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Space Shuttle Columbia Breaks Up Over Texas
An anonymous reader writes "NASA lost communication with space shuttle Columbia shortly before its scheduled landing on Saturday. It was unclear whether there were any other problems." Various news programs have been showing debris falling from the sky, and NASA has declared an emergency.Update: 02/01 15:29 GMT by H : Confirmation has come - the shuttle has broken up over Texas while coming in for landing Florida.
God rest their souls...
Not again. Jesus Christ, not again...
Does this mean we won't be going to Mars?
Is there any chance that people could survive? I know the shuttle has emergency abilities, but it's traveling at what, six times the speed of sound?
Get a fucking life. Seven people just probably died and all you can do is make jokes.
mod parent poor taste
i can't believe slashdot sometimes
I live in the Dallas area. Around 8 AM CST we were making breakfast when we heard what sounded like the distant sound of thunder, loud enough for me to hear over the crackling of bacon. 30 minutes later we turn on the TV and are told that NASA lost contact with Columbia at around 8AM CST somewhere south of Dallas.
Now they're speculating about the presence of an Israeli on board.
Not again.
Here's the yet not-updated NASA site for mission STS-107.
The U.S. Space Shuttle Columbia, flying STS 107 apparently dissentegrated over north Texas during re-entry according to CNN, CBS, and NBC TV reports. Columbia launched on January 16 for that orbiter's 28th journey. Communication was lost at 8:00 Central Time (14:00 GMT), 16 minutes prior to the scheduled landing, at an altitude of 200,000 feet (61km) and velocity of 12,000 miles per hour (19,000 km/h). NASA advises people to report and avoid debris in the area because it may inlude toxic propellants.
I hate call waitin`~+~~~
NO CARRIER
Reports have them at 2x the speed of sound, and altitude of 200,000 ft. Not very good conditions for a bailout.
CBS seems to have the most hi-res footage of the breakup.
Analyist on NBC discusses launch/pre-launch dammage to heat sheild on the leading edge of the wing, that was deemed safe by NASA.
Insensitive ass. Respect explorers.
I have my photos on my website:
www.pdrap.org, link from the front page.
The actual photo page is here
I didn't actually see the space shuttle until it had exploded, so all my photos are of the shuttle as it burns and breaks up. The instant that the shuttle exploded was dramatic. One second I'm looking for it, the next, it was a bright burning ball of fire.
Very sad. Columbia was my favorite shuttle.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Fucking Jackass
This is terrible. Obviously, it is terrible for the team members on board and their families.
But once we are done with the grief and morning for these great people, the space program will be severely hampered from further progress. We need this program to continue, and I'm afraid we've just killed it for twenty years.
Very sad all around.
I was talking with the guy who repairs the autoclaves at my building yesterday about the challenger disaster. Our autoclave had a compromised O-ring. It turned out that he had done some electronics work for the Challenger and the Discovery back in the day. He ended up getting downsized and remembers thinking how his life was going badly, but at least there was the Challenger that he could point to proudly and say, "I was part of that." Obviously the disaster was both a national and personal tragedy for him. So this morning, looking at the news on the lab computer, it was a little eerie to read that NASA had lost contact with Discovery.
...for this comment I made yesterday.
My condolences to the families of the astronauts.
Was there not an Israeli astronaut on that Shuttle?
P.S. Australians please spare the jokes untill tomorrow. No student homes or workshops were destroyed, but people actually died here.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
If you haven't seen the video of this, go turn on CNN right now. This is a tragedy, and I'm sure all our thoughts are with the families of the 7 astronauts on board.
How far will this set the US space program back? Is this going to hae the same debilitating impact that Challenger did 17 years ago?
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
I never would have thought this could happen. God rest their souls.
This is tragic.
Does anyone know if there was any plutonium/highly radioactive material on board?
I fear this could be just the tip of a very horrible iceburg......
I dont think they could recover those poor people from a crashing piece of debris... I just hope no one gets hurts on the ground!
Is there any info on where the debris is landing? It look slike it could be from mid texas to misissippi. Do any of you have knowledge of where this stuff is landing?
May god bless the souls of the brave men and women on board.
pending committee review
At the moment of entrance in the atmosphere it travels around Mach20... or 20 times the speed of sound. I hope they had any emergency systems prepared, but I sadly think that at that speed there can hardly be any way of surviving. :(
__
Sig: Marine Stock Photos
This is a very tragic event but I cannot stand the news coverage. "Could you explain 'sensory data' for the people not involved in this field?" well, sensory and data...
Aston Games
BBC news live (needs Real/Helix player)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsa/n5ctrl/live/now2.ram
Story
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/2716369.stm
NASA TV Live (Real/Helix Player)
http://quest.nasa.gov/ltc/ram/nasalive-v.ram
http://www.space.com/shuttlemissions/
http://www.msnbc.com/news/857733.asp?0cv=CA00
And apple has already changed their homepage.. How long till our President blames this on a certian Middle Eastern country? My thoughts go to NASA and the families of the crew.
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/MM_NTV_Web.h tml
Voiceover says (paraphrased) Declared a contingency over central america. If you find debris, inform law enforcment and do not touch as it may be hazardous
one of the screens showing what looks like a debris trail
Use the Dial up 55kb, not the 225 kb please
Say a small prayer.
-- My Weblog.
You are one classy moron.
You were probably the 2,386th Slashdot reader to submit this story, considering that I first heard about this story via OT posts on other threads demanding that I TURN [MY] TV ON.
Grow up, and get a fucking life.
[This post pre-modded -1 Flamebait for your convenience.]
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
Remember how long it took to reinstate the STS program after the Challenger Incident?
What are the chances NASA will send up STS 108 on schedule?
Will they use the soyuz emergency capsule to return earthside?
I'll bet that revived Teacher in Space program gets grounded again.
Very Unlikely. It sounds as if the accident happened around 200,000 feet. It is doubtful that any government could shoot down a craft at that altitude.
The CBC story is up as well, and seems much more certain about what happened, though they don't mention the Israeli that was on board.
This is a staggering tragedy. Hopefully NASA can find out what really happened soon.
--Dan
1. No Surface to Air missile can reach above 100k feet.
2. There is almost no fuel on the space shuttle during reentry.
3. Most likely cause of destruction was damage to heat shield.
4. Survival is possible... space shuttle was relatively slow, already mostly throught the atmosphere the crew may have been able to bail out, and they do have parachutes.
5. This does not bode well for manned space exploration
the video of the shuttel over texas shows it breaking up.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
During launch. Insulation from the external tank hit the left wing and caused possible damage. They should have aborted, as they have options to return to launch site (RTLS), transatlantic landing options in Morocco, Spain, and other locations depending on the trajectory, as well as the AOA, or abort once around. Apparently there were no risks forseen from continuing. :(
Lets all pray and hold our breath...
Looks like we've witnessed the end of the American (and maybe International) space program. Although I was still really young when Challenger exploded I remember that they didn't launch another mission for a long while after that. I suspect now that with the age of the current orbiters that it's gonna be put on hold indefinately.
Anyways, there's already speculation that a piece of insulating foam from the fuel tank fell off on liftoff and hit the left wing and damaged the heat shield. NASA officially declared that the shuttle is lost.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
Sorry for posting that... I wrote it before I had heard anything but "contact lost". Post was inproper, sorry.
Under normal circumstances, the shuttle is checked and astronauts don't leave for a good 15 to 30 minutes after the shuttle has landed.
See my journal, I write things there
So how many shuttles do we have left?
Please mod down this troll trash. I can't believe how many assholes there are on slashdot.
This is sad, sad day. Here's CNNs profile of the crew of the Columbia.
You make it sound like he's the first stowaway in space or something.
I miss Meept.
You have got some very real and very disturbing problems.. suggest you get help, or an education, or both.
BTW, this particular program started in 1998, that's when they started training the Israeli for it at least.
Grow the fuck up.
the only way that it coul;d be terror is if some one got in and picked a few ceramic panels off or messed with the flaps on the wings....traveling at mach 6, there is no weapon that can hit it.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I was just reading the stats on CNN and the shuttle was built in 1978 (first flew in 1981). I wonder if it even had some escape pod (or something similar). It's about time they took some money away from jet fighters that kill people and spend it for some safer, new shuttles to save people.
