How NASA Defended Its Assembly Facility From Hurricane Katrina 59
An anonymous reader writes: Tomorrow marks the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's arrival in New Orleans. Though that time was filled with tragedy, there were survival stories, and a new article gives an insider's account of how NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility weathered the storm. Michoud was their key fuel tank production location, and if it had been lost, the space program would have gone off the rails. A 17-foot levee and a building with four water pumps capable of moving 62,000 gallons per minute stood between the storm and catastrophe for NASA's launch capabilities. "Water was merely the primary concern of the first 24 hours; Hurricane Katrina left its mark on the facilities even if Michoud was the rare speck of land to escape flooding. Roofs were lost to strong winds, one building even blew out entirely. External Tank 122 took some damage." Members of the "ride out" team spent much of the next month at Michoud, working long days to inspect and repair issues caused by the water. They maintained the facility well enough that it became a base for members of the military doing search and rescue operations. Amazingly, they did it all without any injuries to the team, and NASA didn't miss a single tank shipment.
what's the opposite of Progress? (Score:2)
Survived Katrina, didn't survive Congress
Re:what's the opposite of Progress? (Score:5, Informative)
TL;DR version: Survived Katrina, didn't survive Congress
You apparently didn't read the complete article. They are now busy building components for the Space Launch System. They are still very much alive. Good for them!
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Yep, still building rockets to push a craft through the atmosphere. Alive yes, thinking straight is debatable. They clearly didn't learn too much studying the SR-71 from '97 before mothballing it in '99 at NASA. I'd wager they would have gotten mach 4 at around 150,000' out of the SR-71 if something didn't happen in 1964 on the north shore of Tahoe and the development of JP7 had been fine tuned. They probably didn't look too hard at the AQM-60 Kingfisher developed under OXCART under CIA SR in the same p
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You apparently didn't read the complete article. They are now busy building components for the Space Launch System. They are still very much alive.
They might have food on the engineers' families tables, but I don't see anything coming out of there flying anytime soon.
In case that's not impressive enough (Score:1)
". . . muttering something about uptime." [baselinemag.com]
"Shit, we're dealing with a sysadmin." [xkcd.com]
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Because its not just a NASA facility (Score:4, Insightful)
New Orleans on the other hand was crumpled like a beer can under the might of Katrina, and smelted in the incompetent furnace that was the Bush administration.
You mean because of the governor and mayor, right? Bush had to wait until the state authorize the use of the military to jump in. Or do you want the president to have the power to jump in and take control of a city?
His failure - if you have to find one - is that he didn't publicly chastise the governor until the governor was shamed into doing that. Unfortunately, that was not his style - otherwise he would have blamed 9/11 on the Clinton administration since that is when most of the preparation and planning took place.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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You are perfectly welcome to cite your own reliable sources and update wikipedia to correct the factual errors and remove opinions.
And even if you don't you can still cite sources to contradict the above statement.
Or perhaps wikipedia is actually correct on the subject.
Most likely you're just a loud mouth conservative, like most of the posters here, and have no actual facts.
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You mean because of the governor and mayor, right? Bush had to wait until the state authorize the use of the military to jump in.
I think we're talking about FEMA, which you might remember was headed by a guy who's only qualification was that he was a judge for horse shows or something like that.
Or do you want the president to have the power to jump in and take control of a city?
Providing aide does not require taking over anything.
Unfortunately, that was not his style - otherwise he would have blamed 9/11 on the Clinton administration since that is when most of the preparation and planning took place.
You mean like when Clinton was directing cruise missile strikes against terrorists in Africa over the screaming objections of Republicans, or were you more referring to how Clinton warned Bush about threats to attack the United States and Bush did essentially nothing? Does this mean that the
*BUSH* administration?!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't you mean "Nagin administration"? And "Blanco administration"?
Or does the fact those two have a "D" after their names mean you can't blame the people actually in charge when Katrina hit? You know, the clowns who let literally acres of buses get flooded out because they were too stupid to use them to evacuate people?
Because Florida got hit with three hurricanes right in a row in 2004 - Charley, Ivan, and Jean all hit between Aug 13 and Sep 26, 2004.
And there was no problem with the response to that, now was there?
Bush was in charge then too.
What was the difference? Bush was in charge in Florida, too - Jeb Bush.
