NASA Commemorates Space Shuttle Tragedies 100
eldavojohn writes "Space.com is covering NASA's commemoration of the Apollo 1 crew & the last shuttle crews of both the Challenger and Columbia orbiters. The Apollo 1 crew was lost forty years ago yesterday to a fire while testing their spacecraft on a launch pad. From the article: 'While the nearly two decades separating NASA's three space disasters allowed room for the agency to grow complacent, the relatively short time between the 2003 loss of Columbia and the end of the shuttle program could avoid a repeat of such behavior.'"
Antiques (Score:5, Interesting)
So could replacing the shuttles. Even if we keep the basic design, make one or two that are built for more frequent service and toss the rest. The only reason to "end" the shuttle program is that it became stagant.
Launch them unmanned (Score:2)
I thought the same thing. They should keep the vehicles and a single pad and launch them unmanned. It is a great capability.
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Re:Antiques (Score:4, Insightful)
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Eh? The HST was launched onboard Discovery on STS-31 [wikipedia.org]. I'm no rocket scientist, but I assume that the scope had to fit into the cargo bay in order to be launched... =)
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Has anyone seen comparisons of the characteristics of the modules, satellites, and other payloads the shuttles have carried?
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Because there isn't much actual reason to do so. In the case of a satellite with a failed booster the safe thing is to either fix it in orbit or deorbit it. Sticking a dodgy rocket engine in the back of a manned vehicle is not a good idea.
and in the case of the Hubble Space Telescope the only shuttle which
Sounds like an SUV (Score:1)
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They were combined for political reasons. A smaller manned vehicle might well be able to reach higher orbits, thus be more useful for repairing satellites.
Re:Antiques (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, the very idea of the reusable manned/cargo vehicle is inherently flawed. My personal favorite analogy is like deciding that you should buy a truck (instead of a truck and a small car) because you need to haul stuff around occasionally, with gas costing $1000 per gallon.
The new configuration, assuming it works as they say it will, is superior in l ways but one. The Ares V will have 130 m-T capability to LEO instead of the shuttles 24 m-T. The Orion capsule is in fact reusable, and while smaller than the shuttle, it doesn't make sense to launch the labs every time you go up. This goes with the idea that the ISS will become something useful. Having another tragedy like Columbia, while not only less likely, would also not cause a loss of our cargo capacity as well, which led to the current state of the ISS. The only real disadvantage is our inability to return things from orbit, and as far as I know we've never used that capability.
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We used it on a few occations, the most noteable being STS-32, when Columbia brought back the absolutely massive LDEF satellite. http://setas-www.larc.nasa.gov/LDEF/index.html [nasa.gov]
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Challenger was lost because an SRB torched the main tank, located right next to it. Columbia was lost because of debris striking the orbiter, located right next to it. Consider that when Skylab was launched and entire solar panel deployed in the lower atmosphere where it was ripped off the rocket. It got to orbit anyway.
The reason there's insulation on the tank in the first place i
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Had the orbiter been designed with either 3 or 4 SRB's, it would not have required an external fuel tank as the orbiters main engines would not have been required to reach orbit. There would have been no fuel tank to torch when Lockheed-Martin made the stupid decision to get the SRB manufacturer to sign off on a launch of the Ch
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Even without the fuel tank in the picture, an SRB that comes lose from it's mount is going to cause a fatal situation. It doesn't matter if that SRB is attached to a fuel tank or to three other SRB's.
I can think of no instance where a catastrophic fail
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Well, what can we say more.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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- RG>
Space Shuttle Trajectories (Score:1, Funny)
Cancel War - Restart NASA (Score:5, Insightful)
For the heroic efforts of the astronauts who died for enhancing our knowledge of the universe, I salute you all!!! I just wish our governments would turn to peaceful efforts and get the space program back into space -- and further than ever before.
We aught to get out of stupid wars, recover a little financial sanity and work on getting NASA going full tilt to warp drive...
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The problem is that like wolves, lions, and Apes, we are a highly territorial creature*. So long as we keep pissing on fence posts to say "this is mine" then we will have war where two peoples have pissed on the same post.
-nB
* as am I, and I ain't volunteering to change first (fourth or fifth maybe...)
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When was the last time you saw a war fought over territory? Territory didn't get us into Iraq, or Vietnam, or Korea. The only actual territorial war going on now that I can think of off hand is the Israeli/Palistinian conflict.
Most wars these days are fought to gain political or economic a
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Territory of money, territory of thought, still is control.
-nB
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I do think that humanity could be infinately perfectable but maybe we need to meet
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At no time in history, including the "classical" period, has more than a trivial amount of humanity not been focused on either survival, war, or capital accumulation.
