Columbia Disaster Anniversary 214
Jorkapp writes "One year ago today, seven astronauts perished in a horrible silver-white comet over Texas skies. Since then, life at the Johnson Space Center seems to have returned to normal. Still, memories of the doomed STS-107 mission can be found throughout the center. Space.com has a rather interesting editorial about NASA's past, present, and future with the Space Shuttle program. In the immediate future, returning the Shuttle fleet to flight is a key first step. Eventually, NASA plans to launch Constellation, a new Crew Exploration Vehicle designed to replace the shuttles." Jim Lovell has a few words to say.
Pretty amazing (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Pretty amazing (Score:5, Informative)
They didn't. If the ET insulation had impacted the tiles, there would have been only minor damage (a weeks worth of repair time before the next flight was estimated).
The insulation didn't hit the tiles, it hit the RCC panels [spaceref.com] at the front of the wing. These are entirely different. They are big, tough, heavy elements which turn out to be unexpectedly brittle.
Re:Pretty amazing (Score:4, Informative)
The reason that I suspected the foam was not just the relative velocity, it was how much ice would be around the foam. I don't know if all the ice would have been shed immediately, but foam plus ice would be a lot more damaging.
Re:Pretty amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
Communication issues? A fair criticism. NASA bureaucracy? Makes sense. But to criticize the weight of the tiles - which are designed to be heat-resistant yet lightweight - seems a little ignorant to me. I think a heavier object of similar size (say... a brick) would have no problem falling from the sky.
It's always pretty amazing how some of us feel qualified to give aerospace engineering advice to Ph.D. aerospace engineers.
Re:Pretty amazing (Score:2)
Doesn't NASA make a great, light insulation material called Aerogel? Could it be blown-in/extruded into a vacuum space that features a tough exterior?
Oh, boy, sleep! That's where I'm a NASA scientist!
Re:Pretty amazing (Score:3, Informative)
The NASA guys had a hard engineering problem to solve, with many physical and financial restraints. I'm suprised they managed to get the damn shuttles to do any serious work at all.
Re:Pretty amazing (Score:2)
So fuck, why didn't you tell NASA then tough guy? You could have saved the shuttle. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Why is this modded up? Please.
I am split (Score:5, Interesting)
A Bugg
Re:I am split (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I am split (Score:2, Insightful)
I do not believe it is resonable to design a single vehicle that will transport people from the earths gravity well to the rest of the solar system. We need to have vehicle that deliver people to LEO, vehicles that can transport cargo from the earth or LEO to the planets, vehicles that can
Re:I am split (Score:2, Interesting)
1) Tell Burt Rutan we need a moon base and a cheap way to get there and back.
2) Give him a check for, say, $8 billion.
3) Stand back.
We'd be there in less than 10 years, guaranteed.
Re:I am split (Score:2)
George W. did not campaign on war; in fact the foreign policy on which he campaigned in 2000 was isolationism. So you can chalk that up to another broken promise, though 9/11 probably counts as an extenuating circumstance.
Re:I am split (Score:2)
Historically isolationism meant invading other countries when folk felt like it. The isolationist bit meant not giving a damn about defending any other country that might be attacked. So letting Hitler invade Europe was fine with the isolationists, and so was invading the Philapeans, Cuba
BAH Humbug (Score:2, Interesting)
No-fault errors. (Score:5, Interesting)
Some junior NASA engineers made an unauthorised request to the military to get some photos of Columbia so that they could see if there was damage. At the same time, a senior NASA engineer made the same request. NASA management heard about the first request, and (rightly) were upset because it was made without authorisation (these photos are very expensive, only the boss can ok them). So management contacted the military and told them not to take photos at this time. Now this is the scary bit. What they didn't realise was that there was a second (authorised) request. They accidentally cancelled both.
Now how do you protect yourself against that sort of misunderstanding? The only way I can think of is to go overly bureaucratic and assign tracking numbers to everything. The amount of paperwork explodes and you drown in self imposed red tape. Is there a way for a large organisation to avoid this sort of no-fault errors without needing a signature every time someone sneezes?
