Message-ID: <AadyiVC00VcJA5N05A@andrew.cmu.edu>
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Reply-To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU
From: space-request+@Andrew.CMU.EDU
To: space+@Andrew.CMU.EDU
Date: Sat, 21 Jul 1990 01:44:02 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: SPACE Digest V12 #102

SPACE Digest                                     Volume 12 : Issue 102

Today's Topics:
			Re: World Space Agency
	       Pardon My Participle! (was Re: Energia)
		       Re: SPACE Digest V12 #75
	      Re: Software data on Apollo space program
	      Re: Software data on Apollo space program
		    Re: HST, Perkin-Elmer and NASA
			   Weather Control

Administrivia:

    Submissions to the SPACE Digest/sci.space should be mailed to
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----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 19 Jul 90 21:00:29 GMT
From: usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!ogicse!unicorn!n8035388@ucsd.edu  (Worth Henry A)
Subject: Re: World Space Agency

In article <2379@l.cc.purdue.edu> cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
>
>I doubt that if it were not for the Cold War that there would be much
>space activity at all.

   And, I suppose their were no exploration or technical endeavors before
the Cold War?

>     The Soviet Union is broke, the US is broke, the
>ECN is broke....

   Broke?, not quite...yet, one of the premises behind a WSA is that each 
member would have to spend less on space then they now do. If they can't 
afford hard currency, then perhaps they could barter hardware or other 
resources for their share. Membership would be optional, but the benefits
will accrue first to the members and then, to the rest of the world. With 
proper structuring, a WSA could be chartered to strive at become 
self-supporting if space ever proves profitable. If a member should have
financial difficulties, or feels the agency is failing in its mission, it
can always cut back, or eliminate, its contributions.

>Cooperation will only work in the very short run; it takes competition to
>advance.

   Competion can be created within organizations, as well as between them.

>A World Space Agency would have to fight a World Hunger Relief Agency for
>funds.  It would lose.  Only the minority are willing to make an investment

   There is a longer history of support for exploration and research than
for welfare. Most people are sick and tired of projects that serve to 
prolong misery, rather than finding ways to eliminate the problem. Projects
like "Mission to Planet Earth", implemented on a world-wide scale, could be
very useful in the search for solutions. A successful WSA could also serve
as a model, and a resource, for other international agencies chartered to
deal with global problems like feeding the world's masses, sensible
economic development for the third world, and the environment -- all
global problems requiring global solutions, but, currently mired in
national politics. 

>in space; military and political competition can force a nation to do what
>its citizens would rather not spend money on.

   Once again, a WSA could allow a successful program at a lower percentage
of the Gross WORLD Product. The economy is increasing a global one, either
we work together on all our goals and problems, or we will all be broke,
permanently...

>I believe the following is a quote from GBS.
>
>	The reasonable man adapts himself to the environment.  It is only
>	the unreasonable man who attempts to adapt the environment to
>	himself.  Therefore, progress depends on the unreasonable man.

   Your quote only serves to contradict your arguments, a properly
structured WSA could ADAPT the space exploration environment to allow
success, rather than the failure to which current organizations are doomed.
Forming a WSA would not be easy, a point I've repeatedly made, but, 
many politicians, in many capitals, are looking to cut budgets and
are eyeing their space programs for major, if not complete, cuts. Forming
a WSA would provide those politicians a way to make some significant budget
cuts without completely eliminating their nation's involvement in space.
A win-win for the politicians, a loss for some of those "nasty" bureaucrats,
a win for the best and brightest space engineers and scientists, and an 
economic win, on several counts, for the public.

   I am not saying a WSA is the perfect, or even a good solution, I am
merely trying to get a constructive discussion going in an effort to
find a solution. The days of a half-dozen different national space programs
are coming to an end, collectively they are just too expensive. Private
efforts are not yet viable, but, a few decades of well structured
exploration, research and development might make the privatization
of space possibly, while providing many economic spin-offs in a time of
global economic upheavals. The politicians would just as soon let the 
space programs die a noisy and politically profitable death, but, if
presented with a well formed alternative which politically benefits them 
on several fronts they would rush to support it.

