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Friday, May 30, 2003

Importance of X38 Technologies

Few Americans know the significant advances and cost effective capabilities developed by NASAs X38 program. That program has been a victim of the cost cutting requirements of Sean OKeefs administration. No one doubts the need for cost improvement and program consolidation. This was especially true for the parallel programs of Crew Rescue Vehicle (CRV) and Crew Transfer Vehicle (CTV). Now those programs have been consolidated under a new (and typically NASAian way of renaming the same thing over and over again) program called Orbital Space Plane (OSP). There remains debate over the politics of program realignment at the agency, but unfortunately the progress made in the loosing programs was largely lost with the demise of that program (X38 in this case). The list of critical technologies that had advanced beyond paper studies and had in fact had reached first production is quite long. Electromechanical actuators with multi string redundancy, flush air data nose cone and processing, network elements to isolate processor faults, Space Integrated GPS / INS (SIGI), are all applicable to any new vehicle. The remarkable progress in the development of the parafoil may not apply to every configuration but surely is just as important. I would hear NASA managers say that the hands on experience gained by the development process for X38 would help the team for later programs, as if this was an equal replacement for the flight tests that would have been accomplished in the X38 program. While true that the experience remains valuable, a better approach would have been to integrate the Marshall and Johnson teams together for OSP and bring forward the technology programs of X38 as part of OSP. This still might happen. Johnson and Marshall made significant progress in team building during the Space Launch Initiative (SLI) program over the last two years (more on that later). I continue to hope that NASA can "harvest the seeds" that its motivated workforce continue to plant. For the agency to succeed with smaller budgets pressured by home-land security and defense it will need to yield return on every investment.

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Wednesday, May 28, 2003

My Mission Statement

1) Provide a dialog for improvements in Access to Space

2) Provide helpful Mac OSX hints

3) Provide explanation of configuration control

4) Provide HTML generator for source code documentation

5) Provide Java based Go and Connect 4 Games



My goal is to promote a dialog about space policy and review many of the programmatic problems that an agency like NASA faces. NASA is a premier organization that has lost it bearings. At the Johnson Space Center, I was fortunate to be surrounded by people who believe in the destiny of man in space, and applied their skills faithfully to promote that endeavor. But as in all large organizations, the inertia of the organization often limits creative solutions and changes. Shuttle is an awesome vehicle. Every day that I work on the program, I was more amazed at the complexity and ingenuity of the engineering solutions to problems most of us have never thought about. As a Shuttle middle technical manager, I also saw (and participated in) the political wrangling to make improvements in our nations only manned program. Throughout this conversation I will share the dilemmas that management faced and the sometime suboptimal compromises that we all complained about even knowing that an optimal answer did not exist.




I also know that significant improvements can be made in almost every discipline, especially when applied to a next generation vehicle. NASA is constantly struggling to try both 1) take lessons learned of the pass and also 2) start with a "clean sheet". It is a fallacy to say ONE NASA, such an organization never existed. There have always been competing factions, some promoting what is working now, and others promising leaps into the future. Both group are cynical towards each other! And as always, both make good points as a devil's advocate to the other.




An additional goal is that this web site provides useful information for people that want to upgrade their knowledge and skill in the computing world. After writing thousands of lines of code, managing millions of dollars, and trying to keep my group's computational capabilities up to date, I believe that Mac OSX has provided the foundation for a seamless operation between an unix like development environment and easy to use windows. Most Mac Power Users already know this, but there is much more under the hood then most people know.




Finally, I have a number of pet projects that are under development. Go and Connect 4 are games that I am testing the cross-platform development on OSX.


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