So, do you realize that half of the world is rejoicing?
Oh, shut up. You can't possibly know that.
Assuming a total failure of the STS-107, and NASA's expected need to investigate without the added burdun of trying to launch any more shuttles for a while, what about the folks on the ISS? Can they be managed with only Russian space transports?
Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting
At least, nice to see some compassion expressed on /. for people other the file-sharers who get their broadband connection turned off
Hope this turned out better than it looks right now
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
Here's a timestamped update of the final minutes of the mission on the Spaceflight Now site.
They were speculating about what the presence of said Israeli implies.
As more people turn to the web for the "real" story, and truth, let's hope 9/11 lessons were learned. One thing I noticed is all major news stations offering live video are now charging for it.
Hopefully it's going to make it easier on the servers and better distribute the load. Of course, there's always someone asking for trouble...
If you have information, before posting it here, make sure you can handle the hits :|
Notepad specialist & FAT administrator, group training available
don't read /. in a shuttle.
The first real disaster of 2003. Long live the crew and the legacy of the space shuttle Columbia.
Engage Rant:
I blame the federal government. Yes it is easy, but christ- how much money do we need to spend on national defense? Nasa has a miniscule budget compared to most of the other areas of the US government and has a tenth that of the defense program.
When thing like this happens, one must think about how the pursuit of scientific and intellectual exploration is being done in 20+ year old gliders being run with ATARIs, while the military can ditch a few state-of-the-art fighters off the end of a carrier and its no big deal-there is never a concern that we must 'cut back'.
I truly hope this is not sited as an excuse to further castrate the already shoe string budget the science workers at NASA work with, but rather to increase it, to show that the safety of those who risk their lives for science and the overall advancement of the human race is paramount.
It is not, unfortunately. The majority of people are more concerned with fictional characters on TV and sunday night football. If your happy and you know bomb iraq.
This was an emotion response, not very well thought out. I know it was an accident, and that it was no ones fault. I cried as a 6 year old when the Challenger went down, and I hoped it would never happen again. My heart is heavy now. My respects the families of the crew.
Thank you,
- Josh Rizzo
First, my condolences to all involved.
Now, NASA uses a space shuttle that has computer technology in it so old they had to get some off eBay. For all I know, it still uses vacuum tubes. They had the opportunity for a new space shuttle program, but I believe they scrapped it at some point. I don't see how anyone at NASA can be surprised that this happened, given time. The shuttle may have just been struck by a tiny piece of debris in a heat shield tile, which punctured it and compromised the whole shuttle.
Things like this happen, but they can be made a lot less likely. I recommend, for anyone interested, to read about Feynman's challenger investigation. It details many things about NASA and its bureaucracy.
webpage
So now we really never know if ants can sort tiny screws in space.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Protective tiles fly off with every re-entry. We've now lost, what, fourteen people in the entire history of the shuttle? We never even lost a chimp with a rocket.
My greatest fear is that Dumbya will attempt to blame this on terrorism and use it as a touchstone.
No, no, it was a hidden enclave of Germans with high-powered potato guns that downed the shuttle. Christ, it should be a capital offence to be as stupid as you!
The shuttle was moving over 12,000 miles per hour during this portion of its descent. I do not think they could survive.
God Dammit! We don't yet have a singe reason to think that there was anything but a technical failure. I was getting pissed with all the news stations immediatly jumping around speculationg about security and terrorism, making worse a terrible tragedy and playing into the current propaganda machine. I'm disgusted to see this same sort of non-rational fearmongering here on slashdot.
Wait. Watch. Pay attention. We don't need more noise in the signal.
I think we may have a new record-breaker here...
The news people are freaking stupid.
Foxnews had Jim Lovell on and was comparing Apollo 13 to Shuttle. Lovell put the smack down on them.
CNN is getting a little better, but there are alot of Umms going on.
My heart goes out to the family of the men and woman who put their lives on the line to advance our understanding of the universe around us. Those who have given their lives for the cause deserve to be held in a special place in our memories.
This is truly a loss to us all, regardless of country.
*raises a glass in toast*
To the explorers, wherever they may be.
Minupla
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
i realized that a few minutes after posting this. color me stupid/ignorant.
Mod parent up...this from the Washington Post: On launch day, a piece of insulating foam on the external fuel tank came off during liftoff and was believed to have struck the left wing of the shuttle. Leroy Cain, the lead flight director in Mission Control, had assured reporters Friday that engineers had concluded that any damage to the wing was considered minor and posed no safety hazard.
I don't know about anybody else, but if even one post about this gets modded Funny, I will walk away from SlashDot for good.
If the posts so far are any indication of the number of Genuine Assholes who frequent this site, it's a lost cause anyway.
This is not funny in any way.
i wouldn't call that conclusive evidence, but you're entitled to your opinion.
Is it not?
How many jokes did you fucking Americans make about Afghanistan while killing thousands there? But they don't count, they're only Afghans. But whenever a fucking American dies, everybody has to be upset.
Guess what, most people outside the US have a good laugh every time some American dies. Why people hate Americans so much? Because obviously Americans love to kill foreigners, whoever they are. Why else would it be standard procedure for every president of your country to send troops somewhere to kill someone every time they feel their popularity in the US needs a little boost? And it works every time, so obviously you folks have no respect for non-American lives. Why should the rest of the world have any respect for your lives?
Can NASA afford to ground the STS's for 5 years while they investigate this one?
What about the ISS? will NASA Astronauts use Soyuz capsules?
And now I can push back the chance of seeing a human Mars landing another 10-20 years.
This is going to be a very tough time for NASA.
Lol x 100 (bc they won't let me say lol over and over again. PERL Using bastards.)
Re: Grow up fucktard.
NASA at one point was inspecting damage doen by the collison of insulating foam at liftoff of the tiles on the wing during the mission..could not NASA have sent the 7 astronaughts to the space station and sent up another shuttle to pick them up given that you cannot do an effective inspection of thermal tiles in spac eor from gorund when the shuttle is in space?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
So... it is Amazing that people have not realized that entrenched bureaucracy exists simply for its own sake of existence not for any goal of achievement (except for "how much money can we waste" and "how many phD's with funny name can we stand up here and not accomplish anything" or perhaps "how many 'favors' can be made to place individuals looking to have a good mark on their resume. Thank you Big Government for not only syphoning off money from law abiding tax payers, costing real lives with your bullshit "cost cutting" (as opposed to logical cost effective production methods) ploys and creating an environment (typical of government) of do-nothing bureaucrats that gives a very false sense of "something is being done" to all those interested in space exploration and those inovations that come from it. You have created yet another empty (yet oh so expensive) agency that denies the ability to further progress to those who wish it all the while costing the very interest in such endevours through your continued incompetence. (hint: people loose faith in not just the agency but what it claims to represent when things like this happens all the time)
NASA should be dissolved immediately and laws passed that get rid of the socialist control and restriction over those who wish to see real progress and better understanding.
A lot of people are dying now, not because accidents like this, but by the hand of terrorist states like Israel. And you think what happens over Texas is more important?
As a tribute to the potentially lost crew, I say "May the last embrace of the Mother welcome you home." ...I think.. that it could be over for NASA, especially in the Bush regieme.
...then the old man said to me, "It's jivin' time."
Seems like everyone has been thrown back to that horrible morning almost two decades ago...
Even the news lady on CBS2 in NY called the shuttle "Challenger" three or four times already, without realizing it.
The worst part is, they just keep playing the video over and over, in different zooms and at different speeds. Reminiscent of the 9/11 videos.
Every time I see it, I feel bile rise in my throat. What a horrible thing to see.
And to all who feel like joking about this; don't.
Even if it may have therapeutical value to YOU, it definitely wont for most other people. I can tolerate people joking about unmanned rockets that fails, even if I wouldn't do that, either. But this is a MANNED spacecraft, with seven human beings most certainly killed. There is nothing fun about that.
bius sig file. This is a moebius sig file. This is a moe
You are a very sad, sad, person. People like you make me turn to religion because I really want to believe that there is a special place in hell for you.
