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#160 by Lee Jay on 11 Apr, 2014 01:16
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What an amazing rocket the Atlas V is!
Congratulations for the ULA team to pull off 2 successful launches in 7 days!
Indeed! And those solids really help it hop of the pad, don't they! -
#161 by kevin-rf on 11 Apr, 2014 01:42
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Indeed! And those solids really help it hop of the pad, don't they!
Watching the sideways side step of the v411 is more fun
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#162 by Jim on 11 Apr, 2014 02:45
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Lets see if this works. This is from an iPhone. Location unknown
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#163 by Lee Jay on 11 Apr, 2014 02:48
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Lets see if this works. This is from an iPhone. Location unknown
Ripping! -
#164 by Artyom. on 11 Apr, 2014 02:51
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#165 by jcm on 11 Apr, 2014 05:43
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ULA note mission success!
If I understand the forum timetag behaviour correctly, you posted this at 2158 GMT which was 4h15 min after launch - this is about 1.5 hours EARLIER than one might normally expect for a 3-burn GEO delivery, but is consistent with a fast ascent using
a higher-than-normal transfer orbit apogee, say 200 x 40000 km, and a third burn at around GEO altitude before apogee was
reached. So I was originally surprised by the early time of this announcement, but I guess it's ok. Another implication
is that if perigee was over the equator (which doesn't have to be true) the inclination might be in the 5-7 degree range
as we've seen for some past SIGINT missions, rather than being 0 to 1 deg. -
#166 by baldusi on 11 Apr, 2014 14:48
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Congratulations again on making it look so easy one such a tight schedule.
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#167 by LouScheffer on 11 Apr, 2014 16:27
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Yet another excellent performance by ULA.
I have a questions with no precise answer, I'm sure. How much of this recent performance is top-down, and how much bottom up?
By top-down, I mean management considering that reliability and dependability are their competitive strong points, and assigning extra people and resources to make absolutely sure everything is ready on the first go. By bottom up, I mean employees believing that there is now significant competition, and pressing harder to make sure everything is OK so their jobs and company survive. (I saw this at HP, long ago. They cut back to 9 days every two weeks, at 90% pay, since their sales were down. But production went up, not down, since it was clear there was a real problem, which led people to work more than 10% harder/faster/more efficiently.)
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#168 by Jim on 11 Apr, 2014 16:34
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There is no way to tell since there has been no change in performance. How do you better 100%?
Increased flight rate is done by deliberate action. The processes are analyzed and duplicate or little value added ones are eliminated or reduced or some are reordered to find efficiencies. -
#169 by Nick L. on 11 Apr, 2014 16:50
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Yet another excellent performance by ULA.
I have a questions with no precise answer, I'm sure. How much of this recent performance is top-down, and how much bottom up?
By top-down, I mean management considering that reliability and dependability are their competitive strong points, and assigning extra people and resources to make absolutely sure everything is ready on the first go. By bottom up, I mean employees believing that there is now significant competition, and pressing harder to make sure everything is OK so their jobs and company survive. (I saw this at HP, long ago. They cut back to 9 days every two weeks, at 90% pay, since their sales were down. But production went up, not down, since it was clear there was a real problem, which led people to work more than 10% harder/faster/more efficiently.)
It's both, but it's not a recent change. The management knows that reliability and schedule performance are the company's edge, and the engineers and technicians work hard to maintain that edge and find new ways to enhance it - those things haven't changed since before ULA's formation. The "we're one failure away from going out of business"/"you're only as good as your last launch" mindset has been with ULA and its ancestor companies since the AC-70, -71, and -74 failures. -
#170 by Nick L. on 11 Apr, 2014 17:24
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GoPro view from the pad (always love these):
Credit: Matthew Travis
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#171 by Blackstar on 11 Apr, 2014 17:37
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The reliability is not an accident. It is a planned outcome.
Go back in history a bit, to the 1990s. August 1998 there was a Titan IV failure with a classified satellite. Then in April 1999 there were two Titan IV failures involving DSP and Milstar satellites, both left in useless orbits. Add those three failures together and the loss was billions of dollars (Jim may know the total, but I seem to remember that the dollar amount was publicly revealed, and it was in the $3-$4 billion range, including the rockets). USAF commissioned an investigation, led by Tom Young, who is kinda the go-to guy for this stuff:
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/launchers-99p.html
"To sum up months of work, we found problems in accountability, quality, subcontract/supplier management and cost emphasis," said A. Thomas Young, the former president and chief operating officer of Martin Marietta Corp., who chaired the panel."
One of the primary conclusions of the investigation was that USAF had gotten sloppy and allowed their contractors to get sloppy. There were a lot of reasons for this, but there had been a shift in oversight responsibility during the 1990s. USAF had decided to save costs by dismissing a lot of its civilian in-house acquisition oversight. They sent a lot of people packing (I think that many of them were at Aerospace Corporation). The idea was that they could let the contractors self-monitor their performance and report on how they were doing. "We're doing everything right!" was the standard response.
This report sent some shockwaves through USAF and DoD, and the lesson that they learned was that it was stupid to save a few tens of millions (or even over $100 million) a year when they were sticking billion dollar satellites atop rockets that were blowing up. Spend more money, achieve high reliability became the mantra.
And that legacy--billions of dollars lost after efforts to reduce costs, a scathing report, and a determined response to fix things--is why we got this:
http://spacenews.com/article/military-space/39832shelton-fires-back-at-spacex
Shelton Fires Back at SpaceX
By Irene Klotz | Mar. 12, 2014
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The head of Air Force Space Command has a response to Space Exploration Technologies Corp. CEO Elon Musk, who, during a spirited March 7 Senate hearing, asked why if SpaceX’s rockets “are good enough for NASA, are they not good enough for the Air Force?
