"Not at all unprecedented, alas. I think it's a side effect of viewing the
technical people as interchangeable cogs in the machine, so it's routine
to assemble a new team that gets to start from scratch on a new project,
rather than keeping the previous project's successful team together so it
can hit the ground running on something new."
This is why the space telescope guys are pushing to make LUVIOR/Sagan space
telescope a giant hex-grid, sun shielded Webb clone: The team is still
notionally together, the hardware is very much designed, the know how
exists. Despite the fact that Starship will be in revenue service before it
launches, I still think it is a good idea to build it just like Webb.
On Sat, Mar 25, 2023 at 10:40 PM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Sun, 26 Mar 2023, Michael Kelly wrote:
Michael:Thank you for the kind words.
I'll add a thumbs-up to what the other Michael and others have already
said: very interesting and not at all boring!
...You might read two books by David W. Stumpf: "Minuteman: A
Technical History of the Missile that Defined American Nuclear Warfare",
and "Titan II: A History of a Cold War Missile." Both are very
thorough.
Two small corrections: (1) It's David K. Stumpf. (2) Small title
correction, one word omitted: the second book is subtitled "A History of
a Cold War Missile Program". It's a pretty thorough history of the Titan
II *program*. I'd have reservations about calling it thorough on the
technical side of the missile, though -- it's better on that than I'd
expected (especially given that Stumpf is a military historian, not an
engineer), but by no means complete. (For example, both Titan I and Titan
II took interesting, and by modern standards unconventional, approaches to
vernier thrusters for control and velocity trim, but Stumpf just alludes
to them in passing, very briefly, rather than explaining them.)
I only recently became aware of his Minuteman book and haven't read it
yet. He also did a book on the old Regulus sub-launched strategic cruise
missile, which was phased out when Polaris ramped up.
...I do know that all of the lessons learned in our ICBM development
history were forgotten by the Air Force, and TRW's veterans are almost
all retired or deceased. I've heard some inside scoop on the current
Sentinel missile development, none of it good. They're starting over
from scratch, as if no one had ever developed such a thing - ever.
Not at all unprecedented, alas. I think it's a side effect of viewing the
technical people as interchangeable cogs in the machine, so it's routine
to assemble a new team that gets to start from scratch on a new project,
rather than keeping the previous project's successful team together so it
can hit the ground running on something new. (The latter is unfortunately
rather harder to do nowadays, when the projects are few and far between,
but that hardly matters when upper management doesn't even understand that
they ought to be trying to do it.) This encourages the new team to think
that there's nothing much they ought to learn from previous efforts, and
also guarantees that there's no budget item or timesheet code for doing
so ("you're supposed to know how to do this stuff").
The guys who did ISS paid no attention to the Skylab experience, and
worse, very little to Shuttle-Mir, even though the latter was explicitly
meant to be a learning experience for the US about station operations!
Henry
