No, not Wernher von Braun:

Bernard Schriever's Stifling Shadow

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Hmm

I thought the Japanese H family of rockets was based on the Delta, not Atlas.

The British Blue Streak missile had a similar pressurised tank arrangement to Atlas but different engine (a improvement of the S3D used on the Jupiter).

Ariane used N2O4/UDMH , not Lox-kerosene in the French Viking engine. To my knowledge Britain had no sigificant input into Ariane (sadly).

Jon

I'm not sure what to make of that article. It begins by lauding Schriever and running down von Braun, but by the end of the article it says von Braun advocated reusable stages (which the article promotes) and that Schriever's missile philosophy was throw money at the problem with quick and dirty solutions, and the article denegrates that approach as the biggest hurtle to the new space initiative.

The guy can't seem to make up his mind.

[Nitpick]The Nuclear Titans were deactivated in the mid/late 80's. [/Nitpick]

Yes. A friend of mine and I got a tour of an active-duty Titan II solo with our science teacher (AF reserve) when we were in 8th grade (late 70s). Oh, the joys of being a science nerd. \/

And now many of those silos are houses!

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I also found the article self-contradictory and its premise false. Actually the common ancestor of all the rockets mentioned was the Navaho, whose liquid fueled booster was adapted by all these programs. The Saturn family was designed in part as a heavy-lift group of boosters for applications beyond the Moon program. Unfortunately NASA, per the behest of Nixon, scrapped all these ELVs for the Space Shuttle project.

The only way Schriever's management techniques have stood the test of time is that there are still a lot of Theory X management types out there.

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The article raises some good points, but they're lost in the gallons of hogwash.

Von Braun's "management style" was characterized by a dirty-hands approach to management and a conservative approach to engineering. The lack of dirty-hands management in NASA today is seen as the greatest single impediment to its success. Managers have become bureaucrats separated from the actual engineering. Von Braun, on the other hand, understood what his engineers faced because he was there facing it with them. His conservative "margin for margin's sake" style of engineering is appropriate for manned and experimental space flight, whereas the military's "don't fix it if it ain't broke" approach to rocketry works for ICBMs but not space exploration. Much of what is wrong with space exploration today can be attributed to von Braun's management approach having "gone out of style."

He was not "overruled" on key Apollo technology. He simply required the merits to be shown to him before he accepted them. This is part of the conservative approach, and was an attitude shared by many in the Apollo program. The problem with a lot of engineering management today is the immediate acceptance of "whiz-bang" ideas without proper design studies. So you see companies dump a couple million dollars and two years down the crapper just because one person got the boss excited about some buzzword that turns out to be a turkey.

It seems this article's author chooses to completely disregard the political aspect of why certain technology and methods persisted and why others fell by the wayside.

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Clavius Moon Base

How true that is. And how it was spotlighted by O'Keefe's pompous pronouncements about "foamologists", which crow he later had to eat (although I don't recall his ever retracting or apologizing for any of those haughty statements).

Right on the mark again. A good part of my work over the last few decades in manufacturing engineering and quality has been the recalibration of MechEs, etc., fresh out of school who have no idea what a tolerance is, think that since it's drawn on paper or the computer screen, 99% of the job is done, and who would rather quit than get their hands dirty.

I think GE's *******ization of the Six Sigma program is in part responsible for this. The brainstorming sessions required by this approach give all ideas equal value, and from that point forward someone who opposes an idea due only to its lack if technical merit is looked upon as not being a "team player". Plus GE turned Six Sigma, which originally was concerned with quality improvements, into a cost cutting program which is now a darling and pet program of more executives than I care to mention.

How many times has engineering been told to "take off your engineering hats and put on your management hats", while management took off their management hats and put on their political hats? It's a big number.

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There should have been a warning this was a Jeffrey Bell article. I stopped reading his stuff some time ago - bad for the blood pressure. In the ones I did read, there were always factual errors and I always disagreed with his conclusions.

As far as NASA goes, I think their key problem is that they are trying to do things that government institutions simply cannot do well. Yes, I want them to do research, but when it comes to manned space services, they should be buying them, not trying to do it themselves. Going to the moon was a specific, well focused goal, with a heavy "We don't care how you do it, just do it" attitude. We don't have that today.