________
So, when ULA achieves high reliability, it's because they're aiming for it. And they're getting paid extra for it. Now you can argue that USAF is paying too much, and you can argue that there's an opportunity cost to paying too much, but I'm simply pointing out that there's a legacy here. There's a reason.
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#172 by LouScheffer on 11 Apr, 2014 17:59
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There is no way to tell since there has been no change in performance. How do you better 100%?
Performance *has* improved, by not having technical issues delaying launches, even if the issues ultimately are successfully resolved. For example:QuoteThree times in the history of the Atlas 5 program has a rocket been forced to roll back after a scrub. Those instances were caused by technical troubles that required hardware removal-and-replacement jobs to be performed in the 30-story-tall VIF.
From http://spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av030/muos1status3.html
The previous rollbacks occurred on the Hellas Sat mission in 2003 to replace data instrumentation unit, the WGS 2 flight in 2009 to replace a leaky liquid oxygen valve and Intelsat 14 also in 2009 to replace an ordnance control assembly. -
#173 by Jim on 11 Apr, 2014 18:22
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Performance *has* improved, by not having technical issues delaying launches, even if the issues ultimately are successfully resolved. For example:
Too small of sample and those issues were with subcontractor hardware.
Also, the range is a "supplier" and it forced a rollback for this mission
MAVEN had a rollback issue that occurred during WDR.
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#174 by kevin-rf on 11 Apr, 2014 18:28
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At least no one dropped a clipboard
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#175 by William Graham on 11 Apr, 2014 18:39
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ULA note mission success!
If I understand the forum timetag behaviour correctly, you posted this at 2158 GMT which was 4h15 min after launch - this is about 1.5 hours EARLIER than one might normally expect for a 3-burn GEO delivery, but is consistent with a fast ascent using
a higher-than-normal transfer orbit apogee, say 200 x 40000 km, and a third burn at around GEO altitude before apogee was
reached. So I was originally surprised by the early time of this announcement, but I guess it's ok. Another implication
is that if perigee was over the equator (which doesn't have to be true) the inclination might be in the 5-7 degree range
as we've seen for some past SIGINT missions, rather than being 0 to 1 deg.
It is also possible that the "successful launch" announcement was made before the final burn - I believe that has happened before on NRO launches. I'd imagine if that were the case we'd probably be left with a near-GEO Centaur, so hopefully SeeSat will be able to shed some light on it before too long. -
#176 by WHAP on 12 Apr, 2014 05:53
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ULA note mission success!
If I understand the forum timetag behaviour correctly, you posted this at 2158 GMT which was 4h15 min after launch - this is about 1.5 hours EARLIER than one might normally expect for a 3-burn GEO delivery, but is consistent with a fast ascent using
a higher-than-normal transfer orbit apogee, say 200 x 40000 km, and a third burn at around GEO altitude before apogee was
reached. So I was originally surprised by the early time of this announcement, but I guess it's ok. Another implication
is that if perigee was over the equator (which doesn't have to be true) the inclination might be in the 5-7 degree range
as we've seen for some past SIGINT missions, rather than being 0 to 1 deg.
It is also possible that the "successful launch" announcement was made before the final burn - I believe that has happened before on NRO launches. I'd imagine if that were the case we'd probably be left with a near-GEO Centaur, so hopefully SeeSat will be able to shed some light on it before too long.
I don't believe you'd ever see ULA announcing mission success before spacecraft separation. -
#177 by William Graham on 12 Apr, 2014 09:06
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ULA note mission success!
If I understand the forum timetag behaviour correctly, you posted this at 2158 GMT which was 4h15 min after launch - this is about 1.5 hours EARLIER than one might normally expect for a 3-burn GEO delivery, but is consistent with a fast ascent using
a higher-than-normal transfer orbit apogee, say 200 x 40000 km, and a third burn at around GEO altitude before apogee was
reached. So I was originally surprised by the early time of this announcement, but I guess it's ok. Another implication
is that if perigee was over the equator (which doesn't have to be true) the inclination might be in the 5-7 degree range
as we've seen for some past SIGINT missions, rather than being 0 to 1 deg.
It is also possible that the "successful launch" announcement was made before the final burn - I believe that has happened before on NRO launches. I'd imagine if that were the case we'd probably be left with a near-GEO Centaur, so hopefully SeeSat will be able to shed some light on it before too long.
I don't believe you'd ever see ULA announcing mission success before spacecraft separation.
I've seen it before. To give one example from a past thread here, the "successful launch" press release for NROL-26 was posted an hour after liftoff. Spacecraft separation occurred in GSO so there is no way powered flight could have been completed before it was announced in that case. I think it is at least possible that the same is true here. -
#178 by edkyle99 on 12 Apr, 2014 16:34
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GoPro view from the pad (always love these):
Interesting to see - and hear - the big spherical LC 41 LOX tank venting immediately after liftoff. Does anyone know if the entire tank load is vented away after a liftoff?
- Ed Kyle -
#179 by WHAP on 12 Apr, 2014 16:59
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GoPro view from the pad (always love these):
Interesting to see - and hear - the big spherical LC 41 LOX tank venting immediately after liftoff. Does anyone know if the entire tank load is vented away after a liftoff?
- Ed Kyle
No!!!