Re:No-fault errors. (Score:2)
Bureaucracy can be annoying, and seem unnecessary at times, but when dealing with human lives like this, I agree with you that the bureacracy is perhaps needed. What you mentioned is a mistake that just sounds unbelievable, and very unfortunate.
The paperwork will just have to be taken care of, there are human lives at stake.
Re:No-fault errors. (Score:5, Interesting)
If that fails, then clearly the error lies with the person that made the second or N+1 request: the Air Force is not in the business of losing spacecraft or astronauts: if the importance of getting those pictures was clearly shown, there is no way that any reasonable officer would have denied it.
Bottom line: bureaucracies don't fail, people do (because they can always work the system). There is no such thing as a no-fault error in engineering.
Re:No-fault errors. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't really agree with this. There may have been fault in this case and in most cases, but a culture that believes that someone is always at fault will be one where people will not attempt anything new or risky.
All potential failures cannot be anticipated. If you have to find fault with a person, you'll sometimes end up just finding a scapegoat.
The fault might well be with the bureacracy, too. If the bureacracy creates so much paperwork that engineers didn't have time to do their engineering, then that's a fault of the bureacracy itself. Of course, you could always find the fault with the top managers that didn't staff sufficiently or authorized something that was inherently risky without allowing for failure, but I bet top managers won't ever be found to be the proximate cause of a failure.
Re:No-fault errors. (Score:5, Insightful)
As for your comment on culture, I agree with your thought but disagree with the conclusion: the whole point of a bureaucracy such as NASA's is to minimize risk, not maximize profit/reward. In engineering the risks/innovation should be done at the design stage, not during implementation, maintainance or operations.
Re:No-fault errors. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it is very clear that the fault here lay with NASA. It was pure butt-covering that they have been engaged it.
The cost of the photos is irrelevant. The satellite is a sunk cost. Taking a look at another space object is a reasonable experiment to consider regardless of whether you use the data.
NASA nixed the photographs because they were not interested in looking for failure.
Re:No-fault errors. (Score:2)
Bureaucracies fail all the time. Mostly they fail by being over complex and not changing with the times. KISS
The airforce isn't responsible for planes or noughts, is that not NASA. Greece doesn't have any space craft
Officers are not reasonable, they're not trained to be reasonable, they're not paid to be reasonable, they're not promoted for being reasonable. Officers are managers in charge of workers who cannot resign.
Re:No-fault errors. (Score:2)
As for officers, I have to say, on average, I'd rather work with a military officer than with a middle manager. Officers usually have other ideals in addition to climbing the organization ladder.
Re:No-fault errors. (Score:5, Insightful)
Perfect, unless you like sleeping indoors and feeding your children that is. It appears that various bureaucracies brought enormous pressure to bear to shut up the engineers who were reporting problems. Sure, they could have tried to run to the New York Times. Assuming anyone at the NYT would have listened to them, that would have gotten them a vote of thanks from a grateful public (monetary value: 0.00) and a lifetime blacklist from the aerospace industry (monetary value: $-2,000,000). What would you have done?
sPh
Re:No-fault errors. (Score:2)
Personally, I've been in a very similar situa
Re:No-fault errors. (Score:2)
Hamming it up (Score:5, Insightful)
No my issue is that two NASA managers were overconcerned with 'efficiency', that is Ham and Dittemore both seemed rightly concerned that everything should go smoothly with minimal cost overrun that they ran roughshod over those who actually knew something who were unhappy but had no real evidence at the time.
If the managers were running a production line, there call was correct. If they were involved with something safety critical (not just the shuttle, the same could have been said if they ran a chemical plant) then until the engineers are convinced, they should play safe.
Another issue was the confusion felt by the lower ranking engineers. They realised that the capabilities of the military cameras were *very* classified. Some who really wanted the imagery hasd the impression that a more senior peron had seen it and there was nothing to worry about. If they did not have that impression, they may have fought harder to get the pictures.
No, from the initial (and stupid staetments by O'Keefe, where he completely discounted the foam) through to the detailed errors earlier, it shows a lack of engineering knowhow at the top of the shuttle program. Bean counters are useful and an invaluable aid to budget control, but puting them in charge of something they don't really understand is stupid.