This is what happens when the media and politicans constantly go on about the "imminent threat of terrorism". Everytime something bad happens people jump to blame Osama & Co. Shit happens every day, planes crash, people die. It's sad but it happens. Space shuttle reentry occurs at something like 25 mach, there is no way to make that happen without risk. Not with 20+ year old equipment anyway. Of course it could be terrorism, but chances are remote.
anyway, what the hell does 'when the program started' have anything to do with this? if you're making some tie to israel, knock yourself out - i'm just looking a few levels ahead. this will most likely result in the severe reduction of non-military nasa activities, and give bush more money to dump into his 'liberation'efforts. we stand at a dangerous point in history and i'm pretty sure we'll make the wrong choice.
In case there's now a shortage of willing crew, I hereby volunteer. Let's go, tonight, to evacuate ISS pending the crash completion of the x-38 project, or whatever we come up with instead.
This is unbelievable. I still find it hard to accept that the shuttle was destroyed. I'm having a feeling at the moment not unlike 9/11.
I have no words. May the crew rest in peace.
There's honestly no telling what other space-borne diseases, mutant bacteria, secret black classified projects, and so forth.
In fact, there could be even nuclear materials onboard -- and even one gram of plutonium released into the atmosphere could poison half of America!
It's no wonder that a LOT of teams are being mobilized to that area, X-Files style.
My best guess is that within 2 weeks, The orders will be given (publicly) to mothball the station. The shuttle was/is responsible for delivering supplies and crew to the ISS. Without the support of the shuttle fleet, the ISS can't survive. There aren't enough Soyuz or Progress crafts that are even in the works to be able to take care of the ISS. They'll probably boost the ISS up as high as they can, crawl into their Soyuz return craft, turn out the lights, and come home. God only knows how far back this tragidy has set us back.....
This is a terrible day. Keep these peope in your thoughts. Never forget.....
NASA will likely ground the shuttle fleet so how will the Space Station crew get down? Russian ferries?
How long do you think it will be before you can buy bits of Columbia SS on EBay?
:.(
That Kalpana Chawla was a fine looking young lady, shame huh?
NASA training : If you happen to be plummetting to earth in a panic sticken frenzy whereby the craft is breaking up, you must reach up for the O2 masks which will come down, tug on them, and affix your own before attempting to help someone else.
Underneath you seat is your life jacket and parachute, you must wrap it around your body twice and twi in a knot at your side. There is a whistle, light and space pen in the side pocket.
I am genuinely sad at this though, terrible terrible accident, first time ever this has happened, on re-entry...
On launch day, a piece of insulating foam on the external fuel tank came off during liftoff and was believed to have struck the left wing of the shuttle. Leroy Cain, the lead flight director in Mission Control, had assured reporters Friday that engineers had concluded that any damage to the wing was considered minor and posed no safety hazard.
Source: cnn.com
Is anything being reported about people on the ground. It is of course tragic for the crew of seven but they were professionals on duty, and I suppose that they have known and chosen the danger, whereas bystanders have made no such choice.
My condolences to the families of the crew.
Lets not drag OBL and Al Qaeda into every disaster.
The shuttle was moving at near 12,000 mph when it broke up. ( to fast to get shot down )
The shuttle's altitude was 200,000 feet. ( too high to get shot down)
Nasa has been investigating a piece of debris that fell off the shuttle/booster during launch that shows up on some film. This piece may have damaged part of the heat shield.
3 possibilities come to mind.
1. The insulation hitting the wing on takeoff caused damage.
2. Terrorism. (bomb on board?)
3. Collision with space junk coming out of orbit/in orbit/etc.
I'm all about humor, but your insensitivity is astonishing. Furthemore, your joke isn't even funny and some lame-brained mod gives you "Interesting"?
Hey, SexKellkyOsbourne? Fuck you. I hope you remember this moment when one of your own eats shit.
blog
yeah...mabye tehy were ust throwing out their garbage.
put 2 and 2 together man....tehy are on a fixed flight path with no window to arrive early or late as they are a flying brick.....video shows parts falling off and at the end of the video it shows 3 distinct smaller units.
they are gone.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
you fucking idiot. Even at a time like this you couldnt be arsed to read the articles?
It was at 200,000 feet doing approximately Mach 6.
Check this: [latest is at the top]
1502 GMT (10:02 a.m. EST)
News reports say President Bush is being briefed. It is expected he could soon make a statement to the nation.
1500 GMT (10:00 a.m. EST)
There have been no further announcements from Mission Control.
1440 GMT (9:40 a.m. EST)
During a mission status news conference yesterday, Entry Flight Director Leroy Cain was asked about any possible damage to the shuttle's thermal tiles during launch. The tiles are what protect the shuttle during the fiery reentry into Earth's atmosphere.
Tracking video of launch shows what appears to be a piece of foam insulation from the shuttle's external tank falling away during ascent and hitting the shuttle's left wing near its leading edge.
But Cain said engineers "took a very thorough look at the situation with the tile on the left wing and we have no concerns whatsoever. We haven't changed anything with respect to our trajectory design. It will be a nominal, standard trajectory."
1436 GMT (9:36 a.m. EST)
NASA is asking that any persons finding debris should stay clear given the hazardous nature of the materials and alert local authorities. ...
While the presensce of an Israeli on board makes one obviously question whether terrorism was invovled, let's not get into the realm of Sci-Fi here.. An EMP bomb isn't something you make in your basement.
The shuttle was flying 5 times higher then an average Airliner when it broke up, and was traveliing at about 10 times the speed.
All of Al-Qeada's attacks have been relatively low-tech. That's what's made them so hard to catch. There is no way they have access to am EMP bomb, or anything that could have hit the shuttle this high moving this fast.
If it was terrorism, it would have been something put on the shuttle before it took off. The piece of the shuttle that broke off during take off probably has much more to do with this then terrorism does.
In either case, let our prayers and wishes go out to the crews family and friends...
------------------
"Never Attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity..."
Much more likely that it was a CIA or Mossad job.
Note that I don't claim that it was, it's just much more probable than you theory. And both Agencies have killed Americans and Israelies before - not to mention others.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I don't know if you're trying to be ironic, or if you have access to information inside NASA, but that's a grossly irresponsible statement to make. Let's hold off all conspiracy theories until things have settled, shall we?
More than mere navel gazing.
at an altitude of 200,000 feet (61km) and velocity of 12,000 miles per hour (19,000 km/h)
That makes terrorism highly unlikely. That's too high and too fast for much of anything to hit it. It's more like a ballistic missile than an airplane at that point, and we all know how well the Star Wars project is faring.
But the damage has been done: the astronauts are dead, and the U.S. space program -- which never recovered from Challenger's loss -- may soon be dead as well.
-j.
we all know that space travwel is a riskless activity and the NASA technology has never failed before.
Just ridiculous. Did you also speculate that there were some students involved when the Challenger crashed? Maybe they wanted to get back at their teacher.
Moritz
Mark this day in your life. Oddly, I was reading slashdot when I heard then news.
I hear that
- Columbia is the oldest shuttle
- The crew compartment can re-enter by itself allowing the crew to jump out. I wonder if anyone has tested this!
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Seven star salute....
* * * * * * *
Ciao, brave heros.
Maybe now, the Government will give NASA the money to build a new earth to orbit reusable spacecraft. Why do people have to die to convince the American Government to do something?!?!?!?!
They are/were brave people who have created and flown in the Shuttle, but it is time to replace and retire the bird. Please presure your elected representatives to fund a new spacecraft so that we can have a safer vehicle to take us into space.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
John Ira-Petty, NASA: 'There is absolutely no reason to suspect a terrorist attack. I cannot imagine a more difficult target.' This is a tragic accident, but probably has nothing to do with the Israeli crew member.
Meep.
News that debris is falling southeast of Dallas, Texas, perhaps (ironicly?) in Palestine, TX. Still, Palestine police are not reporting that they've received debris reports.
Souce: ABC Radio.
--LP
I was just at the Kenedy Space center last week and I feel sick. I saw the astronauts live from orbit in a press conferense. It's really mind blowing. We might not even have a space program after this. God this really sucks. They must have been running windows......
Not undervaluing the human tragedy in this disaster, which is horrible. IF it doesn't land safely which it most likely won't, American space exploration could be set back for a decade or more. With the proposed scrapping/freezing of the ISS the only country going into manned space missions will be China.
You were an ass for the original posting but good of you for apologizing...most people wouldn't do that, especially around here. It's a sad day...
