Making Teamwork Work
From consulting firms to steel workers, most work groups would benefit enormously from developing better teamwork, but making it happen isn't easy. Excerpts from
Reassessing the Risk Assessment
Risk assessments should help an engineer determine cost-effective remedies to environmental pollution. Unfortunately, most don't. Most assessments drastically overestimate...
Landfills: Anatomy of Automated Design
California's 360 acre Bee Canyon landfill (completed last year) sits amid a complicated network of narrow canyons with side slopes 300 ft high. As with most landfill projects,...
Value Engineering at a Superfund Site
The Helen Kramer Landfill ranked fourth on the EPA's National Priorities List and the estimated cost of clean up was about $39 million. By value engineering selected parts...
Design Cable-stayed Bridge for Cost Effectiveness and Safety
Innovative design approach is needed to enhance the prestigious status enjoyed by cable-stayed bridges. The present paper aims at such a goal of cost effectiveness and safety by providing...
Enhancing Decision Analysis Techniques for Lunar Base Construction Research
The usefulness of decision analysis concepts applied to lunar base construction research has been demonstrated [Boles 1990]. During the referenced work the authors realized that further...
A Proposed Methodology for Ranking Space Resource Utilization Processes
A recent survey paper on lunar manufacturing identified 26 initial steps previously proposed as primary routes for lunar processing. Most of these have not been studied in sufficient detail...
Materials and Structures Synergistic with In-Space Materials Utilization
The objective of this paper is to clearly demonstrate the significant advances made in recent months toward actual hardware realizations of various concepts for the utilization of in-space...
Cargo Transport to the Lunar Surface Using a Three Rotor Sling
The three rotor sling, a momentum transfer device, is described. The dynamics of multi-rotor systems are explained, and the three rotor system is shown to be favored over one and two rotor...
Extraterrestrial Resources: A Perspective from Terrestrial Economic Geology
Terrestrial mining experience indicates that the overwhelming criterion of a potentially economic deposit is its recoverable concentration of the desired mineral or element. These criteria...
Lunar Mining?Surface vs. in Situ?A Comparative Study
Surface mining and in situ mining are briefly reviewed and compared. It is verified that the inherent advantages of in situ mining over surface ruining point out that in situ mining should...
A New Era in Space Operations
The United States has embarked on a bold new course in space. We are in the process of deploying global missile defenses which promises to help realize an extended era of international...
The Virtual Mission: A Step-Wise Approach to Large Space Missions
The new Virtual Mission concept will provide NASA's Science Program with a powerful new, 'go-as-you-pay,' flexible, and resilient way of accomplishing its science observing program. The...
Advances in Ground Operations for the Next Generation Space Launch Vehicle Programs
For over thirty years, large launch vehicles such as Saturn, Delta, Atlas, and Titan have successfully provided the world with access to space. The emphasis of each of those programs was...
Mars Via the Moon?A Robust Lunar Resources-Based Architecture
A space operations architecture is outlined that uses lunar materials to cost-effectively support Lunar and Mars exploration and operations. This architecture uses a chemically powered...
Towards a Spacefaring Civilization
Three questions are addressed: (1) Is the U.S. a spacefaring nation? (2) Are we a spacefaring civilization? What are the benefits of being one? If we are not, how do we become one? (3)...
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Transportation Control Measures for San Luis Obispo County, California
The San Luis Obispo Air Pollution Control District has developed simple techniques to estimate emission reductions from various Transportation Control Measures. Accurate emission estimates...
Moving Toward a Probability-Based Risk Analysis of the Benefits and Costs of Major Rehabilitation Projects
By the year 2010, 77% of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer's projects will be over 40 years old. The Corps wants to allocate its scarce rehabilitation funds in a cost-effective manner. To...
Methodology for Evaluating Dredged Material Alternatives Using Risk-Cost Analysis Under Uncertainty
A methodology and a case example was presented at the 1989 Conference on Risk-Based Decision Making in Water Resources, Santa Barbara, to perform risk-cost analysis for dredged material...
Risk Based Optimal Fatigue Testing
Optimal fatigue life testing of materials is considered. Based on minimization of the total expected costs of a mechanical component a strategy is suggested to determine the optimal stress...
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