by me.
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.. We've already done military things, and we've recruited former military personnel. I get where you're coming from, but..
 
pbluekan said:
Naturally SV goes gaga for cosmonaut. Let's be a bit more original and not just go Soviet.
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Yeah. And in the setting vote the "soviet victory" option got almost no votes, figured we want to parrot that breed of socialism at a minimum.
10ebbor10 said:
Flight experience just means they survived the war, and weren't executed for (not) dropping atomics on a city. The actual overlap between spaceflight and military flight us limited. Heck, one could afgue that sailors would be better, as submariners know what it's like to be locked in a can with life support and can also do astronavigation.
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You make a damn good point about looking for submariners. These space capsules will be in the air for longer than strategic bombers with less space for humans than fighters, while having a "you die if something goes wrong with your machine" factor only rivalled by actual submarines. It does seem that our scientists are still focusing on the technical problems, and haven't started looking at human factors seriously yet.

That said, I would like more info about that "test pilot culture" problem you mentioned, because just searching NASA and "test pilot culture" gets me a bunch of book excerpts and articles and I don't have the spoons today to sort out which ones could be serious scholarly sources.

Also of note, I agree with @KNakamura that experience operating new, dangerous, and untested machinery would be useful... but the "Flight Experience" vote option makes no reference to specifically seeking out test pilots. Just those with a lot of flight hours in general. Aside from being good at not dying when exposed to high G-forces (which is the easiest part of the fighter pilot skillset for us to train in-house) there is very little overlap between what you need to safely come home from a fight between production jet fighters, and what you need to not crash a first generation space capsul.

Now that I think about it, and how nobody in-universe is considering submariners, there is a very apparent blind spot some people have of "Space exploration involves cutting-edge vehicles going into the sky, so obviously the AWESOME SKY PLANE PEOPLE are the ideal personnel for the job" when the skillset overlap in reality tiny. Chasing fighter aces just has us sink deeper into that blind spot.

And remember, this is not the cold war. It is perfectly acceptable to take time and get a solid training program, rather than grabbing existing aces to make sure we one-up the soviets or whatever.
 
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10ebbor10 said:
Also, we have an airstrip and no manned rocket atm, flight experience is one of the easiest things for us to create. Just acquire a few trainers and maybe some surplus jets.
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And time in the air does not flight experience make. You know we're not looking for hours in the cockpit when we say "flight experience". We're looking for the abilities that make someone a good pilot in the field.

More to the point, there is a reason I didn't just say "we need ex pilots" I also am advocating for science. We need engineers, if we can get them to go up.
10ebbor10 said:
Flight experience just means they survived the war, and weren't executed for (not) dropping atomics on a city. The actual overlap between spaceflight and military flight us limited. Heck, one could afgue that sailors would be better, as submariners know what it's like to be locked in a can with life support and can also do astronavigation.
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Flight experience does not just mean they survived in all cases; that's a gross simplification. If we're looking at early NASA as our example here, they were fighter pilots with decorated combat records. They don't freeze under pressure, and likely thrive in it. They think innovatively and out of the box in stressful situations and act decisively. You literally cannot teach those skills.

I'd also say that mariners or submariners would be decent candidates. I agree with you there. I don't really agree that the overlap for space flight and atmospheric flight experience doesn't exist. G's, for one; while trainable, you can't beat working experience. Experience with a fully 3D working environment is also critical. Even submariners don't get the same sort of immersion in a 3D environment that pilots get, especially so as the pilots have personal experience in navigation, movement, and intuitive deadreckoning.

The TL;DR here is that you can't just train someone to have the abilities the early people in space had. We, in quest, don't know what abilities they are going to need we can only guess.
 
General_Urist said:
and what you need to not crash a first generation space capsul.
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To be fair, what you need to not crash a first gen space capsule is a strong incentive not to touch any of the buttons. These things should be able to fly empty, and we should test them empty until we are sure they work empty. Flight should be entirely automatic, the passenger should be there as cargo, or maybe to operate science experiments.

Human operation of space capsules shouldn't be needed until early docking experiments (and in that case, I'd still prefer an automated docking system) or the lunar landing.
 
10ebbor10 said:
To be fair, what you need to not crash a first gen space capsule is a strong incentive not to touch any of the buttons. These things should be able to fly empty, and we should test them empty until we are sure they work empty. Flight should be entirely automatic, the passenger should be there as cargo, or maybe to operate science experiments.

Human operation of space capsules shouldn't be needed until early docking experiments (and in that case, I'd still prefer an automated docking system) or the lunar landing.
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So you mean, something completely unlike all early manned spacecraft
 
KNakamura said:
So you mean, something completely unlike all early manned spacecraft
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Not really?

Both Mercury and Vostok had fully automated control systems (as well as manual backups). In fact, the Soviets went so far as to put a code on Vostok's control systems, preventing the useage of the manual control systems unless it was entered, with the code sealed in an enveloppe to be opened only in cases of emergency.

