Non-televised Press Briefing with Bolden

Keith, I have a sneaky suspicion they're going to reveal some of the "flexible path" at this briefing. I don't think they will reveal it publicly until it's ready for consumption (it should have been done that way from the start, but yeah, can't take it back now). I know you dislike closed door stuff (and I sympathize), but I hope you or one of your guys can be there.

Holy Cow(ing)! Thanks for that Twitter feed. Appears I was wrong about a mini-reveal. But the Mars rhetoric is blowing my mind. My God. Mars 10 years earlier than Cx would have done (not stated in the feed, but if you skip the moon and focus on fast ships, Mars becomes an option a decade sooner, simple logical deduction).

I'm at a loss for words.

Astro_Sugar has now protected their tweets (why I don't know). I am amused by all of the people bashing the plan. This is the best plan I have seen from a NASA Administrator in my lifetime. I'm 33.

Editor's note: you can still see them by going to http://twitter.com/search?q=JSCbolden

What plan?

"But the Mars rhetoric is blowing my mind." That's all I heard, was a lot of rhetoric. There was not a coherent plan presented.

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." That was a goal and a timeline. Bolden's ramblings contained neither.

Given a concrete goal and mission, the NASA community can do wonders. Without a specific goal, NASA will drift.

I'm tired of administrators that just because their degree says "scientist" somehow think their job qualifications are justified and ignore the difference between the prefix: "rocket" and "political".

I consider this new administration and lack of vision a waste of my time, life, effort, and tax money.

No one breaks records without knowing what the record is. No goals, no glory.

Reading the twitter reports, it is interesting to note a specific reference to a bold international partnership.

"As long as I'm here, the new program is going to be international in nature. It's easy 4 admin to back out if it is just US".

In the last few days after the release of the new plan, I never saw a comment related to the interesting possibilities such kind of partnerships can generate for HSF.

I think it is time to break the impasse of the "american astro on american rocket". It is a self-impose constraint. Now is the time to develop with ESA a better space infrastructure, with a free exchange in technology and job opportunities.

Every day in this administration is like a bad day in Iraq. Maybe they are ready to admit this whole thing was one big fiasco.

Watched the all-hands yesterday (it was presented to us as a JSC all-hands meeting, not a press conference or public meeting - I'm in favor of open things, but I also think it's good for him to go to the centers and address them specifically, privately). Applause in the auditorium was definitely more muted than the last time he was here.

There were no concrete answers on a path forward, really a lot more of the same things we have been hearing for a couple of weeks now. Bolden is definitely interested in a heavy lift vehicle, but there doesn't seem to be any notion of what it will be lifting or where it will be lifting it to (presumably, it will be lifting a spacecraft to Mars, but ... if he won't come out and say that, how do we know?).

There are a couple of tweets that sound vaguely derogatory to various engineering projects (to the effect of "you saw X - it might not be the best thing. I don't know." The spirit of those types of comments (he made a few of them) isn't really captured in tweet form: what he's saying is that yes, we've come up with some really amazing stuff over the last few years. But a lot of that stuff was designed under specific constraints, for specific missions, and so those amazing things may not be the best tools for upcoming missions. At least to me, those comments aren't disrespectful so much as an acknowledgment that you can't always just take stuff you've got now and expect it to work everywhere.

He talks a lot about NASA supporting STEM education, and there was more of that.

This was the first time I'd heard him say specifically that he had talked to some of these companies vying for contract launch services about employing NASA contractors currently working on Shuttle/Constellation projects. He may have brought that up before, but I remember being pleased to hear it finally. He mentioned that if they import workers from California into Florida, that's not saving jobs in Florida so at least he acknowledges that. Aside from that, I didn't get the impression that he's trying to sugarcoat the fact that some jobs will be lost. But he also pointed out that "Starbucks is a job" but that's not where Shuttle/Constellation workers need to end up; he seems to be counting on a combination of new commercial aerospace jobs + intensified R&D work here at NASA to absorb many or most of those workers.

It seems like the general attitude that the administration is going for is: let's just take some time to be creative and come up with novel solutions to difficult problems, then once we've got a collection of those, then we can put them together into a spacecraft.

In theory that's not a bad attitude. It could save us from the problems we had with "old" tech being the norm in Orion due to cost and schedule constraints (among other things), and let us design something that is truly groundbreaking (I wish they hadn't tortured the phrase "game changing" to the degree that they have).

