D
docm
Guest
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1266<br /><br />Cutting through the doubletalk & newspeak these are the most pertinent paragraphs IMO;<br /><br /><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>><br /><b><font color="yellow">After the Ares I system design review in late October 2007, thrust oscillation was identified as a risk by the Ares Project and assigned a risk of four-by-five (out of five-by-five) on the NASA risk matrix.</font></b>NASA uses the risk matrix as a way to track the probability that a risk may manifest itself and the overall impact if the risk does manifest itself. <b><font color="yellow">Risks are scored from 1 (low) to 5 (high) for both probability and overall impact.</font></b><br /><br />The thrust oscillation risk is not directly associated with launch vehicle performance or first-stage development. <b><font color="yellow">The thrust oscillation risk is associated with the integrated stack, meaning the assembled Ares I first stage, upper stage and Orion crew vehicle.</font></b>Ares I performance is tracked on a monthly basis, and Ares I consistently has met its performance requirements with margin. <br /> /><br /><b><font color="yellow">Because it is early in the process, NASA is still working to characterize the potential impact, assess design feasibilities and formulate a plan to address the technical analysis on the thrust oscillation issue. Therefore, NASA has not held a formal briefing for congressional staff or Government Accountability Office staff but has been open about this issue since first learning about it.</font></b><br /><br />Thrust oscillation is a new engineering challenge to the developers of Ares - but a challenge very similar to many NASA encountered during the Apollo Program and development of the space shuttle. Every time NASA faces an engineering challenge - and it faces many</p></blockquote> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>