Re:Hamming it up (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hamming it up (Score:2)
Bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
disasters (Score:5, Interesting)
Everytime a major tradegy happens I try to save an editorial peice or something of the likes so my grandchildren/great grandchildren can remember the errors of the past
As they say: "Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it"
Hopefully in future generations, they will take this into account to assure the same error does not happen twice.
Re:disasters (Score:2)
Re:disasters - controversial (Score:4, Insightful)
Any loss of life is a personal tragedy for the individual and the family but 7 lives lost in a spacecraft accident is not the worst thing to have happened in the last few years.
It's just an event, to be noted with due respect. Space is a dangerous place to travel, its just that the relatively good safety record of the shuttle craft has pushed that awareness out of the collective mind.
7 astronauts agreed to those risks and sadly paid the price. Real tragedies happening at the time and since have been forgotten in the rush to cover and re-cover this issue.
Re:disasters - remembering (Score:2)
The problem will lie in getting them to READ the history when you give it to them.
And a newspaper is a better idea than a CDROM, but still I hope it was acid free paper, and an ink that doesn't biodegrade in oxygen after 25 years.
Personally I hold little hope that we as a species will avoid preventable disasters like this again. Hopefully we'll learn to deal with the aftermath better though. Learning from mistakes doesn't always help us avoid them in the future, we ju
An article that talks about problems with NASA (Score:5, Interesting)
- NASA has known there were problems with tile flaking for a long time.
- Stress from the impact was noted on the black box recorder, but not transmitted to the crew or ground control
- Some of the shielding floated away during orbit, a fact confirmed by radar data, but no one noticed at the time.
- NASA turned down repeated requests to inspect the wing for damage during the mission.
- There was no real reason Columbia's flight couldn't have been delayed after tile problems with Atlantis except for the bureaucratic need to maintain "momentum."
All in all, the article is pretty damning for NASA's management.NASA Is Kinda Like Any IT Organization It Seems (Score:5, Insightful)
Sidenote on bureaucratic crapola... (Score:2, Informative)
One of his biggest complaints was that for every hour of actual engineering and fabrication he did, there was about TWO hours of procedure documentation he was forced to write before anythig he built was used. Yes, this makes sense for major components, but he had to document EVERYTHING he did, including the most minor one-shot test rig.
Just suporting the
Re:NASA Is Kinda Like Any IT Organization It Seems (Score:3, Insightful)
Thank god shuttle has an EOL date (Score:5, Interesting)
Er correction to above (Score:2)
Re:Thank god shuttle has an EOL date (Score:2)
Various FAQs (Score:5, Informative)
Online at Space.Com [space.com]
The Online Columbia Loss Faq, compiled through March 2003 [io.com] much of which might be outdated, but good for lots of small details, and a sense of the history as it happened.
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board Website [www.caib.us], due to become inactive on February 1st, 2004 (!)
People might want to download the final report while they can, dated October 2003, although It is also available on the Nasa Website here [nasa.gov]
Columbia families say NASA still 'fudging' (?) (Score:2)
the controversy continues. and Nasa seems to be dragging its' feet in making certain changes
Blame the subordinates (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know if this reflects the author's attitude but I'm pretty sure the CAIB report didn't have this tone, which we saw after Challenger as well. Then it was engineers failing to "prove" their case (although they did speak up). This time the engineers "failed to speak up," although they had conferences on the foam strike involving dozens of people and escalated their concerns to the highest levels of NASA. I guess that does not count for "speaking up."
Next time they will be blamed if they don't commit mutiny, kidnap the managers and threaten them with torture. Roger Boisjoly moved large rocks in his backyard. I wonder what the Columbia engineers are doing?
Re:Blame the subordinates (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/11/lange
The CAIB report was quite hard on mismanagement (Score:2)
Risky Business (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Risky Business (Score:2, Interesting)
Seems like yesterday (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems to me that an event is etched clear as day in our memory, and a week afterwards we push it aside as we go about our daily lives, and when the memory is brought back, it is so clear that it couldn't possibly have happened a year ago. Where did all this time go?