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 19 Jul 90 16:28:05 PDT
From: greer%utdssa.dnet%utadnx@utspan.span.nasa.gov
X-Vmsmail-To: UTADNX::UTSPAN::AMES::"space+@andrew.cmu.edu"
Subject: Pardon My Participle! (was Re: Energia)


	Sorry to include my apologies with all the others that are taking
up bandwidth in SPACE Digest lately, but I felt I probably ought to clear
up something that might otherwise get out of hand.
	In an article to the SPACE Digest I recently included the
following as a .sig:

> "Who would have predicted...that Dubcek, who brought the tanks in in
> Czechoslovakia in 1968 is now being proclaimed a hero in Czechoslovakia.
> Unbelievable." -- DQ 10/2/89

To which I received:
 
>Not to quibble, but I believe you're misquoting someone.  Dubcek was
>OUSTED by the Soviets in 68 - he hardly "brought them in", unless
>there's an implied cause and effect that's comparable to blaming
>the victim of a crime.
> 
>Just the way I understand it, I could be wrong ...
> 
>Ihor Kinal

	Sadly, this was NOT a misquote on my part.  Given the gross
inaccuracy of the statement, it is easy to see how Mr. Kinal and others might
think the fault was mine.  However these are, in fact, the very words of
J. Danforth Quayle, Chairman of the National Space Council and Vice President
of these United States.

_____________
Dale M. Greer, whose opinions are not to be confused with those of the
Center for Space Sciences, U.T. at Dallas, UTSPAN::UTADNX::UTDSSA::GREER
"One word sums up the responsibility of any vice president, and that one
word is 'to be prepared.'" -- Dan Quayle

------------------------------

Date:     Thu, 19 Jul 90 15:46:46 MDT
From: harres@CORRAL.UWyo.Edu (John M Harres)
Subject:  Re: SPACE Digest V12 #75

>         If this newsgroup is going to be forced to become 'NASA-free',
> is there any way I could get on a NASA emailing list? I find the postings
> of the various NASA related folk useful and interesting.
>                                                 James Nicoll
Thank you for some sanity in this mess.  I haven't been on this list long (3
months), and I've noticed that the ratio of useful information to argumentative
nonsense has gone up from about 50% to almost 90%.  Now it's just a quick scan
for anything from Ron Baalke, Mary Shafer, or payload status reports.  I hate
wasting the bandwidth on this argument, but it's getting out of hand.  Let's
discuss space, and not ethics.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Harres                          harres@uwyo.bitnet
University of Wyoming                harres@corral.uwyo.edu

------------------------------

Date: 20 Jul 90 17:57:30 GMT
From: jon@june.cs.washington.edu  (Jon Jacky)
Subject: Re: Software data on Apollo space program

In article <1990Jul17.123502.1639@IDA.ORG>, bryk@IDA.ORG (Bill Brykczynski) writes:
> Could anyone provide me with references to documents describing
> the Apollo space program from a software point of view?  Specifically,
> I am interested in the software testing approach used.  I have
> heard that the operational software was "brute force" tested,
> labor intensive, and expensive.  LOC, lifecycle cost breakdown,
> error rates, etc. would be useful.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> bill brykczynski
> bryk@ida.org

I am aware of three references.  None of these provides the detail Bill asks, 
but they may provide leads.  In particular, Ceruzzi's book has a lot of 
references and a good bibliography.  (it isn't at hand at the moment so I can't
check now)

J.D. Aron, "Apollo programming support", pps. 181-186 in SOFTWARE ENGINEERING:
CONCEPTS AND TECHNIQUES ed. J.M. Buxton, Peter Naur, and Brian Randell, 
Petrocelli/Charter 1976, New York.

This is actually a transcript of a brief talk and discussion at the 1969 NATO
Science Committee Meeting on Software Engineering in Rome.  Aron appears to 
be talking about the ground support system, not the flight system.  He mentions
that the project ranged from 300 to 600 people at the Houston site, at the
peak about half were programmers and half were administrators and support.

There is a lot of interesting history and anecdote in this book.  It also
contains material from the first NATO conference at Garmisch in 1968, generally
regarded as the first ever meeting on software engineering, I think they
originated the term for that occassion.    There are other versions of the
proceedings of those conferences than the Buxton et al book.


Joseph M. Fox, SOFTWARE AND ITS DEVELOPMENT, Prentice-Hall, 1982.  Fox was
a top manager at IBM Federal Systems Group involved in the 
Apollo/Skylab effort.  He says it occupied 700 people for 7 years at Houston
(p. xiii); the contract was valued at $209 million, generated 23 million
instructions, and consumed 6,000+ man years (Table 4-10, p. 67).