In practice, if we don't have a clear set of goals and at least some notion of a path to get there, with milestones, public interest wanes and the budgetary commitment evaporates (especially in hard economic times). That's not a certain thing - a steady dribble of NASA innovations that are well publicized and sent off into the private sector would help maintain public support, but history shows that NASA isn't good at that.

Bolden said a few times that he is in favor of such milestones, goals, and timelines. I don't know if that means that those things will exist but don't yet, or if he's just saying that to placate people and really they'll never exist. I guess we'll find out.

I was in the auditorium yesterday. The Tweets that were sent out were factually accurate but they did not give the "tone" of the audience reaction. It was a very cool, (not in the good sense) reception. General Bolden monopolized the hour long forum although he said he would speak little and answer many questions. He took a total of four questions (although one was 3 minutes long) and provided 10 minute non-answers. The greatest applause was for the questions that attempted to get him to answer where the agency is headed. He never did to the satisfaction of anyone I spoke with afterwards. The one question that went unasked was, if we are so smart, why could we not figure out what we are going to do before we terminated the one program that at least stood a chance of getting us beyond the ISS. It was not a great day for JSC employees. No hope provided and it seems to be evident that General Bolden historically a really good guy) has had a sip of the Obama kool-aid and is guiding us to the dismanteling of the American human space flight program with nothing proven to replace it.

Any systems engineer will tell you that before a highly complex system can be developed, there must be a clear mission. Until there is a clearly defined mission, you cannot hope to develop the technology to achieve that mission. And saying "flexible path" as if you are going to develop some wonderful gadget that will achieve missions you have not yet conceived, is about as dangerous as you can get...not to mention more expensive than you think. Pay no attention to the man slinging platitudes on the podium. You can wake up from the slumber once the first real mission is defined. From that flow ALL the requirements for what a system needs to be able to do. Guaranteed. No amount of "game changing" rhetoric is going to obviate this fact.

Ray,

Designing a vehicle for a specific mission is a sure way to back yourself into a corner that's very hard to get out of. One of the greatest liabilities with the Shuttle is that it was designed for a specific mission: LEO servicing. It does that well, but can't leave Earth orbit. If you design a capsule for the moon, it won't (necessarily) be able to go to Mars, and it won't (necessarily) be good for servicing the ISS. If you design a vehicle that is good at servicing the ISS, is able to go to the moon, and is able to go to Mars - you haven't designed a vehicle for a specific mission, you've designed it for three missions.

If you're going to design a vehicle that's able to take on multiple, different types of missions, you really don't need to say "this vehicle is designed for these three things" - you can say "this vehicle is based on a flexible platform that can be fitted for various types of missions, including X, Y, and Z."

Any Good systems engineer will tell you that such a platform can be designed with certain missions in mind, but it shouldn't be designed specifically for specific missions, or it won't be good for other things.

What we don't want is to design a vehicle that's only good at one thing; if we do that we'll be stuck in 10-20 years with a vehicle that only does one thing, and that's the biggest waste of all.

The Constellation architecture was being pigeonholed. The Orion vehicle de-evolved from a reasonably capable and flexible vehicle into one that would barely be useful as an ISS crew rotation vehicle, and would require significant effort and re-work (and probably a new launch vehicle) to be used for anything else. Remember when there was going to be a Shuttle for people and another for cargo, and other vehicles that would take advantage of the Space Transportation System (why do we still bother calling it STS, anyway)? What happened to those? The first spacecraft design that flew was the only one to ever fly. That's what will happen with whatever we build next, so why not build something that's actually useful for more than one thing?

This isn't the 1960s anymore; we have the knowledge, experience, and technology to build a truly flexible spacecraft; we don't have to design another craft that's only capable of doing one thing.

@akear

"Like the lead character in "the bridge of the River Kwai", Bolden ... set the US space program back decades."

I do think it's probably unfair to blame this all on Bolden. We don't know the details of how/who made this call, but it was unlikely to have been 100% Bolden.

Hey, maybe it will all be for the best in the end - the proverbial 2x4 to get the attention of the mule. This is going to start a big debate in Congress on exactly what the US's goals are in HSF, and maybe something good will come out of that. (But I'm not holding my breath... As someone else pointed out, Apollo was a result of national security concerns. Until the Chinese start launching, space will not be a national priority.)