Oh, and when the response to Hurricane Andrew in Florida was horrible? Guess the party of Florida Governor Lawton Chiles...
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Wow. I'm sorry but these posts are too common and too frequent for me to believe that this is not a democrat propaganda. Post often enough and people believe this shit - or at least start sub consciously believing the spirit of these posts.
If this was a MS or Google shill, they would be called out in a New York minute. Hell, they at least are more subtle than this.
It's a real shame what politics have come too.
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And to add, if it's not a paid for democrat, then why are none of the democrats or progressives calling out these lies? Do they really add to any conversation?
In this thread alone...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
And I haven't refreshed the page otherwise I'd probably see more.
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Don't feed the troll. It's here for the reaction.
Re:Because its not just a NASA facility (Score:4, Insightful)
Was it ever determined to be incompetence of the Bush administration, or are you just spouting off?
At the time, the stories coming out were that there was a delay in the request for assistance, which is required before the federal government can come help. If they didn't request assistance and the feds showed up, people would be complaining about a federal invasion. Also, when whole swaths of land are ravaged, getting into the area to help is rather difficult, and can take time in the case of a hurricane as they hit an enormous amount of area, not just a little city.
But it is always more convenient to blame your political opponent, even if it is lazy.
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Bush stated he refused to provide help because he doesn't like black people.
I wish I weren't out of mod points... Put up or shut up. Show me where Dubya said anything of the sort. He didn't. Troll.
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Today, it's not clear whether West himself would repeat what he said 10 years ago. After all, he is more careful now and even apologized to Bush in a 2010 interview on NBC's "Today" show, saying that he "didn't have the grounds to call him a racist." [huffingtonpost.com]
It's sad how many people don't actually know anything about what they quote.
Re:Because its not just a NASA facility (Score:4, Informative)
"Brownie [wikipedia.org], you're doing a heck of a job"
Yes, as a matter of fact. Bush was too incompetent to know his flunky was too incompetent [cnn.com]:
And, in case you don't scroll far enough in that article:
So, a man without proper experience failed to act and then offered to "tweak" the response, as if it was a minor thing.
So how about you stop thinking of this as a partisan issue. It really does come down to an unqualified crony of Bush failing to act, and Bush acting like it was all going according to plan.
Yes, yes it is. Only in this case it's you doing that.
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Links? I have heard that the national guard (a state organization) was turning people back after the storm had started, but nothing about the army.
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At the time, the stories coming out were that there was a delay in the request for assistance, which is required before the federal government can come help.
In an emergency, with lives at stake, you are supposed to do what is needed and worry about the "proper" paperwork and chain of command later. Insisting you can't save lives without XQA dash 5 filled out is the kind of crap that our soldiers in WWII used to call chickenshit [wordpress.com].
insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called — instead of horse — or bull — or elephant shit — because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war
This is pretty much an exact characterization of the response we got from the Federal government at the time, and the excuses that are still thrown up for their inaction today. Of course this is the exact flavor of shit you can expect wh
Re:Because its not just a NASA facility (Score:5, Insightful)
Pay no attention to the 130 years of Democrat rule of the city leading up to Katrina. All the fault for the city's unpreparedness lies with a single Republican who had no authority to intervene.
If I rolled my eyes sufficiently for the amount of derp packed into your comment, I'd probably get dizzy and fall over.
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There were issues with Post Katrina ET's (Score:5, Informative)
We had issues with Post Katrina ET's because many of the technicians were displaced after Katrina and they lost institutional knowledge. The Ground Umbilical Carrier Plate (GUCP) was not installed within the tolerances and we had problems for the rest of the program with leaking hydrogen gas from this connection which caused quite a few scrubbed launches.
http://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/60... [nasa.gov]
Can Only Be Stopped By... (Score:2)
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Why no mention of gulf coast?? (Score:3)
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Probably because most other places had competent City and State governments in place who knew how to handle the crisis. NO went to hell because no one knew what to do and took forever to even officially request federal aid and even then tried to retain control over things they had no clue how to handle.
People forget than FEMA is not a first response organization. They are suppose to come in to assist already established State and Local teams, take over centralized command if the locals are not capable and
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NO residents that didn't leave were victims of learned helplessness.
In other words, they were so used to nanny government wiping their butts for them, they forgot how to fend for themselves.
I guess it's too much to ask.. (Score:2)