Also I find a graph in Norman R. Augustine's AUGUSTINE'S LAWS, Viking 1986
(Fig. 23, p. 117) which Augustine credits to Barry Boehm (it's probably in
Boehm's SOFTWARE ENGINEERING ECONOMICS).  It seems to show Apollo 7 carrying
about 50,000 bytes and Apollo 11 carrying about 80,000 (this sounds too high
for the onboard computers of that time to me) and about 5 million lines
of ground support software for Apollo.  Quite a different figure from Fox.

The latest reference is Paul Ceruzzi's BEYOND THE LIMITS: FLIGHT ENTERS THE
COMPUTER AGE, MIT Press, 1989.  Highly recommended. As noted above, the 
references therein may help you.

I've cross-posted this reply to sci.space.   I, too, would be interested to
learn more about this.

- Jon Jacky, University of Washington, Seattle jon@gaffer.rad.washington.edu

------------------------------

Date: 20 Jul 90 20:29:31 GMT
From: usc!samsung!emory!hubcap@ucsd.edu  (System Janitor)
Subject: Re: Software data on Apollo space program

Who has last winter's USENIX procedings? A NASA bigwig was the keynote
speaker there, and he had lots to say on the subject. 

-Mike

------------------------------

Date: 20 Jul 90 14:26:58 GMT
From: uoft02.utoledo.edu!fax0112@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Subject: Re: HST, Perkin-Elmer and NASA

In article <42@cscdec.UUCP>, jack@cscdec.UUCP (Jack Hudler) writes:
> 
> And if everyone had just shut up and said nothing until "full disclosure"
> was made, then NASA would have similarly shut up, they'd just assume that
> nobody cared and continue to plod along as before.
> I mean after all, NASA would not go out of it's way to create problems for
> itself, would it? ;-).
> This type of attitude is like: "Oh! ssssh! Don't say anything NASA knows 
> what there doing! They can do anything!" Puke.. gag!!
> -- 
>

Hey I never said THAT!  My point was, ok, we have an inquiry going (several
actually), that should do it.  Lets wait until they figure out what
happened.  Until then all the "they should have done this or that",
"incompetence on so-and-so part" etc is futile without all the facts.

Robert Dempsey
Ritter Observatory

------------------------------

Date:     Fri, 20 Jul 90 8:11:58 CDT
From: Will Martin <wmartin@STL-06SIMA.ARMY.MIL>
Subject:  Weather Control

The recent weather here in the Midwest brought to mind the old SF notion
of "weather control". We had blazingly hot weather for some weeks, and
then a delightful respite of temperatures in the 50's for a few days. The
TV weathercasters attributed the relief to the jet stream moving 
Southward, thus allowing cooler Northern air to flow into this region.

That started me to thinking. Though "weather control" was a SF staple
concept for many years, and we seem to know what conditions we want to 
achieve (in this case, a more-southerly-flowing jet stream), I still
have never read any discussion of just *how* we could force these
desired changes to occur.

I send this to "space" because it is traditional to think of "weather
control" being an orbital-based function. But what can you do from orbit
to control the weather? All I can think of is pumping heat into some
spot or area (such as by lasers or reflecting mirrors) and shading other
areas from sunlight. That doesn't seem to be effective enough to do
something like push a wind pattern around, and also has collateral ill
effects (the area you pump the heat into may not be happy about ambient
temperatures at 200 degrees F. :-).

So, a possible discussion: think of it as terraforming practice -- given
essentially unlimited resources (I can't see this being done "on the
cheap" :-), what actual mechanisms would be used to control the weather
from space? Something somewhat less drastic than asteroid bombardment to
cause "non-nuclear" winter; something that can be done to an inhabited
planet to *improve* the conditions for the inhabitants. I would think 
"improve" could be defined as lowering both the average and the extreme
temperatures during the summer, and raising them during the winter,
increasing precipitation in arid regions and decreasing it in wet ones,
and limiting the severity or eliminating entirely severe weather
conditions (hurricanes, tornadoes, etc.). An important factor would be
to improve regions without harming other regions, unless you could
somehow declare a "free-fire zone", say in the middle of oceans, where 
all the bad effects could be concentrated. (Mariners might not
appreciate that, of course. :-)

Regards, Will

------------------------------

End of SPACE Digest V12 #102
*******************