Spaced Out, you are correct, I am a bit premature implying that there's a concrete plan (I suspect that is why The Mars Society has not made a statement yet about the budget). However, it is obvious what they *want* to achieve. The Flexible Path is clearly what is being envisioned. In late Jan. The Space Show did an interview that discussed the Flexible Path. I highly recommend it. It puts you on the moon or Mars by the mid 2020s. Same timeline as Cx, more efficiently.

And you are right, currently it is rhetoric, which is precisely why I phrased it that way. I know that the overall plan has yet to be revealed. But the writing is certainly on the wall.

This is the first time in the history of NASA that advanced propulsion was taken seriously for manned space flight, VASIMR, ion, nuclear. We've had this sort of technology in scifi for nearly a century. NASA is now actually going to make it. That's what we should've been doing all along.

Ray, I agree that without a solid plan you aren't going to be able to design your technology to fit it. However, Flexible Path is certainly a solid plan. It basically says "We want to be able to go anywhere in the solar system quickly." That means trips to Mars in 3 months, trips to Jupiter or Saturn in a similar time frame (the wonderful thing about VASIMR or ion or other advanced propulsion is that you just add more fuel and your ship can go faster and faster). Why send a probe that will likely fail to Europa when we can land a base there for a year of exploration with drilling equipment? Again, this is the first time in the history of NASA that advanced propulsion was considered for human space flight. The first time. I remember when VSE was announced and we were promised a nuclear ship to Jupiter (or it may have been Saturn). I was quite excited about that, but it's been so long and nothing happened with it that I forgot the name of the mission. That ought to tell you something about how much Cx has taken priorities from advanced technology in NASA.

eep, I think if you design for the moon you can certainly use that technology to get to Mars. However, it means 8 month trips out, 8 months trip back, a year on the ground, this a nearly 3 year mission. This has always been a concern for Mars (or any mission beyond LEO), yeah we can design magical magnetospheres to redirect some cosmic rays, we can surround the crew in water or some other volatile, but it's still not ideal.

Cx put a Mars mission in the mid 2030s. This new direction brings it to the mid 2020s, *if that is our desire*. Flexible Path.

BTW, before I get in to trouble, all my statements are my own.

blaming the CxP fiasco on lack of budget is just more of the same denial syndrome that caused the program to fail and the CxP advocates still don't get it.

These same CxP problem denialers won't do better in their next program because they don't really get what they did and didn't do right. Seems like they really need an honest independent post-mortem instead of just blaming it all on everything except themselves.

CxP budget might be the pc scapegoat for saving NASA face, but...

Frankly, they're lucky that GAO/IG didn't do any real deep down serious digging into - huh, Cxp folks?

read the tweets before they got protected

most interesting question was from the USA guy about the NASA control boards involvement with the Merchant7 - wonder what was behind that particular question?

joshcryer,

All good comments. You're right that a lot of the technology that would get you to and from the moon would also get you to and from Mars, but there are still some key differences that have to be taken into account. The length of the mission (and thus storage of more consumables) is one of the issues; how to generate power for the long-duration mission is one; radiation exposure is certainly one as well (to me that should be a big area of research: rather than finding the maximum nonlethal dose, we should look at effective ways of shielding). From a systems perspective, this means you can design a vehicle platform that has robust radiation tolerance, then design a modular/expandable service module that can be fitted to missions of various durations with different propellants, etc. For a mission longer than a week or so, you really just have to add more pressurized volume for living space, exercise countermeasures, storing consumables, privacy, sanity, etc. This could be something as simple as an evolved ISS node. This is really where you turn your vehicle into a true spacecraft, rather than a launch/re-entry vehicle that you also take to other places.

In the Constellation program, some initial thought was given to this sort of thing, but it was quickly abandoned because of (among other things) launch weight constraints (note this is an opinion/personal observation, nothing more). 6-person crew became 4. Systems were stripped or removed altogether; windows, stowage, everything was cut so that the thing would even make it off the ground - it was really reduced to an ISS lifeboat, not a useful spacecraft. With that as a basis, going farther than the ISS was going to be difficult or impossible; it was going to need significant redesign anyway.

eep:

Designing a vehicle for a specific mission is a sure way to back yourself into a corner that's very hard to get out of.