Those smaller particles of debris are more than likely the heat tiles that cover the shuttle
In his book "What do you care what other people think?" he talks about the Challenger thing, and talks about NASA in general.
Just a good book all around. Wish we still had Feynman around to see what happened this time.
This is sad. Very sad. But not for the astronauts.
I'll go out on a limb here and say that the astronauts themselves would trade their lives in a second to be in space, and to contribute whatever it was that they did on this mission. I know I would.
So I won't waste a tear mourning them. I'll save the tears for their families and friends. I have no business mourning sad. Only remembering them.
~D
I don't want to downplay the tragedy of the loss of life at all, but...
Isn't it odd that the media/NASA is not reporting any conclusion of what happened, now 70 full minutes after the event? Not only that, but all of the news stations keep interviewing the same random guy over and over again who allegedly saw the shuttle breaking up? Why is no one giving us information? Why is everything so damn vague?
(Posting as an AC because I'm feeling a little paranoid today)
I think there was a teacher on this[ the second teacher to die an astront, and the first Israli. Let the consperiancy theorys fly.
Did I find the shuttle or just a ghost? check these NASA sites... on them the shuttle is still moving - http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/tracking/beta /index.html
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/tracking/inde x.html
I had been watching NASA this morning since 6:30 am Eastern... then, just before the planned landing, NASA said they lost contact...
Watch REAL PLAYER:
rtsp://163.205.10.21:8080/redundant/nasatv.rm
This bit of tangential info from the BBC site... Not to diminish this dreadful tragedy. NASA takes Internet into space By Graeme Wearden NASA has been conducting tests using IP, the protocol for transmitting data across the Internet, to communicate with the Columbia space shuttle over the last fortnight, turning the shuttle into a node on the Web. The experiment aims to improve data transfer between space craft and mission control on the ground. It is could lead to shuttles and satellites operating as Web servers in the future, and is part of NASA's OMNI (operating missions as nodes on the Internet) project. The Columbia space shuttle was launched on 16 January, and on board is a PC running a version of Red Hat Linux. This computer has been communicating with NASA by sending IP packets via satellite, meaning that data can be transferred even when the shuttle is on the far side of the earth. NASA has been working on methods of extending the Internet into space for several years. In 2001 it created the world's first Web server in space, and a year earlier it used FTP to download instrument data from Columbia to the ground. By using standard Internet protocols to communicate with its space craft, NASA believes it can cut the costs of future missions and achieve effective data transfer using a range of applications. "Spacecraft using IP protocols enables seamless routing of data, email, SMTP servers, virtual private networking, FTP transfers, remote file systems and Java interfaces, and other custom protocols as appropriate," said NASA scientists in a recent presentation. Columbia is due to return to Earth on 1 February.
I don't know how long it was after Challenger before they launched another shuttle, but, with a crew on the Space Station, a long delay will not be possible this time.
This is awful...
Today, thousands of children died of poverty, yet their lives were not as valuable as those on board that shuttle because media coverage was 0 (zero)
Now act shocked
Come on, mod me down as a troll
Or, indeed, people who can spell.
for just such emergencies....I think after this, Nasa will give it priority and we will see this being olaced on new shuttles and perhaps the older ones
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I heard that the Challenger disaster was the beginning of the end for NASA, and it took them a decade to regain trust and confidence. I'm sure we can forget about Mars by 2010
CNN just reported at 10:13am EST that the shuttle Columbia, carrying a crew of 7, broke up 200,000 feet over Texas. NASA has never lost a crew on its return trip home in 42 years of space flight. Here's hoping for the best. Humbly, Dak
pronoblem
There was an Israeli on the Space Shuttle....so of course everyone's thinking one of yer Ay-rab friends did it. Have fun living in a bomb shelter!
Please, don't leap to conclusions.
STS-107 Columbia landing journal.
NASA has alerted the public that the shuttle uses toxic materials for its propelant and that people should keep clear of any debris found.
that is going to be spun into some kind of justification for either Bush's war on terrorism or weapons in space. or at the very least, an excuse to point a finger at Muslims, somehow blaming them for the tragedy.
"To stop the terrorists."
Look assholes, if you're going to post stuff that's in poor taste or just nasty, why don't you use your names instead of posting anonymously? Have some respect for those that have done more than the sum total of anything you will accomplish in your sad lives.
Kalpana Chawla of Indian origin was present on board - 2nd visit . . . Also first Israeli
The NASA missions sure will be hit
But from News that I hear ppl saw explosions means all hopes dashed. SAD VERY SAD
An Excerpt : [CNN]
NASA officials said they last had contact with the shuttle about 9 a.m. EST, and it had been expected to touch down at about 9:16 a.m. EST.
Video of the shuttle tracking over Dallas showed multiple vapor trails, but NASA spokesman Kyle Herring said it was too early to determine the source.
Steve Petrovich, a police officer in Palestine, Texas, said he heard "a rumble and boom" at about 8 a.m. CDT (9 a.m. EST).
Jim Hubbs of New Boston, Texas, said he heard police discussing over a police scanner "a smoking object going southeast" that disappeared in the Bowie County area near the Arkansas state line.
Officials said no tracking data were available.
Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, was among the seven-person crew. There was no official reaction from the Israeli government, but a Defense Ministry spokeswoman said, "Like everyone else, we are feeling terrible, hoping the slightest hope that still remains at this stage will become a reality."
Columbia is the oldest of NASA's shuttle fleet, first launched in 1981.
Also, why the fuck is CNN talking to rednecks in Podunk, Texas, who are describing what they saw? Why don't they talk to someone who actually knows what they're talking about?
Reality has a liberal bias
The module the astronauts are in is reinforcecd, and there are parachutes that can be used. While this could not be used at 200,000 feet (the edge of the atmosphere), if the reinforced front module survived the blast without breaking (unlikely) and the hatch didn't get jammed (unlikely), and the module was in free-fall (not at 12,500 mph) at under 30,000 feet, it's possible that the astronauts could parachute out.
But basically, it'd take a miracle. And someone probably would have visually seen/reported parachutes by now.
--LP
Luckily, The Russian's space program can also retreive them. It was designed that way ,for suituations like this.
I am amazed the parent has hit +4. First, this is a bizarre conspiracy theory - we all know how reliable those are. Second, I'm no expert, but doesn't it seem unlikely that al-Qaida could hit a space shuttle traveling at twelve thousand miles an hour (12,500 mph!!) with an EMP bomb without being noticed? A related article on CNN quotes an administration official as saying that he shuttle's altitude -- over 200,000 feet -- made it "highly unlikely" that the shuttle fell victim to a terrorist act.
He was an astronaut. Just like the rest of them. He was up there for the same reasons they were, not because he was some brown-skinned terrorist that was out to destroy a handful of Americans in as spectacular a way as possible.
The fact that people like you still exist in this day and age disgusts me beyond belief.
A voiceover just said
...
At 8 o'clock, they lost connection with the shuttle.
It was scheduled to land at 8:16
It was last cited 200K miles above northern texas
Don't touch waste if found
Not good
Cover your eyes and click this link!
it would be a real shame to take that as a reason to accelerate the war processus.
Well I would advice you not to turn on Fox News Channel...right under the Shuttle coverage their ticker is running stuff about Iraq, Saddam and "coming war." Not very subtle if you ask me.
(By contrast, CNN's ticker has nothing but information about the shuttle)
One of the eye-witnesses in Texas stated that it appeared the contrail had a spiral characteristic that might mean the craft was tumbling during or before re-entry. This may imply that it was not a catastrophic explosion, rather some other event that went wrong.
Part of the insulation on one of the boosters apparently came off on takoff (gaining orbit) and struck a wing. The wing was checked during flight and said to not be damaged.
i'm not blaming bush for anything. i see this as a catalyst for things he needs - i.e. excuses to reign things in more. i was commenting on a potential series of future events, not a conspiracy. i will not reflect on past causalities but i will speculate on future events. feel free to ignore me. select 'exclude stories posted by michael', as this is where i tend to flame the most (because michael = asshat).
good to see that all the ACs are out today, as none of us have the balls to stand behind our own statements.
OK, I can see something go wrong during takeoff when you have thousands of pounds of rocket fuel strapped to your back. But landing? At landing the shuttle is a glorified glider.