But even so, I will argue that if we can not launch a capsule and guarantee it comes back without human intervention, we should not launch it at all.
 
10ebbor10 said:
Not really?

Both Mercury and Vostok had fully automated control systems (as well as manual backups). In fact, the Soviets went so far as to put a code on Vostok's control systems, preventing the useage of the manual control systems unless it was entered, with the code sealed in an enveloppe to be opened only in cases of emergency.

But even so, I will argue that if we can not launch a capsule and guarantee it comes back without human intervention, we should not launch it at all.
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Mercury did! And.. even still, famously, John Glenn had to use manual control to ensure safe operation. Like it's a recurring theme in early NASA things that manual operation was as important as automatic operation. (Hell, Sigma 7 is a great example of the benefits of trained and skilled operators.)
 
KNakamura said:
So you mean, something completely unlike all early manned spacecraft
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All American manned spacecraft; Vostok could fly fully hands-off. NASA had a test-pilot mentality where it was totally fine if a spacecraft behaved erratically because the pilots should be able to fix the situation, which IMO is downright irresponsible and a result of the flyboy culture pervasive in the US at the time (which manifests ina whole bunch of other things too; don't get me started on the US missile program). In a sensible space program, you wouldn't have single-point-of-failure mission-critical sysetms where the expectation is "oh yeah the pilot will just fly by the seat of his pants"
 
C_Z said:
[..] NASA had a test-pilot mentality where it was totally fine if a spacecraft behaved erratically because the pilots should be able to fix the situation, which IMO is downright irresponsible and a result of the flyboy culture pervasive in the US at the time [..]
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It's not particularly irresponsible for test vehicles to rely on both attempting to engineer most of the flaws out, but have a trained crew for the inevitable failures.

I would also like citations on this. I've read a lot of stuff on early NASA by various people involved, and I never ever got the impression NASA was quite that loose.
 
KNakamura said:
It's not particularly irresponsible for test vehicles to rely on both attempting to engineer most of the flaws out, but have a trained crew for the inevitable failures.

I would also like citations on this. I've read a lot of stuff on early NASA by various people involved, and I never ever got the impression NASA was quite that loose.
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I don't have citations on a subjective assessment by myself of how things like having a repeated pattern of your flight instruments failing is bad, but like, that's bad, even for the '60s anywhere outside of very early stage flight testing. For Mercury, and excluding launches which didn't test the spacecraft (either due to blowing up before then or just being ballistic arcs that weren't intended to reenter in a survivable manner) we have:

MR1AWent fine on automated systems
MR2Went fine on automated systems
MR3Poorly oriented retro-burn because of crew error while trying to fly by visuals instead of instruments
MR4Went fine
BJ1Cascading failures prompted by failure of booster separation resulted in failure of automated systems, but overall successful mission
MA2Went fine on automated systems
MA4Pitch responsiveness was poor after separation from the booster. Experienced attitude issues due to thruster failures.
MA5Roll thruster failed due to metal chip in fuel line, causing attitude drift; automated system successfully corrected for this.
MA6Damping system fired late, causing oscillations that had to be corrected by the automatic system. Experienced roll problems later in the flight that increased propellant consumption; manual control was used to reduce this. During descent, oscillations forced the switch back to automatic control, which was better at damping them out.
MA7Failure of the horizon tracking sensor used to indicate spacecraft attitude, disabling automatic control.
MA8Went fine
MA9Electric short circuit disabled automatic control and added significant complexity.

The average flight's issues happening on a single flight should be a reason to scrub that mission, pause new launches, and debug. That NASA continued to press forward is an indication of how they were treating these as test flights where risk and unexpected behaviour was acceptable, as well as the immense political pressure they were under.

I would deeply hope that we would not put a human pilot into space on a system that has such a poor reliability rate and lacks redundancy.
 
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  • Voting
    • Scheduled vote count started by Shadows on Mar 21, 2024 at 6:55 PM, finished with 65 posts and 41 votes.
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  • Voting
    • C_Z said:
    The average flight's issues happening on a single flight should be a reason to scrub that mission, pause new launches, and debug. That NASA continued to press forward is an indication of how they were treating these as test flights where risk and unexpected behaviour was acceptable, as well as the immense political pressure they were under.

    I would deeply hope that we would not put a human pilot into space on a system that has such a poor reliability rate and lacks redundancy.
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    I would hope so too, but I also remember from Mercury that they were very much in learning as they go mode. (Which.. had.. consequences - see Apollo 1)

    Personally, I think that there's a virtue to test flights, but I agree that had NASA had more time they likely would have wanted to slow down a bit to do more testing.

    Fair enough.
     
    KNakamura said:
    I would hope so too, but I also remember from Mercury that they were very much in learning as they go mode. (Which.. had.. consequences - see Apollo 1)

    Personally, I think that there's a virtue to test flights, but I agree that had NASA had more time they likely would have wanted to slow down a bit to do more testing.