I am not saying only a single mission. Many systems are designed for several missions, for the simple fact that each mission will have different stressing scenarios that stress different elements of the design. What I am saying is ANY missions you think you want to do need to be operationally vetted first. Because what you are insinuating (but perhaps not stating outright) is flat-out wrong, and it is also the recipe for the cost and schedule overruns we have seen in the last 15+ years on major systems projects.

If you're going to design a vehicle that's able to take on multiple, different types of missions, you really don't need to say "this vehicle is designed for these three things" - you can say "this vehicle is based on a flexible platform that can be fitted for various types of missions, including X, Y, and Z."

That is a marketing person's language, not a design engineer's. What you suggest is the quickest route to requirements creep you can possibly define. By not being able to exclude capabilities and missions, you are opening up the trade space so wide that anyone can come in with a requirement that causes your overall design to NOT CLOSE. And that is a bad thing. You cannot be all things to all people, and those who have actually had to do complex system design know all too well that it is easy for outsiders to come in and "throw grenades" with "what if?" requirements, but ask them to design something that closes and they say "not my job."

Any Good systems engineer will tell you that such a platform can be designed with certain missions in mind, but it shouldn't be designed specifically for specific missions, or it won't be good for other things.

This is tantamount to doing no single thing really well, but doing many things with arguable quality or performance. Again I point out to you that the history of failed projects proves you are incorrect in your assertion. And most of those failed projects are merely terrestrial aircraft (ATF anyone? RAH-66 Comanche anyone?) which do not have the significant complexities of spaceflight.

This isn't the 1960s anymore; we have the knowledge, experience, and technology to build a truly flexible spacecraft; we don't have to design another craft that's only capable of doing one thing.

And how well have things gone since the 60s? Please show me a single, high-value, complex system development that has NOT been over budget and blown its original schedule since 1980. F-35 is just the latest example of a vehicle trying to be all things to all people... and LockMart is, today, trying to sell F-35 as an "air dominance fighter" (the role of its recently canceled F-22!). F-35 cannot yet do the things it was SLATED to do (and there are lots of them), and they are trying to convince us it can do more?

Again, do not get me wrong. No one says it has to be "only one mission." But if you do not start with a single Design Reference Mission (which can certainly be expanded to others), you will end up with requirements creep, which drives costs above predictions, drives schedules beyond planned IOC dates, and ends up with a system that may do many things crappily, but does no one thing well.

The philosophy you are trying to espouse is something that DOES work well at an individual component level, where you can "go shopping" for existing parts, throw them together, and build something that meets demonstration standards. But at the "system of systems" level, the philosophy you espouse not only falls apart, but can actually get people killed when you attempt to use a system for something that it was never analyzed (in detail) to do.

Ray,

This attitude is a reason that flight hardware is so severely limited. Unimaginative people are much more comfortable saying "this is impossible" than "I don't know how to do this."

I am not saying only a single mission. Many systems are designed for several missions, for the simple fact that each mission will have different stressing scenarios that stress different elements of the design. What I am saying is ANY missions you think you want to do need to be operationally vetted first. Because what you are insinuating (but perhaps not stating outright) is flat-out wrong, and it is also the recipe for the cost and schedule overruns we have seen in the last 15+ years on major systems projects.

You may have misunderstood me. I don't propose ("insinuate") that we build something, launch it, and then say "OK, let's go to Mars now." You seem to have the institutional attitude (another crippling blow to HSF) that if there are no requirements, we have to either slap some POS together and hope it doesn't blow up, or continue milking the cash cow by designing ever more fantastic articles until we're shut down. What I'm *actually* proposing ("insinuating") is that we let competent, creative engineers sit down and come up with a flexible, robust vehicle that is capable of handling (for example) a mission to the moon, to Mars, and to some moons of Saturn. These are all reasonable, scientifically interesting targets for exploration. Does that mean "design a vehicle that can specifically go to the Earth's moon, Saturn, and these two moons of Saturn?" What if we want to go to an asteroid, or a moon of another planetary body? Each target will have some different requirements. By designing to a specific mission, you exclude others. By designing systems (and systems of systems) that are robust, have reasonable margins, and are built with exploration in mind (a mission in itself), you have a vehicle that can be sent to places you haven't thought of yet. Yes, there will need to be some refits for various missions. This is where margins (e.g. launch weight) are important. What were the margins in the Constellation program? What were the capabilities of the Orion capsule that was being developed? This vehicle was being designed for a specific mission: ISS rendezvous (don't let anyone fool you in to thinking that Orion as it was being designed was going to make it any farther than LEO).