Re:Seems like yesterday (Score:2)
Re:Seems like yesterday (Score:2)
Re:Seems like yesterday (Score:2)
The tragedy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The tragedy (Score:2)
Re:The tragedy (Score:3, Insightful)
Is that there's not going to be another launch vehicle comparable to the Shuttle in terms of capability for the next half century.
The space shuttle certainly has a big cargo capacity. Despite being a huge compromise (hence its limitations), it does succeed at being a heavy transport. But why do we need a space shuttle to do this job?
You have to train astronauts to do a relatively automated task anyway -- launching the shuttle, orbiting, and landing. NASA can fly the whole mission from the ground, rely
Need some additional perspectives (Score:5, Informative)
sPh
Jerry Pournelle (Score:3, Funny)
I like the reference to Pournelle, he's a great guy. Used to buy Byte just for his column but after Byte went paid-only on the web I lost interest.
Have you seen this parody [netfunny.com]? Excerpt:
"When we finally got home from the monthly Rambling Writers Conference (this time in Djemaa-el-Fna), we found Fractal Manor's main hall shoulder deep in brand-new state-of-the-art totally free computer hardware and software for me to check out. Drat. I'll never get around to most of it, of course, and probably will end up du
Re:Jerry Pournelle (Score:2)
sPh
I remember (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I remember (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I remember (Score:2)
Re:I remember (Score:2)
Re:I remember (Score:2)
Allen
The URL (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I remember (Score:2)
Re:I remember (Score:2)
Tim
Re:I remember (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I remember (Score:2)
Not astronauts (Score:3, Insightful)
They were not using astronauts but doing a multicultural PR gameshow. Lives were lost and the management was to blame for this stupidity.
Most of the real trained astronauts realized this and spoke out later. Most should have been very angry.
We were doing highschool kitbox experiments up there instead of pushing the frontiers.
I worked in Huntsville in the early days. Everyone I knew that had background knew immediately that the tile areas were at fault. NASA knew it also but put up the lame excuses so the PR could continue.
O'Keefe should be working as a greeter at Walmart.
An accountant bean counter should not be mading these decisions. I hope he never gets a full nights sleep the rest of his life.
Re:Not astronauts (Score:4, Informative)
2. The flight crew was trained astronauts. The science crew were highly trained as well.
Nice troll, though, you got +1 Insightful.
Memorial (Score:3, Interesting)
If you also remember... (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.gongoozler.com/images/cnn-speed-of-lig
Re:If you also remember... (Score:2)
Don't Mend It, End It (Score:3, Interesting)
Aren't two NASA culture-induced shuttle disasters enough?
Both shuttles disasters can be directly traced to NASA brass CYA maneuvers at the expense of human lives.
Privatize space exploration and get rid of NASA once and for all.
Re:Don't Mend It, End It (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Don't Mend It, End It (Score:2)
NASA is good (Score:3, Interesting)
NASA is very good at what it was intended to do. Unfortunately, that's not running a space launch business.
NASA was originally the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, with the purpose of "..to supervise and direct the scientific study of the problems of flight, with a view of their practical solution." (official history [nasa.gov]).
The main difference between the Moon program and the Shuttle program is that getting to the Moon was a development project - the creation of new technology - while the Shuttle
Astronauts always remember (Score:4, Insightful)
Many are ex-military, many have PhDs, all of them are the best of the best. The loss of any member of the family, whether it's an astronaut or a technician, is felt by all. All honor those who have given their lives in pursuit of space exploration.
Read the CAIB report (Score:5, Interesting)
Many of the findings are not unique to the space program, but reflect the pressures when the bean counters are chasing targets and are in the driving seat. Of course, the converse is that a true engineer is a perfectionist so things are late and too expensive if they run things. You need the mixture of bean-counters and engineers and that is difficult. One issue is that these days, the bean-counters are professional managers and have thus been educated in communication. Some engineers are but many aren't. The core problems addressed by the CAIB revolve around miscommunication and misunderstanding. Powerpoint didn't help either.
