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monogon

Ars Scholae Palatinae
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  • #18
    etxdm said:
    Having spent a good portion of my career as an engineer helping to start up new petrochemical plants, I sympathize with the SLS teams. I will say though, that although our facilities were every bit as complex as the SLS fueling and launch systems, we were expected to work through the gremlins and get things working well as soon as each section of equipment was built and transferred to operations. I'm puzzled about why valves and fans weren't completely debugged and commissioned before there was a rocket mated to the launch assembly. Anyone who has put together a critical path diagram tries to use as many parallel steps as possible.
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    Are we assuming that NASA didn't test components before assembling them into the most powerful rocket they've ever built? Space is hard, as folks like to say. There is a first time for everything: there are far fewer giant rockets on earth than petrochemical plants, and the process for building this model is still imperfect. Hence all the tests.
     
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