Considering this and looking at the pictures, the only conclusion is that it just broke up in the atmosphere. Which means that either the thermal protection system failed or it hit the atmosphere at the wrong angle due to a malfunction causing the pilot to be unable to control the shuttle or (highly unlikely) pilot error.
Brian Ellenberger
Is a speedy alternative if CNN's main site bogs down
On future shuttle missions, one of the astronauts will have to be a naval officer.
So when they decide to use it as an experimental submarine, they'll have a rated officer onboard.
here click on the watch nasatv logo in the upper left corner.
The most tragic part is, of course, the loss of human life. But more than that, these people are the best of the best and hard to replace.
I watched on the Science channel last night the hour long show concerning a possible trip to Mars. The risks are incredible, and, yet, there are those who do not flinch when stating they'd go in a hearbeat. These people are truly brave and irreplacable....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
(1) If you planted a bomb, you'd want it to go off on takeoff -- that's when everyone is watching, and there's less time for stuff to go wrong, since you'd have to wonder whether a bomb would work after spending an extended time in space; (2) it's basically impossible to shoot down a reentering space shuttle because of its speed and altitude; (3) there are so many things that can go wrong with shuttles, especially Columbia, which is the oldest, without invoking terrorism. I suppose it's conceivable that a saboteur did some sort of subtle structural damage calculated to cause this sort of a failure while remaining unnoticed during ground checks, but that strikes me as unlikely for a variety of reasons.
From the video it looks like structural failure, followed by an explosion as the spacecraft disintegrated. That's unlikely to be the result of sabotage. Most likely it was failure in a wing spar or some other component, probably brought on by age and fatigue, though possibly caused by tile zippering and burn-through, or damage on launch. We'll see. No point getting ahead of things here, but plenty of reason to think it's not terrorism.
Prediction: This won't traumatize people the way Challenger did because (1) it's not the first time; and (2) we're at war now, and people's calculations of such things -- especially post-WTC -- are different. I hope, however, that we'll look at moving beyond the elderly and unreliable Shuttle now.
We need to strengthen the American Engineering profession to build our economy and strenthen our security. Lawyers, accountants, globalization and bad management are contributing to a collapase of the American spirit and our industrial competitiveness. This is a terrible symbol of this crisis. Hopefully, it's a wake call.
I know a lot of you on Slashdot aren't old enough to remember when Challanger exploded at takeoff, and don't remember the uphoria and excitement that we all used to have when the Space Shuttle was new, or the excitement that a honest to God civilian was getting to go into space. In this era of any rich playboy with $20mil can get into space with enough effort, its hard to imagine what that was like for us, especially those of us who were young at the time.
You also may not remember the emptiness when it became clear that NASA with public and short-sighted government pressure was shying away from manned space flight, and there was so much fear that it may never recover. This was a tragedy of epic proportions -- the possibility that we in the US (and as one of the major players in manned space flight) might shy away from exploration and adventure because it was dangerous.
Things truely never recovered. The idiocy that is the Interational Space Station is a direct descendant of those events 17 years ago (almost to the day). The loss of our looking outward at greater feats, better manned spacecraft and the like are all descendant from that instant.
Now we stand at the cusp of it happening again. This depresses me. People today just don't understand that taking risks is important to advancement, and death is part of taking risks... something explorers have understood for centuries, and a lot of people have seemed to have forgotten today.
While part of me thinks NASA getting out of the manned space business, and dumping this massive waste of energy going into the ISS would be a good thing, because it may open up that exploration and adventure to those goverments or business who still have that sense of longing. I'm scared, though, that no one else will step up and take the reigns.
I hope we as a nation can recognize this for what it was -- an unfortunate event, but an outcome that can be expected when pushing the boundaries. We should feel pride in the people who lost their lives here, and rise up, and continue to do what they gave their lives for. I hope we as Americans don't shrink away even more in fear.
As potentially unpatriotic as it is to say, it makes me glad to know that the hope, energy and imagination of the billion people in China are there to step up, if we turn our backs on this important step in Humanity's future. It matters far more to me that we do this as a species then we do it as a nation. I hate the thought of what losing this would be a sign of for us as a country, though.
Some caller on CNN is saying right before it happened he was watching and there was a plane very close to the shuttle. How the heck can he tell how close something is at 200,000 altitude? The FUD has begun...
2. Atlantis, Discovery.
First, I'm sorry for your loss, my condolences. Secondly, I'd like to say thank you. Space exploration is a non-trivial endeavor. At this point in time we're not much better at space travel than fish are at land travel. We will get better, but people will be harmed in the process. The astronauts know this and accept the risks. I thank the astronauts and their family for their bravery and sacrafice.
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds...and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of...wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew.
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
'High Flight' by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
I wept in 1986 as a child, now I do it again as a man. Goodbye and Godspeed...
- Necron69
hey...look at the end of the film dude....there are 3 BIG pieces.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I have friends and family here for the Chinese New Year. But now I am sadly reminded of 6th grade science class on the day we lost Changer.... It is hard not to cry.
Do you honestly think this White House will give the Chinese the chance to be first to Mars?
Religion is the opiate of the masses. The wealthy smoke the real stuff.
Remember, in soviet russia people talk of rockets killing terrorists. hyuck hyuck!
Practice Kind Randomness and Beautiful Acts of Nonsense.
an article at EDP24 mentions:
On launch day, a piece of insulating foam on the external fuel tank came off during lift-off and was believed to have struck the left wing of the shuttle.
This may not have been safe as NASA thought, and could have led to wild vibrations that would then cause the orbitor to break up.
May God comfort the heart and souls of the friends and families.
With the first Isrealie onboard, I would not hesitate to believe that someone messed with the shuttle.
It's not that important. Don't waste stress here that you'll end up regretting many years from now on your death bed.
Tithe 10% of your income to the church. Please.
It was 17 years last Tuesday (January 28) that Challenger (Columbia's sister shuttle) exploded. And 36 years last Monday that the Apollo 1 astronauts died on the launch pad.
The *previous* mission to this one (STS 113) picked up where Challenger had failed, by carrying Christa McAuliffe's backup for the Challenger flight.
This is a sad day day for the world, for America, and especially for the American Space Program.
I was going to put a sig here, but I had already submitted the message.
Sabotage is possible, but again very unlikely. With an Israeli on board security would have been air-tight.
The Shuttle fleet is aging but NASA iis not getting the money (it goes to the Pentagon instead).
See my journal, I write things there
no. 3
atlantis
discovery
endeavour
Because when people die in the pursuit of peaceful international cooperation and science, it's always a tragedy. That's all there is to it.
One thing that I love about sites like Slashdot is when they show me how Americans are obviously not even intelligent enough to master their (or is it "they're" - bruhahaha) own mother tongue.
ROTFL
Imagine the horror for the people still on ISS.
From the CNN article:
An administration official said the shuttle's altitude -- over 200,000 feet -- made it "highly unlikely" that the shuttle fell victim to a terrorist act.
I am so unbelievably pissed that they made that comment. Can they think of nothing else?
The coolest voice ever.
Thank you very much for pointing this out. Much like the other (well-publicized) tragedies that have happened of late, it's probably best for the chillin' to be *told* about this stuff by their PARENTS rather than CNN/FNN/whathaveyou.
Now, if that's the only tube in the house . . . let them play in their room or something for a bit.
xScruffx
I think the speculation will be at a fever pitch the next few days since he was one of the pilots who bombed the nuclear reactor in Iraq back in the early 1980s.
Religion is the opiate of the masses. The wealthy smoke the real stuff.
They said on CNN that the shuttle was actually traveling 6 times the speed of sound at 200,000 feet when it blew up. The context was that no surface to air stinger missle could have gotten them (so we'll probably hear that repeated a lot).
Of course, tv journalists have been wrong before.
So it's hard to feel too sad about a mission failure. The Challenger disaster was different, since it involved a civilian who was a pawn of NASAs propaganda machine.
Not to play down this immence tragedy, but while you are praying for everyone aboard the shuttle, don't forget about the servicemen that have recently been lost in military operations abroad. Both of these professions are highly dangerous and come with great risks, but when a squad of US troops is lost it only makes the front page for a few minutes.
Life == Life.