That is a marketing person's language, not a design engineer's. What you suggest is the quickest route to requirements creep you can possibly define. By not being able to exclude capabilities and missions, you are opening up the trade space so wide that anyone can come in with a requirement that causes your overall design to NOT CLOSE. And that is a bad thing. You cannot be all things to all people, and those who have actually had to do complex system design know all too well that it is easy for outsiders to come in and "throw grenades" with "what if?" requirements, but ask them to design something that closes and they say "not my job."

I certainly hope you don't claim to be an engineer (and yes, I have worked on the designs of complex systems, and yes, they still operate successfully). Requirements creep happens when you don't lay down requirements at the beginning and then enforce them. I'm not proposing that we start with a blank sheet of paper and start designing spacecraft without any notion of what they'll do or why, nor am I suggesting that the door should be left open for new requirements after work has started in earnest (nor should it be completely closed if new requirements are found along the way - engineering requires you to be flexible). What I'm saying is that requirements should be written with EXPLORATION in mind. Exploration is, by nature, unpredictable, so you have to make your requirements reflect the fact that you don't know what you're going to be wanting to do in 20-30 years. So START with well defined, reasonable requirements that don't limit you to a short-term set of goals, or else you'll be starting over again in 15 years. Or worse, in 15 years you will have reached the end of your craft's capabilities, and will sit at that same spot for another 15 years fighting about how to pay for yet another architecture.

This is tantamount to doing no single thing really well, but doing many things with arguable quality or performance. Again I point out to you that the history of failed projects proves you are incorrect in your assertion. And most of those failed projects are merely terrestrial aircraft (ATF anyone? RAH-66 Comanche anyone?) which do not have the significant complexities of spaceflight.

You flirt with a valid point here, but miss wildly on the application. Yes, "all-in-one" devices tend to do a mediocre job at all tasks, not a great job at any of them. But again, what I'm saying here isn't to design the Starship Enterprise; it's to design to a set of missions somewhat beyond what we think we're likely to approach in the next couple of decades, and design flexibility into the platform so that it can be modified without huge re-certification efforts for new missions. This is not an "all-in-one" platform, just a flexible platform. An acknowledgment that we can't predict the future, but we can plan for it.

Furthermore, past failures do not prove that something is impossible. This is a profoundly stupid attitude and anyone who thinks it should be specifically excluded from the decision-making process.

And how well have things gone since the 60s? Please show me a single, high-value, complex system development that has NOT been over budget and blown its original schedule since 1980. F-35 is just the latest example of a vehicle trying to be all things to all people... and LockMart is, today, trying to sell F-35 as an "air dominance fighter" (the role of its recently canceled F-22!). F-35 cannot yet do the things it was SLATED to do (and there are lots of them), and they are trying to convince us it can do more?

Which is why it's good that the latest budget proposal has us doing things very differently. Because you're absolutely correct: especially in the last few decades, large-scale development projects have all gone horribly wrong and their results, if they complete anything at all, have been disappointing. So the choices are:
A) Scale back expectations of the end result so that we can meet them, even if what we come up with isn't going to be useful in 15 years,
B) Just do more of the same and hope that something different will happen, or
C) Try something new, since what we've been doing hasn't worked well.

Why not give "C" a try? Rather than try to slap something together on the cheap and fast that will get us back into space with a marginally capable vehicle using the existing (completely broken) system at NASA and a pile of outdated technology shoehorned in with a few good ideas, let's take a few years to step back, take stock of what we have and what we need, do some basic research into things that will be useful for LOTS of missions, then integrate them into a vehicle that's actually worth building?

Again, do not get me wrong. No one says it has to be "only one mission." But if you do not start with a single Design Reference Mission (which can certainly be expanded to others), you will end up with requirements creep, which drives costs above predictions, drives schedules beyond planned IOC dates, and ends up with a system that may do many things crappily, but does no one thing well.

The philosophy you are trying to espouse is something that DOES work well at an individual component level, where you can "go shopping" for existing parts, throw them together, and build something that meets demonstration standards. But at the "system of systems" level, the philosophy you espouse not only falls apart, but can actually get people killed when you attempt to use a system for something that it was never analyzed (in detail) to do.