Re:Read the CAIB report (Score:2, Insightful)
I think, though, the Slashdot crowd should calm down a little and try not to blame management. Most seem to do so because of their own personal experiences and frustrations with management. These are not completely unfounde
Re:Read the CAIB report (Score:2)
A good example is chemical engineering. All plants leak to a lessor or greater degree, but to fix the leaks requires a plant shutdown. It is a balance between the engineer's concern about safety and the manager's concern about wasted production (a plant may take a day to shutdown or startup). The interesting thing is that
From a year ago (Score:5, Interesting)
One year ago tomorrow, I posted in my weblog [xwell.org]:
I still believe that. Bush's Mars program may or may not be the best way to go, and NASA may still need to figure out what it's really going to do about the Hubble, but the public is still talking about space exploration, the latest batch of Mars probes are capturing the imagination of the entire world, the X-Prize [xprize.org] is still going strong, and we're making progress. The naming of the landing sites and nearby hills after those who gave their lives in this endeavor was a wonderful touch. We're ready to move forward.
Why did progress stop? (Score:3, Interesting)
Fund for astronauts' children (Score:2, Informative)
I recall.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I sat there on the edge of my bed, thinking back to the reentry of Apollo 13 and when they came in shallow, scaring the entire mission control, not to mention the rest of the world.
The shuttle has been a major money hog for the space program, as well as the nation herself.
We HAD a heavy lifting vehicle. Hell, it laid down the heavy lifting record and it still stands today... The Saturn V and her sister ships.
You bring that baby back and we will have a multimission, easily modifiable vehicle capable of lifting multiple satellites that would make the Delta V's bust their rivets, to lofting entire space station modules, stuffed with spare parts and supplies.
There were proposals on the boards that had the V lofting the atom-powered NERVA vehicle that would have made Mars easily, to additional modules for SkyLab, if that program never got the axe.
One problem with the NERVA stack though is that the overall height would have been a good 10-20 feet higher than the door on the VAB.
Bring her back folks.. We'll be rolling in research projects that will be coming from the savings on the vehicle.
Re:didn't they shread all the blueprints? (Score:3, Informative)
And many others have heard that also, so many in fact that it qualifies as an urband legend [urbanlegends.com].
It's not true however. They're still there. The problem is that you couldn't get the parts (sixties vintage) today, and the launch pads have been rebuilt. We've als
Lovell is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand the fear that so many have, that if we stop manned spaceflight until we have a sensible replacement for the shuttle or a sensible place to _go_ other than LEO (again) to do "science" experiments submitted by grade-school children (again), then we'll never go back. The money will be appropriated for other purposes, and that will be that. Maybe they're right. Maybe the only way to stay in space is to keep pouring billions of dollars into creaky, unsafe vehicles going nowhere and doing nothing. If so, though, what's the real point?
The most-often cited reasons for manned spaceflight are science, the human drive to explore, and the need to get our eggs into at least one more basket. The science coming out of the budget-gobbling manned program is dwarfed by that of the robotic probes. We're not pushing the boundaries of anything by going to the same place we've gone 100 times before for a couple of weeks each time. Anything extraterrestrial human dwelling would be inexorably tied to home so a disaster to Earth (e.g., Shoemaker-Levy bopping us instead of Jupiter) would doom them as well.
I guess I've just lost the "vision". In my youth I was a big proponent of manned spaceflight. We were going to swarm the solar system and after inventing FTL, the galaxy or even the universe. Those were the dreams of a fat kid with a poor understanding of physics, though. The reality is that there's nowhere for us to go, nowhere we can reach. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I see an unmanned spaceflight program as vastly more worthy of our money until we've gathered far more information about "the neighborhood" than we have now.
Not only wrong but clueless (Score:3, Informative)
Do you move into a house with only the foundation poured and complain of the rain too?
It flabbergasts me when people insist that ISS is a failure because it hasn't accomplished anything when it isn't even finished being built!
If we were to compare ISS to Skylab, I'd say we were about 10 days into the Skylab II mission, and they hadn't accomplished much by then, too busy making repairs. But even on the original timeline, they'd
Anyone else get almost misty-eyed... (Score:2)
Forget Mars, we have better things to do in space! (Score:5, Interesting)
There are things we can do with manned space projects that would mean a hell of a lot more to the taxpayers than a small handful of people bringing back a few pounds of Mars rocks and a ton of observations that'll be of use to generations of science grad students, and we need to get on with them.