01:36AM up 426 days, 2:46, 1 user, load average: 0.14, 0.11, 0.05
Surely NORAD was tracking this, and has an estimate on where the remains hit the earth.
Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
I'm 8 years old again, sitting on the floor with my classmates, watching the Challenger lift off...
It's a hard rain, that's gonna fall.
Shuttle breaks up The space shuttle Columbia broke up today as it descended over central Texas toward a planned landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Seven crew members were aboard. The White House said the shuttle's altitude -- over 200,000 feet -- made it "highly unlikely" that the shuttle fell victim to a terrorist act.
:(
Source: CNN
Requisat im pace
I live in a suburb of Dallas... at about 8:00 this morning (I wasn't paying attention), I heard what sounded like some big truck screwing around in the street in front of my house. I thought it was just the construction going on across the way...... wow.
Hopefully, W. will ignore his damn politics and bring back the funding for the X-33. It was better than 90% done and ready for static flight tests(drop tests). The engines had been fully tested at stennis and passed with flying colors. The only real issue was the tanks for which they were having trouble and had already decided to use alumnin tanks until the composites were ready. What a terrible lose this is though and not the right way to get the right things done.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
hear hear. Too bad there isn't a way to disable certain mods for boards like this.
Kip Hawley is an idiot.
Oh, No.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
but it isn't a shock like when the Challenger blew up. I was always hoping that the next generation shuttle would be ready before probability caught up with the next shuttle, but I guess I was wrong.
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
The only way for any of them to escape alive would have been to parachute out of the shuttle, which is impossible at that speed and altitude. The orbiter is almost certainly completely destroyed, along with its crew. Sorry to burst your bubble. :(
Move 'sig'. For great justice!
Check Here
Following the Challenger disaster 17 years ago, Richard Feynmann came to the conclusion that catastrophic shuttle disaster had odds off approximately 1 in 100 (See RISKS Digest 18.09) based on the fact that 4% of unmanned space shots go bad - and presumably manned flight gets that 'extra' attention that would reduce their rate a bit.
Challenger was flight STS-51L - this was flight STS-107. I'd say even Feynmann may have been somewhat optimistic (although 2 failures is a thin data set - anyone want to figure a chi-square on it?).
Me too. This is a horrible event, but having a mental image of Homer + the shuttle episode with chips still brought a smile to my face for a second.
I really am going to hell now.
the only way that it coul;d be terror is if some one got in and picked a few ceramic panels off or messed with the flaps on the wings....traveling at mach 6, there is no weapon that can hit it.
Im not saying it was terrorism, so dont mod me down for fear mongering, but as someone else pointed out, it IS a hellaciously complex beast in the first part. So much so that I doubt any one engineering team knows the "whole shuttle".. it is more a complex set of systems that tie into each other. That being said it would be possible (but hardly plausible) for someone to sabotage one piece of that system. Extrapolate that to the shadowy "sleeper cells" we have heard so much about (but rarely seen) and it is possible it could have been sabotage. Again, not plausible, but possible.
if you add to that its very near the anniversary of the original Disaster, and the first Israeli astronaut was on board, well.. its just grist for the Conspiracy Mill.. (a mill I refuse to get involved in until I know more about it).
The only thing that would undoubtedly convince me at this point that it WAS sabotage would be one of those tapes surfacing that show bin laden taking credit, that were shot six months or a year ago.
As to why it blew up on re-entry not launch, it would have much greater impact as a "terrorist" act if it happened on the way back in.. we are somewhat galvanized to the fact that the thing can blow up on the way up...we have watched it, and face it.. in the back of your mind, every one of you is seeing that fireball and the contrails of the boosters vectoring away every time it goes up. But Landings have always been flawless.. not a hitch. (At least not that we "joe public" have ever heard about.. I truly wonder how many times we have come very close to losing the crew before).
So for a "terroristic" purpose, on the way back in.. (or nearly to the ground) would be the best.. plus, this way the rather toxic residue is falling over populated areas.. rather than just over the ocean.
Either way, it SUCKS and I pray for those 7 people on board!
maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
You know what? A few years ago people like you'd have bothered me. Now I know you're just wrong. You know why? People are largely the same all over the world. When an Afghani civilian dies, it saddens me. When an Iraqi civilian dies, it saddens me (and it makes me angry at our policies when it happens as a result of them.)
I've been all over the world to many places that are not the Americans' best friends. And the people I've met have been friendly and normal human beings (except for in France. They were jerks.)
So go back to firebombing your local McDonalds and pouring Starbucks down the drain. I'll continue feeling sad for the families who have lost their loved ones and I guarantee you I'll end up being a happier, better person in the end.
One of these days/I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
+1 funny!!!
i don't give a shit about the shuttle crew. More people die everyday because of things we can really prevent. This just was an accident.
CBS is reporting on TV that one of the last bits of telemetry to come in was a change in tire pressure. Anyone care to speculate what could have changed that? Interesting fact anyway, I thought.
Does anyone have images or a movie from local radars? Currious to know if they saw any of the pieces come down and where.
-Kurt
In a related note, I would venture a guess that this is the end of the Bush administration's attempt to revive nuclear tech in space with project prometheus.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
> You are a very sad, sad, person.
Could you explain why?
> People like you make me turn to religion because I really want to believe that there is a special place in hell for you.
That's exactly what I mean. As soon as a foreigner dares to voice his opinion, and it's not your opinion, you want him to die and, as that doesn't seem to be enough, be tortured until eternity (because that's what the concept of "hell" is all about).
"Free Speech! Ra! Ra! But only for US citizens! Everyone else go to hell! Ra! Ra!"
Working on it - got brute force downloader on the actual pics. Have thumbnails from linked page, but still waiting on pics. URL for pics can be found in HTML source if you can get page to load. Going for pics only might save this guy some bandwith, eh? Will post URL ASAP.
Thousands die on the road every year, and we haven't closed down automobile travel, yet.
Thousands die from tobacco-related causes...
Thousands die essentially from poor eating habits...
We have a poor sense of risks in our society.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The fact that people like you still hang around on this site disgusts me a great deal (although not "beyond belief"). This post brought to you by trollx2.pl, the "troll the trolls" utility.
Something breaks off on launch and hits the wing. Ground weenies say "don't worry"...
Nobody even bothers to go and *check* while in orbit??
The right kind (or wrong) kind of dent is gonna be just a bit of a problem on re-entry, don't you think?
"oh, there's nothing wrong with the O-rings"...
grrrr.
Since it seems slashdotted...
1502 GMT (10:02 a.m. EST)
News reports say President Bush is being briefed. It is expected he could soon make a statement to the nation.
1500 GMT (10:00 a.m. EST)
There have been no further announcements from Mission Control.
1440 GMT (9:40 a.m. EST)
During a mission status news conference yesterday, Entry Flight Director Leroy Cain was asked about any possible damage to the shuttle's thermal tiles during launch. The tiles are what protect the shuttle during the fiery reentry into Earth's atmosphere. Tracking video of launch shows what appears to be a piece of foam insulation from the shuttle's external tank falling away during ascent and hitting the shuttle's left wing near its leading edge. But Cain said engineers "took a very thorough look at the situation with the tile on the left wing and we have no concerns whatsoever. We haven't changed anything with respect to our trajectory design. It will be a nominal, standard trajectory."
1436 GMT (9:36 a.m. EST)
NASA is asking that any persons finding debris should stay clear given the hazardous nature of the materials and alert local authorities.
1435 GMT (9:35 a.m. EST)
The last voice communications from the crew involved a tire pressure message. Communications were then garbled and static. Contact with the shuttle was lost at about 9 a.m. EST.
1429 GMT (9:29 a.m. EST)
Search and rescue forces are now being deployed, NASA says.
1427 GMT (9:27 a.m. EST)
NASA says the shuttle was about 200,000 feet up and traveling at 12,500 miles per hour when contact was lost. From all the reports we're receiving, it is becoming clear that the shuttle broke apart over Texas.
1419 GMT (9:19 a.m. EST)
Contingency plans are in effect in Mission Control.
1416 GMT (9:16 a.m. EST)
This was the time of Columbia's landing. What we know is contact was lost with the shuttle at about 9 a.m. EST and a sighting by residents in Texas reported a debris cloud following the plasma trail as Columbia streaked overhead.