Again, the argument of "requirement creep" is only valid if you don't set forth requirements at the beginning. I'm not suggesting that we start building something without defined requirements; that's not only wasteful, it's impossible. What I am saying is design the requirements so they're not an impediment to future efforts.

And I'm not sure where you get the idea that designing subsystems and then adapting them for use in a larger system is ineffective or dangerous. I'm also not sure why you think I'm suggesting putting together a bunch of neat ideas and then launching them into space without some analysis of how they're going to work together. I'm hoping you've just misunderstood me.

eep:

There is little point in debating you, as you feel the need to insult and belittle me, rather than discuss the issue. Let me assure you that I am a design engineer, and you have likely arrived (safely) at locations on at least one of my products. Your statement of "I hope you don't claim to be an engineer" is demeaning and does not change the fact that I have 28 years of actual experience designing products that are certified flightworthy by the FAA (i.e. the real world). Why you felt the need to "go there" says more about you than it does about me.

What I am saying is design the requirements so they're not an impediment to future efforts.

This is a naive idea, and one I have had more than one experience with. It is an invalid (and negative) requirement to try to say "don't preclude me from doing something that I cannot yet define for you." The military tries it all the time, and often times contractors do not have the guts to say "that is an invalid requirement." I seriously question your experience with writing solid requirements if you think you can specify any requirement anything like this. Nebulous, invalid, and unverifiable requirements are major problems. There have been ample studies that show how much they amplify cost if allowed to persist. If you want to try something new, try actually enforcing the principles of not allowing nebulous, invalid, or unverifiable requirements. That would be a start, because I see it happening over and over and over again. I documented these exact types of problems with the RAH-66 Comanche flight controls, and told them if these were not fixed the program would be canceled. Management elected to ignore me, and we know what happened.

I have no doubt that you think you are correct in what you are stating. Moreover, I think you believe you are "so right" that nothing I say will ever convince you that what you espouse has been tried. Such nebulous requirements are a direct cause of requirements creep, because eventually someone says "here is what we really meant by that (poorly written) requirement." By then, there are sunk costs, design margins may already be eroding, and you now have what amounts to a "new" (unplanned) capability...all because of a non-crisp requirement.

Good luck to you.

Ray,

I apologize if you feel insulted or belittled.

I do agree with you that nebulous, poorly conceived requirements are a recipe for disaster, and I've had to work under those conditions so I know firsthand what a poorly written set of requirements looks like.

I also agree that projects with requirements that do not match political or financial realities are doomed to failure. This has been a problem that NASA has wrestled with since the end of the Apollo program, and continues to wrestle with today.

Where we part ways is at the notion that the solution to these problems is to design requirements that are so narrow and strictly focused that they preclude reasonable expansion of goals later in the life of the project. You seem to think that planning for the future is a fool's errand; I merely think that *predicting* the future is a fool's errand but planning for it is vital. This sort of future planning is (for example) the reason that SMS (text messaging on your cell phone) exists today: room for future expansion was built in to requirements before a use was found for it. That resulted in "waste," but several years after the empty space was stuck into the protocol, someone came up with a good (and highly profitable) use for it. So I counter your proof that room for growth is impossible, with an example of its success.

Now. Phrases like "what you are insinuating (but perhaps not stating outright) is flat-out wrong," and "that is a marketing person's language, not a design engineer's" tend to get my hackles up, and your condescending tone was/is not helpful either. I'm sure that nothing I say will change your mind either, as it is equally obvious that you've come to your rigid conclusion over decades of experience and nothing will pull you from it. Civilized debate is useful, if for no other reason than it encourages us to explore our own beliefs. Your tone (especially in your most recent response here) reinforces my belief that you approach engineering with a self-centered, inflexible approach and immediately dismiss any dissenting opinions rather than consider that your position may benefit from refinement. I find that to be an unfortunately common attitude in the aerospace industry, where such ego-driven decision making rules. But the opposite of jaded isn't naive, and if you've ever safely stepped off a commercial airplane in this country, you've benefited from *my* years of engineering training and experience. Your implication that I lack experience in the "real world" is wrong, but not unexpected - I've encountered inflexible, condescending engineers for years and know exactly what to expect from them. And sometimes, a project can succeed in spite of them.

Not because of luck. Because of Dedication. Motivation. Experience. Foresight. Initiative.

I'm sure you very artfully covered your ass when you worked on failed projects. That's not why I work at NASA.