    Fair enough.
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    Yeah, I think we do have a bit of an advantage in that we're not racing the Soviets in a dick-swinging contest to prove we can destroy them harder than they can destroy us, and will hopefully have several years of experience with spacecraft attitude control by that point due to our progress being satellite launcher -> earth observation satellites -> crewed spaceflight instead of ICBM -> crewed spaceflight -> earth observation satellites. There is a time crunch, but given the simultaneous requirements of interplanetary probes, our autonomous guidance systems should be robust by that point.
     
    KNakamura said:
    It's not particularly irresponsible for test vehicles to rely on both attempting to engineer most of the flaws out, but have a trained crew for the inevitable failures.

    I would also like citations on this. I've read a lot of stuff on early NASA by various people involved, and I never ever got the impression NASA was quite that loose.
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    NASA didn't really adopt a zero-risk culture until after Apollo 1. That said, the thought process in Mercury actually was that pilots were there as cargo and should only use the controls in emergencies, but they made them, you know. Accessible. In the event of those emergencies. The Soviet tendency to lock down control systems is one of the reasons why the discrepancy in death tolls of the programs is so stark.
     
    Shadows said:
    Your chemistry department in Mogadishu was largely a ghost town anymore. You'd have to hire more scientists… who would then probably also flee to Beijing. Some of them, anyway.
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    C_Z said:
    Long-term, we should set up a robust system for long-distance STEM collaboration.
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    Setting up a pan-IEC network would be a big task, we're all around the world so our signals need to somehow cross wide oceans and not just span the North American continent.

    But despite that challenge, I think we really need it. Or at minimum a robust fax machine network. Hearing that most of the science departments in our Mogadishu HQ and launch site are practically deserted is alarming: Each branch of research is in its own corner of the world thousands of klicks from each other, with rapid communication between them severely limited by technology if not outright nonexistent- whereas before all our researchers were on the same campus and could easily collaborate. The two consequences I fear are 1) "siloing" as the physicists get used to not communicating with the chemists not communicating with the computer scientists not communicating with the aeronautical engineers etc leading to lack of the informal interdisciplinary collaboration that really drives breakthroughs. 2) Penelope's own ability to efficiently manage the IEC is reduced as most of the cats she has to wrangle are continents away and she has much reduced ability to check in on projects if something is out of the ordinary.

    C_Z said:
    I blame @CyberFemme for this.
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    I want to know the lore behind this.
    Rockeye said:
    [ ] [RIGHT STUFF] Size

    This is making me remember an anime where the chosen astronauts were tiny Japanese schoolgirls, for their low weight XD
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    I know that one. Just you wait until in two decades we get another nat 100 on matsci that lets us make effective Mechanical Counterpressure Suits. Plus since we want the stars to be for ALL of humanity and not just a few privilaged specialists we'll eventually want to explore getting normies who aren't PhDs or veteran pilots up there too, perhaps even teenagers since why bother spacefaring if you can never take your family...
     
    General_Urist said:
    Setting up a pan-IEC network would be a big task, we're all around the world so our signals need to somehow cross wide oceans and not just span the North American continent.

    But despite that challenge, I think we really need it. Or at minimum a robust fax machine network. Hearing that most of the science departments in our Mogadishu HQ and launch site are practically deserted is alarming: Each branch of research is in its own corner of the world thousands of klicks from each other, with rapid communication between them severely limited by technology if not outright nonexistent- whereas before all our researchers were on the same campus and could easily collaborate. The two consequences I fear are 1) "siloing" as the physicists get used to not communicating with the chemists not communicating with the computer scientists not communicating with the aeronautical engineers etc leading to lack of the informal interdisciplinary collaboration that really drives breakthroughs. 2) Penelope's own ability to efficiently manage the IEC is reduced as most of the cats she has to wrangle are continents away and she has much reduced ability to check in on projects if something is out of the ordinary.
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    Yeah, agreed on all of that. I don't think we can do it in the next five years, but after that, I think we should try and start investing in a proto-ARPANET to link all of our labs up.

    Prior to that, I think we could try and patch holes by rotating staff between Mogadishu and the outlying facilities relatively frequently and having abundant conferences?
    General_Urist said:
    I want to know the lore behind this.
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    So, @Shadows, one thing I noticed about this particular quest is that... well, if any of the space agency quests could get some an atlantis style tethered ring launch system built by, like, the late 1970s or early 1980s, it's totally this one. After all, it'd be a large, economics-boosting, human-morale-boosting, mobility-boosting, clean-energy boosting, science-boosting project that would require the cooperation of many many places around the rim of the Pacific Ocean, and who better than a quasi-anarchistic commune of local cooperatives to get such a 'big investment, big benefit to tons of people' sort of project done? To that effect, what do we have to do to get a LOT more chances to develop the various big idea for space launch devices, the lofstrom loops, the multi-tether space elevators, the skyhooks, and all of that? So far there seems to be just one project for that, could we push a LOT more investment to those, 'let's come up with kooky ideas' sorts of things?
     
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