1415 GMT (9:15 a.m. EST)
The flight dynamics officer reports there is no tracking of the shuttle.
1414 GMT (9:14 a.m. EST)
Entry Flight Director Leroy Cain has instructed flight controllers to get out their contingency plan.
1410 GMT (9:10 a.m. EST)
NASA is still seeking tracking data. Communications with the shuttle were lost about 10 minutes ago.
1409 GMT (9:09 a.m. EST)
Still no contact with Columbia or crew.
1406 GMT (9:06 a.m. EST)
Mission Control waiting for C-band tracking data and UHF communications with Columbia through MILA. Houston lost communications with the shuttle a few minutes ago over Texas. We have gotten reports of debris in the sky.
1405 GMT (9:05 a.m. EST)
THERE HAS BEEN NO COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE SHUTTLE. Mission Controllers waiting for tracking data from the Merritt Island station.
1404 GMT (9:04 a.m. EST)
We're getting reports from Texas of debris behind the shuttle's plasma trail during reentery.
1401 GMT (9:01 a.m. EST)
Columbia is out of communications with flight controllers in Houston. Now 15 minutes from landing time.
1359 GMT (8:59 a.m. EST)
At an altitude of 40 miles, shuttle Columbia has entered Texas.
1357 GMT (8:57 a.m. EST)
The shuttle is now 43 miles over New Mexico. Columbia is now reversing its bank to the left to further reduce speed.
1356 GMT (8:56 a.m. EST)
Columbia's speed is now about 15,000 miles per hour as it streaks over northern Arizona.
1355 GMT (8:55 a.m. EST)
The shuttle is now soaring over the southern portion of Nevada. Columbia set for touchdown at Kennedy Space Center in Florida in about 20 minutes. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2003
1353 GMT (8:53 a.m. EST)
Columbia is now crossing the California coastline. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2003
1351 GMT (8:51 a.m. EST)
Altitude 47 miles. Speed 16,400 miles per hour.
1349 GMT (8:49 a.m. EST)
Columbia is beginning the first in a series of banks to scrub off speed as it plunges into the atmosphere. These turns basically remove the energy Columbia built up during launch. This first bank is to the right.
1346 GMT (8:46 a.m. EST)
Thirty minutes to touchdown. Altitude 64 miles. Columbia will be making landfall over California shortly, flying north of San Francisco. The shuttle's course will take it over Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and then along the Gulf Coast and into the Florida Panhandle.
1344 GMT (8:44 a.m. EST)
ENTRY INTERFACE. The protective tiles on the belly of Columbia are now feeling heat beginning to build as the orbiter enters the top fringes of the atmosphere -- a period known as Entry Interface. The shuttle is flying with its nose elevated 40 degrees, wings level, at an altitude of 400,000 feet, passing over the southern Pacific Ocean, about 4,400 nautical miles from the landing site, at a velocity of Mach 25. Touchdown is set for 9:16 a.m. EST at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
1342 GMT (8:42 a.m. EST)
Columbia is currently above the Pacific Ocean at an altitude of 90 miles.
1336 GMT (8:36 a.m. EST)
Now 40 minutes to touchdown. Today's landing will be the 62nd to occur at Kennedy Space Center in the history of space shuttle program. Dating back to May 1996, this will mark the 40th of the last 45 shuttle missions to land in Florida. KSC is the most used landing site for the shuttle. Edwards Air Force Base in California has seen 49 landings and White Sands in New Mexico supported one.
1332 GMT (8:32 a.m. EST)
The remaining two Auxiliary Power Units are being activated to supply pressure to the shuttle's hydraulic systems, which in turn move Columbia's aerosurfaces and deploy the landing gear. One unit was started prior to the deorbit burn; the others just a few moments ago. The units are only activated during the launch and landing phases of the shuttle mission. Also, a dump of excess propellant through the shuttle's Forward Reaction Control System has been completed.
1331 GMT (8:31 a.m. EST)
Columbia's current altitude is 146 miles. Time to touchdown: 45 minutes.
1323 GMT (8:23 a.m. EST)
Onboard guidance is maneuvering Columbia from its heads-down, tail-forward position needed for the deorbit burn to the reentry configuration of heads-up and nose-forward. The nose also will be pitched upward 40 degrees. In this new position, the black tiles on the shuttle's belly will shield the spacecraft during the fiery plunge through the Earth's atmosphere with temperatures reaching 3,000 degrees F. Columbia will begin interacting with the upper fringes of the atmosphere above the Pacific in about 20 minutes.
1318 GMT (8:18 a.m. EST)
DEORBIT BURN COMPLETE. Columbia has successfully completed the deorbit burn, committing the shuttle for its journey back to Earth. Landing is scheduled for 9:16 a.m. EST at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to cap Columbia's 16-day microgravity science flight.
1315 GMT (8:15 a.m. EST)
DEORBIT BURN IGNITION. Flying upside down and backwards about 176 miles above the Indian Ocean to the west of Australia, Columbia has begun the deorbit burn. The firing of the two Orbital Maneuvering System engines on the tail of the shuttle will last nearly three minutes, slowing the craft by over 250 feet per second to slip from orbit. The retro-burn will send Columbia to a touchdown at 9:16 a.m. EST on a runway just a few miles from the Kennedy Space Center launch pad where the shuttle lifted off 16 days ago.
1311 GMT (8:11 a.m. EST)
Pilot Willie McCool is activating one of three Auxiliary Power Units in advance of the deorbit burn, now four minutes away. The other two APUs will be started later in the descent to provide pressure needed to power shuttle's hydraulic systems that move the wing flaps, rudder/speed brake, drop the landing gear and steer the nose wheel. NASA ensures that at least one APU is working before committing to the deorbit burn since the shuttle only needs a single unit to make a safe landing.
1309 GMT (8:09 a.m. EST)
GO FOR THE DEORBIT BURN! With the fog burning off and high-altitude winds deemed acceptable, entry flight director Leroy Cain has given space shuttle Columbia's astronauts the "go" to perform the deorbit burn at 8:15:30 a.m. EST for return to Earth. The upcoming two-minute, 38-second retrograde burn using the twin orbital maneuvering system engines on the tail of Columbia will slow the shuttle's velocity just enough to slip the craft out of orbit and begin the plunge back into the atmosphere. Columbia is headed for a landing at 9:16 a.m. EST at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
1303 GMT (8:03 a.m. EST)
Columbia is now in the proper orientation for the deorbit burn. The shuttle is flying upside-down and backwards with its tail pointed in the direction of travel. The shuttle's vent doors have been closed and final configuring of the onboard computers has been completed.
1259 GMT (7:59 a.m. EST)
A weather briefing is being given to flight controllers. The fog is burning off. But the question is whether the situation is clearing fast enough to permit an on-time landing of Columbia today.
1255 GMT (7:55 a.m. EST)
A report on the conditions at the Shuttle Landing Facility indicates sky conditions scattered at 5,000 feet, scattered 29,000 feet and visibility of 4 miles.
1249 GMT (7:49 a.m. EST)
Mission Control has told the crew to maneuver the shuttle and press on with the final preparations for the deorbit burn. However, the weather is still being evaluated and a final "go" to perform the braking rocket firing to drop from orbit has not been made. The deorbit burn is scheduled for 8:15 a.m. EST to send the shuttle on the course for landing at Kennedy Space Center at 9:16 a.m. EST. If this deorbit and landing opportunity is waved off, Columbia would make another orbit of Earth and target a deorbit burn at 9:49 a.m. and touchdown at 10:50 a.m. EST.
1245 GMT (7:45 a.m. EST)
The crew has deactivated the shuttle's kitchen area. And pilot Willie McCool has completed the Auxiliary Power Unit prestart, which positions switches in the cockpit in the ready-to-start configuration. One of the three APUs will be started prior to the deorbit burn. Coming up on a "go/no go" decision for the deorbit burn in the next few minutes.
1232 GMT (7:32 a.m. EST)
The latest check on upper level winds shows conditions are trending more favorable, NASA says. It remains quite foggy, however, at the runway. But visibility is expected to improve as the morning continues.
