Engineering Thread

[GM Office Q]

Sick.

Success: Curiosity photos and landing.

Fail: X-51A SCRAMJet attempts to hit Mach 6 but failed.

[SharksGM]

Cool: James Webb Space Telescope, Thirty Metre Telescope.

Not Cool: Regressive governments slashing funding to basic research.

[TorontoGM]

I remember how interested I was when the first two rovers made it to Mars, then proceeded to completely forget about them until I saw the program "Death of a Mars Rover" on the National Geograhpic channel.

[GM Office Q]

Cool: James Webb Space Telescope, Thirty Metre Telescope.

I tested a couple of components of the JWST at Canada's DFL. I got paid to do almost nothing. Maybe that's why JWST cost 4x as much as Curiosity.

[Parker]

We just had to pressure-test an open drain line because some engineer refused to sign a test waiver because it would be tantamount to admitting he made a mistake on the line class.

So, weld cap on line, test, cut cap off. This is the industrial construction equivalent of digging a hole and filling it back in again, except that it cost the client $25,000.

This isn't the first time, either.

[SharksGM]

I tested a couple of components of the JWST at Canada's DFL. I got paid to do almost nothing. Maybe that's why JWST cost 4x as much as Curiosity.

That's part of it, but hiring trained personnel to do something is far from the worst way to spend government money. And like all space missions, it's better safe than sorry - remember Hubble's mirror? I also heard that a lot of the cost of JWST is keeping components in storage as Congress bickers over whether to fund it (sigh...) as seen here: http://www.spacenews.com/civil/110311-n ... l-fix.html . If they'd just finish the damn thing and launch it sooner it would cost less. NASA's also had curious adjustments to how project costs are calculated in recent years (whether personnel who work on it part-time are counted for the hours they spend on the specific project only or their full working hours), no pun intended.

Plus JWST will likely take more interesting images than Curioisity, no offense to that project.

[GM Office Q]

I tested a couple of components of the JWST at Canada's DFL. I got paid to do almost nothing. Maybe that's why JWST cost 4x as much as Curiosity.

That's part of it, but hiring trained personnel to do something is far from the worst way to spend government money. And like all space missions, it's better safe than sorry - remember Hubble's mirror? I also heard that a lot of the cost of JWST is keeping components in storage as Congress bickers over whether to fund it (sigh...) as seen here: http://www.spacenews.com/civil/110311-n ... l-fix.html . If they'd just finish the damn thing and launch it sooner it would cost less. NASA's also had curious adjustments to how project costs are calculated in recent years (whether personnel who work on it part-time are counted for the hours they spend on the specific project only or their full working hours), no pun intended.

Plus JWST will likely take more interesting images than Curioisity, no offense to that project.

I agree, there are much worse ways to spend government money. However, they are wasting boat loads of money with all the red tape/bureaucracy that postpones the completion of the project and keeps their components sitting in clean rooms across the continent.

JWST will have a much broader range of images, but I'm more interested in Curiosity's findings as it is much more up close and personal with the ability to pick up samples right from the planet's surface for analysis.