Whether you believe the peak oil projections that say:
- already happened
- 2010
- 2030
it's plain that we're looking at the end of cheap oil and the beginning of the fossil-fuel energy end game. This means that we already need to be at work on reducing our own energy demand and replacing fossil fuel with something else. Renewable is cool, but it probably won't cover all the demand and will probably be too expensive for the Third World.We're better off starting with the quick-fix measures for energy conservation now and starting work on a the demo Space Power Satellite (SPS) satellite project already designed by NASA while development is done on an SPS network, a cheap orbital skyhook for at least freight, (elevator or railgun), a moon mining and processing facility.
The timeframes and the cost to do the above are about the same as Bush is calling for in order to send a handful of people to the moon and Mars, with these resources in place, a trip to Mars and to the asteroids to scout locations for the next phase of expanding our industrial base into the Solar System as a whole will be far less expensive, a lot safer, a lot faster, and will probably be done by the private sector. Looking for profit, not just scientific research.
If you want to read about alternatives to current technology policies of the Bush Adminstration and of all the Democratic candidates, check this page [ecis.com] out. The information links that would ordinarily substantiate my post here are on that page and mostly work. If you don't like what I've got in mind, come up with something better and start working on turning it into public policy.
The best way to celebrate the lives of the astronauts who died in space is the way we celebrated the pioneers who died in the American West. By turning the lonely, isolated places where they died into places for human industry and human habitation.
We've mourned our astronauts for long enough. It's time to get on with the real goals they were working for.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
"I'm not sure we ever want to get over it," McCulley adds. "You learn from it and, as we work through these technical issues, folks are asking questions today that they might not have asked before."
Re:WTF (Score:2)
Do we mourn every sunken ship? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anniversaries of accidents and disasters are for the families of the victims, anyone else is just ghoulish.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
It is of course very sad for the families, but I bet even they appreciate that those who died would always be left unfulfilled and dissatisfied if they had not taken the chance offered to them (perhaps they would still go even if they knew the consequences..?).
I do not think the actual loss of life was the real disaster: it was seven people who 99.99% of people hadn't even heard of before the accident. I think the true disaster was the tarnishing of a vision: the idea of the human race reaching beyond our home and "exploring the great unknown". The idea that our technology had allowed us to conquer the solar system. And why were we doing it? Just because.
Slightly offtopic, but I really hate it when people ask what the point of space travel is. If those people don't realise, they will NEVER understand why the rest of us look upon astronauts with such envy. In my view, these doubters are missing a key characteristic of humanity - the desire to increase our knowledge and understanding and to make the world a better place.
Re:WTF (Score:2)
Re:WTF (Score:2)
What's more, they'll find a way of putting a socialist message into it, and in doing so twist it out of all reality.
There are an astounding number of historical inaccuracies in Titanic. I know, I know, it's only a film, but the number of people it misportrays or paints as cowards just in order to get
Re:Information about constellation (Score:2)
I figure the only new feature these new craft will have, is, no styrofoam on the shuttle to destroy the wing, right?
Supposedly this will be fixed for the next shuttle launch. The company that makes the external fuel tanks was charged with fixing the flaw that allows foam to break off, supposedly by not using foam anymore.
No, but seriously, you mean, we aren't going to use shuttles anymore? Whats it going to be, a space elevator? Damn the mod who posted this article without more info!
We will use sh
Constellation = CEV (Score:2)
The CEV itself was more or less a renaming of the OSP - Orbital Space Plane - programme (albeit with $7 billion less allocated to it - hmm, it's already turning into Shuttle 2.0), which partly underwent the change of title to disguise the budget cut, and probably partly because one of the concepts isn't a plane
Um... it's not Trek. (Score:3, Informative)
Please tell me you're [multied.com] not [navy.mil] really [navy.mil] that [constellation.org] stupid [navy.mil].
Re:Constellation Class Space Vehicle? (Score:2)
Re:Constellation Class Space Vehicle? (Score:2)