Neither Regan (yes, President Ronald Regan) nor Berman are prophets. The mere existence of alien life will not cause humanity to unite behind a utopian ideal. Maybe if those aliens give us magic boxes that solve our food, water, and energy needs, then we'll
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Cancel NASA. War optional. (Score:2)
I am deeply
Let's Commemorate Them Properly (Score:5, Insightful)
With safe, cheap access to Earth orbit.
With a permanent human presence on the Moon.
With human exploration of Mars.
And with a long-range, focused, ambitious programme for human involvement in space exploration that will take us to all the major planets in our solar system, pushing science and technology for the benefit of the whole human race.
Sorry, I've been at the malt whisky.
Unfortunate in this day and age (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, I've been at the malt whisky.
It's really unfortunate that in this day and age you'd have to qualify a beautiful sentiment like the rest of your post like that. There was a time in this country, and not too long ago where you could say something like that and not have to cover your ass.
I think what you said stands just fine on its own. If we really want to honor these people, we need to show them and the world in general that their sacrifice was not in vain. And the best way of doing that is to continue their work.
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Yes - there was a period where people were deluded enough to think that such things were easily and cheaply doable. All we had to do was throw money at the project. (That these two beliefs are mutually incompatib
Slownewsday (Score:1)
With safe, cheap access to Earth orbit.
Aside from the spectacular view and parlor tricks, why?
The moon was a chuck of dust. We learned next to nothing from it, except that golfballs can be hit really, really far.
Mars is almost equally barren and inhospitable. We can't fix the problems on our own planet, but we presume that we can terraform Mars into something people could live on easily?
We've been sending people into space for half a century. Has this:
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These are all problems of Human Nature. Nobody "wants" to solve them, for all kinds of reasons. People flourish when there is a positive goal to work towards, however.
Perhaps GW should have overthrown the likes of Robert Mugabe instead of Saddam Hussein?
We need to explore. These things may look futile just now, but I assert that it is stupid to write off an entire avenue of research and exploration because people of limited imagination can see no benefit at present.
Political problems are never solved by
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...and another thing. I'm British. When I say "we" I mean "we humans," not Americans. I'm not saying that exploring space should be entirely up to you Americans, merely acknowledging the great work and sacrifice some of you have put in.
And yes, I agree, your country is terribly 200-year-ago when it comes to social policy.
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Aside from the spectacular view and parlor tricks, why?
The single biggest technological hurdle keeping us from the rest of the universe is the cost of putting something in orbit.
The moon was a chuck of dust. We learned next to nothing from it, except that golfballs can be hit really, really far.
I'm far from impressed with NASA's manned lunar missions and their value, but if that's all you can see then it's a perception problem on your part. We do know a lot more about the early solar environment a
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Given us universal healthcare? (Most of the rest of the industrialized nations have it. Please don't post "but universal healthcare often sucks" unless you've lived without ANY HEALTH CARE INSURANCE and needed health care.)
Helped us educate our children, and feed the poor ones?
Helped us cut CO2 emissions in industry and power generation?
Helped turn the disadvantaged (disabled, undereducated, homeless) into productive members of society - or a
Lessons being forgotten already (Score:4, Interesting)
Yet, NASA continues to insist it will retire the fleet not when it is actually good and ready to do so (i.e. when it is truly safe to, when the station is done, not just rushing to an arbitrary deadline) in 2010. Every time this is brought up, they say 2010.
Why, if they claim to have learned from these deadly accidents, are they continuing to be inflexible and continuing to cite the same hard date?
The correct answer is, "When the station has been safely completed according to all our rules, including safety requirements."
I've been a space buff for years and their repeated failure to learn even though they've lost THREE CREWS is mind-boggling. Going to a new design that doesn't have the design flaws (sidemount etc.) the Shuttle system does may help. But continuing to make the same mistakes, even after all this
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Challenger had to get off the ground as soon as possible. Columbia's loss was in part due to "we don't have time to check that" attitudes from those who could have looked for damage while the orbiter was still in orbit (i.e. photography from other spacecraft) and the assumption that there was no real problem.
Challenger, yeah. Columbia? Not so much. Even if they did take the time to get satellite pics of the damage, there was nothing to be done. There was no feasible plan for rescuing the crew. Not enough fuel to fly to the ISS, not enough supplies for them to wait for Atlantis to be prepped for launch, and no means of resupplying them. NASA put all their eggs in one basket, and then broke the basket. Once that foam hit and they reached orbit, they were screwed. The shuttle is simply overly complex and delicate
Re:Lessons being forgotten already (Score:5, Informative)
It was a case of "My theory is 100% infallible and don't you dare counter it even if it can be done effortlessly and for free"
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What if they had? What if some grainy picture suggested that there might be something like a hole that could cause problems... they still couldn't do anything about it. If true, they made a managerial decision and quite probably the right one.