Well, any design process is only as good as the engineers following it, and Six Sigma is no exception. In the earliest phases, all ideas should be considered, but if the tools are applied properly (CTQ flowdown, QFD, etc), ideas with no “technical merit” should be weeded out pretty easily. However, if the people using the tools are clueless, the process cannot save them.

In Six Sigma’s defense, it does provide a framework for quantitatively refuting bad ideas, which beats qualitative approaches any day. When my boss’s boss has a pet idea that is (pointy) hair-brained, I can at least point out which number they fudged on the QFD, which is a lot safer career-wise than simply saying “Sorry, you’re wrong”.

The mistake GE and others made (IMHO) was creating a Six Sigma bureaucracy—over-training, requiring excessive paperwork (making it a web form does not help—hurts usually!), mis-applying tools, tying promotions and rewards to Six Sigma Projects in a way that encouraged “fluff” projects, and overestimating effectiveness by reporting the same process improvements as results from many different projects. However, since Jack Welch left, I think GE has made good strides towards correcting these problems.

Overall, Six Sigma does work, and is one of the key reasons GE has prospered over the last two decades.

A lot of companies intentionally pick managers for engineering groups that have no knowledge of the subject they are managing. Supposedly they do it to keep management “open minded” and to cross-seed experience from other disciplines. In my experience, it merely makes the manager over-reliant on advice from senior engineers that is often skewed towards a particular solution or process. Worse, it leave the manager incapable of telling when a program is out of control or headed in the wrong direction.

I’d better quit ranting and get back to work. Managers don’t have to be engineers to know a web board from my real work. ops:

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One of my definitions of a manager is someone who only knows what they're told. When asked whether a system is functioning properly or not, a manager goes and asks an engineer; an engineer actually runs the system.

I've always tried to stay on the technical side of that divide, though not always successfully.

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Well, any design process is only as good as the engineers following it...

Which is, in my opinion, to say that the engineers have to understand what the process is supposed to accomplish and what its rules are designed to avoid. There is no magic bullet to effective design. That's not to say formalisms and procedures are ineffective. But it's to say that formalisms and procedures do not guarantee success. Which, now that I read your post more carefully, you say eloquently...

However, if the people using the tools are clueless, the process cannot save them.

In Six Sigma’s defense, it does provide a framework for quantitatively refuting bad ideas, which beats qualitative approaches any day.

Yes, and if you read von Braun's response to LOR, for example, you see initially a qualitative rejection, which von Braun himself overturned when presented with a quantitative justification. When things like fuel budget, complexity, and safety are quantified, LOR made sense. Von Braun recognized this. He wasn't "overruled". He just waited for a more persuasive argument.

I wish -- oh, how I wish -- more of these pie-in-the-sky ideas were subjected to more rigorous examination before they generated so much excitement. Every single design process I know about starts with a "blue sky" session where any solution is invited. But the goal of these procedures is to remove irrational sources of objection: the "oh, that'll never work" mode of rejection. It isn't mean to suggest that all design proposals have equal merit.

In my experience, it merely makes the manager over-reliant on advice from senior engineers that is often skewed towards a particular solution or process. Worse, it leave the manager incapable of telling when a program is out of control or headed in the wrong direction.

In my experience these outcomes invariably follow the appointment of an inexpert manager.

Managers don’t have to be engineers to know a web board from my real work.

Maybe we can get BA to redo the site so it looks more like Pro/ENGINEER or SolidWorks. :-)

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Actually, the original Chessmaster for the Amiga had a menu choice "In case the boss wanders by" that would display a fake spreadsheet--also, I remember a few old DOS games had hotkeys that would instantly exit the program and run a batch file. [-X

As for SolidWorks, I tried copying a long thread to see if I could disguise it as a note on an E-sized sheet, however, that much text made the program chug, plus I was unable to format it so that every paragraph didn't run on as a single line. Also, every time I clicked on the note, it activated the first hyperlink. I'll bet you could write a macro, though, to disguise a thread as a large BOM. :wink:

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--Doug

"When your statics problem becomes a dynamics problem, you're in trouble." --me

Moor's Law: "As you go from freshman engineering to Ph.D., the amount of work required per credit hour doubles approximately every 18 months." --me, inspired by Prof. Scott Moor

My solution is to have two monitors-- one carefully not visible from the hallway. 8)

Its called the "Boss Key". A bunch of games had them. I still put them in my games out of nostalgia.

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