[AR] Re: What happened to the Space Shuttle?
- From: David McMillan <skyefire@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2019 10:52:44 -0500
On 7/19/2019 4:31 PM, Anton de Winter wrote:
Or more generally: what happens with all the technical documentation,
blueprints, designs, rationales, etc after a system/program is retired
at NASA?
Would it be possible for (say) a commercial/private entity to take the
space shuttle design data, improve on the design, and put it into
service again for profit? If not, why?
The big problem here isn't so much the various blueprints and
technical documents being unavailable (for whatever reason), as the loss
of "tribal knowledge." There's a *lot* of critical information
regarding how to build and/or operate a system like this that simply
never gets written down, b/c it's hard to quantify.
Case in point: not long ago, I worked on a project to change the
production process for a major legacy airframe, that's been in
continuous production for 30-40 years (I need to be deliberately vague
here). You'd *think* that, with the plane still in production, everyone
would still have an understanding of the process. That... wasn't the
case. The airframe was basically being built by rote memorization -- a
real *understanding* of how/why many low-level parts of the production
process worked, or were performed the way they were, was no longer
available in the institutional memory (grey-matter, paper, or
electronic). At one point, they were hiring back a superannuated
machinist who had already retired *twice* b/c that was the only person
they could find who *understood* certain critical "whys" of the existing
process. And *that* knowledge is *critical* just to making (seemingly)
minor changes to an existing process or product. Much more so for
trying to re-create a complex system where nearly all of tribal
knowledge has been lost.
Several experiences like this are the reason I tend to laugh
semi-hysterically at people who say "all we need are the blueprints!"
There's just *so much more*....
No, trying to re-create an old system is probably a net negative,
although the old blueprints (and, more critically, the *production
process* records) could make for valuable guidelines. The *real* gems in
the NASA archives are (IMO) the decades of experiment and test results,
which will generally include the critical bits of "why we tried this,"
"what didn't work," "why it didn't work," and (hopefully) "this is what
*did* work and why."
There's a surprising amount of stuff that works in aerospace
engineering where no one really knows *why* it works -- someone with a
huge R&D budget decades ago just kept throwing spaghetti at the wall
until something stuck, worked out how to duplicate and productionize it,
and then everyone just kept following the recipe (mostly blindly) for
years or decades to come.
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