At best it could only cause worry and doubt in a crew powerless to do anything about it, which is a potentially fatal combination even in the absence of a real physical problem
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This is stupid. Even if the crew were doomed, you would know what the damage was. Instead, they had to figure out from a few hundred miles of debris what went wrong. I'll assume here that you couldn't save the vehicle even if you knew it couldn't survive reentry unrepaired (and assuming no help were possible) merely because either the crew or NASA wouldn't go along with allowing the crew to die in orbit.
But let's say that they see that the wing is damaged (that knowledge alone would save NASA months of ti
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Re:Lessons being forgotten already (Score:4, Insightful)
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Seems pretty dismal to me but YMMV.
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The Challenger was the first major loss "in flight" of a crew. What has been well covered up is that the decision to launch on that cold morning was more about corporate ego on the part of the launch team and a head in the sand attitude from NASA. North American Rockwell, which designed and built the shuttle fl
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Sorry to nitpick... but it wasn't orbital _altitude_ that was a problem, it was the _inclination_. Plane changes are very expensive.
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I don't think the rules were particularly helpful. The problem is that they were wanting to do things like launch so that most of the launch trajectory was sunlit. But they simply didn't have enough launch window when they did all that. So then it becomes a choice between launching in less than perfect circumstances or delaying until it meets the exacting criteria. And even if safety is your only consideration, and it shouldn't be, then you still have the problem that any delay creates its own safety risks
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So why would it be impossible to simply say "We will retire it when the station is done" and still meet the goal of completing it in a timely fashion? The point is, the attitude of blindly quoting a 2010 date is a symptom of the same problem -- date-driven goals instead of readiness-driven goals. The continual parroting of the same date
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Nice attitude! (Score:2)
In other words: "Basically, we're gonna keep on doing the same unsafe shit as always, but now it doesn't matter since the odds only seem to catch up with us every 20 years or so and the shuttle won't be around that long."
With that attitude, good luck finding
Likewise. (Score:2)
After all the emotional and engineering investments that are made into the one vital manned program that NASA has left, I'm sure the last thing they w
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Yeah, because it was completely unforseeable that anything bad could ever happen. I mean, a locked capsule full of uninsulated electrical cables and flammable material pressurised with pure oxygen... what could POSSIBLY go wrong?
Sheesh, it sounds like a Fark headline.
Lets hope NASA takes more from than... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Stood Up by Columbia (Score:5, Insightful)
Columbia was due at about 9:16am, and the tour bus dropped us off at about 8:55am. There was a crowd of maybe 200 people outside the main entrance of the space center looking up at the sky and listening to mission control's updates on a speaker mounted outside. 9:16 came and went, and the PA system went silent. At about 9:25 my dad called my cell phone and told me that they had lost communication with Columbia.
At this point, we didn't know if they were going to close the space center to the public, so we redeemed our passes to get into the place. Kennedy staff members were crying, but they continued to be helpful. We made our way to the Shuttle Pavilion, where there was a feed from mission control indicating that there had been a "contingency," and that people who found parts of the orbiter should keep their distance due to potential hazardous materials.
As the day went on, people flowed to the Space Center. At 1:00 or 1:30 there was a ceremony at the astronauts' memorial, and the flag was lowered to half mast.
The tours of the facility were closed, but the displays, including the magnificent Rocket Garden, were available.
It was an unreal day, one I'll never forget. I could have learned a lot more about what happened at home on CNN, but I'm glad I was there.
Anticipating "Shuttle sucks/Apollo great" comments (Score:3, Informative)
Before someone starts bemoaning how great and safe Apollo was compared to the shuttle, I'll say what everyone will subsequently ignore:
If the Apollo program had gone to 117 launches, the best (max likelyhood) estimate is that there would have been 15 loss of vehicle accidents with 30 crew lost. While the error in that estimate is large, there is no evidence that Saturn launch vehicles were any safer than the shuttle, and it's a better than 1-sigma bet that they would have been worse.
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I was going to call you an idiot, but that's an insult to idiots. My analysis does include the escape system. Only about a third of potential loss of vehicle accidents offer any chance of survival even with the presence of the escape tower system. (Notice that it was 30 crew for 15 loss of vehicle events, that means that 5 of the LOV events were su
Commemorate by ceasing to send humans (Score:1)
The complications with sending humans into space are all too obvious and too many to list here. In short, humans need to be packed inside an "earth simulation" wherever they go (air, food, water, exercise, sleep, protection from high-energy particles, etc). All that expense with very little, if anything, in return (from a sci
Re:Commemorate by ceasing to send humans (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure everyone is familiar with, or at least the work of, Dr Steven Squyre, Mars Exploration Rover PI (Spirit and Opportunity robots). He gave the following [nasa.gov] message at a NASA Administrator's Symposium back in 2004 and repeated the same message at ISDC in LA last year. It's a long read but well worth it. I've emphasized the central points:
I'd like to finish this on a slightly lighter note by telling you a story. We had a lot of discussion yesterday about humans versus robots. And as the robot guy here, I want to tell a story about the experience that I had that really taught me a lot about that particular topic. We were at first trying to figure out how to use a set of rovers on Mars to really do scientific exploration. The technology folks at JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] built a wonderful little vehicle called FIDO. And FIDO was a great test rover - you could take it out in the field and you didn't worry about getting a few scratches in the paint.
We took it out to a place called Silver Lake in the Mojave Desert about 1997. And we went out there and it was the first time I had ever been out in the field. So I went out there with my team - a bunch of really high-priced geologic talent - some serious field geologists. And we got the rover out there and, of course, the rover breaks down. First time I've ever been out in the field, it's dusty, it's dirty, you know, the rover's not working. So okay, what am I going to do with all these bored geologists I've got on my hands? So I said, "Look, let's go on a geology walk. Let's go on a little field trip." So everybody got their boots and their rock hammers and their hand lenses and everything. And I picked up a notebook and a stopwatch. And we walked out to a nearby ridge where I knew there was some interesting geology exposed and we sat down - or rather I sat down - and they went off and they started geologizing.
And I started timing them. You know, how long does it take for Andy Knoll to walk over to that rock? How long does it take Ray Arvidson to pick that thing up and break it open with his rock hammer and look at it with a hand lens? And they were doing a lot of things that our rovers couldn't do, but I focused on the things they were doing that our rovers could do. And, you know, I did it as quantitatively as I could - this was hardly a controlled experiment. And when I looked at the numbers afterwards, what I found was that what our magnificent robotic vehicles can do in an entire day on Mars, these guys could do in about 30-45 seconds.
We are very far away from being able to build robots - I'm not going to see it in my lifetime - that have anything like the capabilities that humans will have to explore, let alone to inspire. And when I hear people point to Spirit and Opportunity and say that these are examples of why we don't need to send humans to Mars, I get very upset. Because that's not even the right discussion to be having. We must send humans to Mars. We can't do it soon enough for me. You know, I'm a robot guy. I mean, I love Spirit and Opportunity - and I use a word like "love" very advisedly when talking about a hunk of metal.
But I love those machines. I miss them. I do. But they will never, ever have the capabilities that humans will have and I sure hope you send people soon.
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Though he spoke in 2004, he's talking about a preliminary experiment that was done ten years ago. One highlighted part says, "...what I found was that what our magnificent robotic vehicles can do in an entire day on Mars, these guys could do in about 30-45 seconds." Sounds good to me. Even that is still a big win for robotics (as opposed to humans) when
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Shuttle should not be headline news (Score:1, Redundant)
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Exploration is dangerous (Score:2)
The loss of the astronauts serves as a reminder that exploration is dangerous - and complacency kills. In absolute terms, or even as a percentage, the exploration of space has been made with remarkably fewer deaths than other explorations. The body count for exploring the world, the seas, and the polar regions dwarfs that of space exploration.
It's when we forget just how dangerous it is, that we get sharply reminded. Even more unfortunately, when the people who sent them there forget it. Even with t
Schools (Score:3, Interesting)
Death to the spce shuttle. Long live the space sh (Score:2)
Then the Earth science projects started getting cancelled. People started losing their jobs. It was time to bring global warming back. Now we suddenly needed those earth science projects. Those low Earth orbit projects the Clinton beurocrats said weren't doing anything for us actually were doing everything for us.
Then came new medicare entitlements, new social security entitlements. NASA's 2007 appropr
Never quit.. no matter what.. (Score:4, Insightful)
On February 1, 2003 I had given up my first career as a software developer and had returned to school at the University of Central Florida to study Aerospace Engineering. I was early in my second semester and I was sitting in the Engineering atrium between Engineering Buildings 1 and 2. I was studying Calculus (calc 2 specifically) and I looked up at the flat screen monitors hanging from the walkway. I was sitting there staring at the screens watching the multiple pieces of debris streaking across the Texas sky. I sat and paused but I didn't cry. Challenger had hardened that in me. I thought for a moment and went back to my text book.
On May 6, 2006 I graduated UCF with a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering. Two weeks later I had moved to Seattle and began working at Boeing on the 787 as a Systems Engineer. I spent my senior year mastering orbital mechanics and satellite design.
Am I there yet? No. But my own history has taught me two things: the road is long and others will be lost. Morbid? possibly.. But I never gave up a dream and I never will. Someday my career will take me there, to insure that I will do what I need to do.
For some people it is natural to dream and then move on. For others, that dream never quite dies.