1212 GMT (7:12 a.m. EST)
The crew has been given the approval to begin their "fluid loading" protocol to drink large amounts of liquids to help in readapting to Earth's gravity, a precursor to today's landing. Although there is still optimism for favorable conditions at Kennedy Space Center for touchdown at 9:16 a.m. EST, visibility is currently restricted by fog at the runway. But it is expected that as the sun continues to rise the fog will burn off this morning. In addition, strong winds aloft are being monitored.
1200 GMT (7:00 a.m. EST)
The astronauts are finshing up the chore of checking the hundreds of switches in the crew module, verifying that they are in the right position for entry. In Mission Control, officials are continuing to monitor and discuss the winds aloft at Kennedy Space Center. Weather balloons have revealed that the winds are strong and shift directions are various altitudes. Based on the conditions, NASA will have to determine if Columbia can safely fly through the winds. And, if so, which end of the runway to use.
1128 GMT (6:28 a.m. EST)
CAPCOM Charlie Hobaugh in Mission Control has given commander Rick Husband the Deorbit and Landing Preliminary Advisory Data update. The deorbit burn is now targeted to begin at 8:15:30 a.m. EST and last for two minutes and 38 seconds, slowing the ship by about 250 feet per second. That will put Columbia on course for its hour-long glide back to Earth. Once in the skies off Kennedy Space Center, Husband will pilot the shuttle around a 213-degree right overhead turn to align with Runway 33 for touchdown at 9:16 a.m. EST. Meteorologists are monitoring upper-level winds in determining which end of the runway will actually be used today. At present, Runway 33 is being targeted.
1115 GMT (6:15 a.m. EST)
Now two hours away from the deorbit burn. Weather continues to improve at Kennedy Space Center this morning. In the next hour, the crew will begin suiting up. And then in about 90 minutes, entry flight director Leroy Cain is scheduled to make the final "go/no go" decision on the deorbit burn.
1050 GMT (5:50 a.m. EST)
Columbia's clam shell-like payload bay doors have been closed and locked for today's fiery descent into Earth's atmosphere and 9:16 a.m. EST landing at Kennedy Space Center. Mission Control has given commander Rick Husband a "go" to transition Columbia's onboard computers from the OPS-2 software used during the shuttle's stay in space to OPS-3, which is the software package that governs entry and landing. And Columbia will be maneuvering to a new orientation in space to improve the communications link with NASA's orbiting data relay satellites. Meanwhile, NASA astronaut Kent Rominger is flying weather reconnaissance around Kennedy Space Center aboard a T-38 jet trainer. The low clouds and fog reported earlier are expected to dissipate for landing on the first entry opportunity today at 9:16 a.m. EST. There is a backup opportunity available an orbit later. The wind is expected to pick up for the 10:46 a.m. EST landing attempt but should be down the runway and within limits. So with weather expected to cooperate in Florida today, the astronauts should be back on Earth in a couple hours to wrap up their 6.6-million mile voyage.
1000 GMT (5:00 a.m. EST)
The seven Columbia astronauts are marching through the deorbit preparation timeline at this hour, stowing away equipment and readying to close the ship's payload bay doors for today's reentry and landing to conclude the 16-day science mission. Earlier this morning the Spacehab module was closed after the success marathon research mission that featured about 80 experiments. The weather forecast remains favorable at Kennedy Space Center's shuttle runway for a touchdown at 9:16 a.m. EST. However, meteorologists are watching low clouds and fog in the area. It is believed the cloudiness and fog will burn off as the sun rises. FRIDAY, JANUARY 31, 2003 Columbia commander Rick Husband, pilot William McCool and flight engineer Kalpana Chawla tested the shuttle's re-entry systems today, setting the stage for landing Saturday to close out a 16-day science mission. Touchdown on runway 33 at the Kennedy Space Center currently is targeted for 9:15:50 a.m. EST. Read our full story. THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 2003 Astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia are completing their final runs on experiments in the Spacehab Research Double Module and beginning preparations for Saturday's landing. Most of the 80 experiments already have completed their data collection, and today was the last day for the remaining investigations, in particular the Water Mist Fire Suppression Experiment (MIST)
, the Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment (MEIDEX)
and the Advanced Respiratory Monitoring System (ARMS)
. MIST, which got a late start due to problems setting up the test chamber, is nearing its 30th run as it studies the effectiveness of fog-like water droplet concentrations in putting out flames. The experiment is sponsored by the Center for Commercial Applications of Combustion in Space at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden as part of continuing program to design replacements for environmentally hazardous chemicals such as Halons. MEIDEX will be recording its final data takes of lightning "sprites" and "elves," after successfully imaging a major dust concentration in support of its primary objective to study how fine dust particles, or aerosols, affect the Earth's environment. MEIDEX was sponsored by the Israeli Space Agency and Tel-Aviv University in association with Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon's first space flight for an Israeli. Crewmembers also began wrapping up and storing the final blood, urine and saliva samples they are providing for studies of human physiology associated with the ARMS cardiovascular experiments and the Physiology and Biochemistry Team experiments. The samples will be kept at appropriate temperatures in refrigeration systems in the Spacehab module for return to Earth and further study. And the Biotube experiment, which was activated Wednesday, looked at flax seeds as they grew in the presence of strong magnetic field. Scientists on the ground used video downlinks to monitor the length of root growth to ensure appropriate fixation times. Commander Rick Husband and Flight Engineer Kalpana Chawla of the day shift took turns simulating landing on the PILOT computer-based training system. Pilot Willie McCool of the night shift will get in his practice session overnight. Landing is scheduled for 9:16 a.m. EST Saturday and preliminary forecasts show excellent conditions at the Shuttle Landing Facility in Florida. If weather decides not to cooperate, there are plenty of supplies to support the crew until conditions are favorable. Husband also peeked under the floor of the Spacehab module to look for water that might have leaked out of the balky air-conditioning system earlier in the mission. He reported finding no moisture that could contaminate Spacehab systems if jostled during Saturday's re-entry and landing, but covered several holes in the water sub-assembly with tape as a precaution.
Yes.
What are the chances NASA will send up STS 108 on schedule?
Zero. I wouldn't be surprised if the shuttles never fly again.
Will they use the soyuz emergency capsule to return earthside?
Unlikely. Remember, the Soyuz is not just an emergency capsule, it's a full-blown launcher system. Most supply and crew change missions to the ISS are flown with Soyuzes, so technically the shuttle is not an irreplaceable part of the ISS program.
However, Russia's financially strapped space program has been hard pressed to produce even the current number of spacecraft (the "escape capsule" Soyuz is swapped for a new one every 6 months), so whether they alone can keep going is doubtful.
-j.
Please. Respect the death of the astronauts and possibly, of the space program. Space exploration is the one quest which unites all of us, so this loss is especially tragic.
in the pursuit of international cooperation and science?? muaahahhahah....
The only purpose is to enrich usians
I would like you to also inform the vast number of terrorists around the world that have killed and will kill masses of people. Tell Mr. Hussein that as well, so that he will stop the killing of his own people.
"What's good for the goose," and all that jazz...
I find it interesting that many people here are wringing hands and bemoaning the space program. I would simply say that this is to expected. Accidents happen. Life happens. NASA is engaged in some of the most dangerous endeavours humans have ever undertaken. The reality is vehicles will be lost, people will die. It is the nature of things.
All of us undertake serious risk in pushing forward our human lot every day. Just getting in a car and going to work places us in seroius danger of our lives. You could die tomorrow. NASA is launching people into space on the backs of rockets and plunging them back into the atmosphere at incredible speeds. All to improve the lot of our species, to push the envelope, to reach for greater achievements.
Does this mean we should stop the space program? No. We should honor the lives of those lost and continue in the path they lead.
Mark
Buzz (Aldrin) says that the hypergolic fuel remaining on the shuttle looks like brown cloud. He says stay away because it will coat the inside of your lungs and asphyxiate you within 48 hrs.
Weave a circle round him thrice
Close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honeydew hath fed
And drunk the milf of paradise.
-"Kubla Khan", Coleridge
http://206.54.177.105/
/. maybe he'll give a report later on also.
This guy knows
Now is the time to write your elected congressmen from the House and Senate and let them know that they should not decrease funding to NASA because of this, but they should increase funding. NASA has been working financially with one hand tied behind their backs since Challenger, and cutting funding further would likely cause even more accidents to happen. Get out your pens and paper and help keep NASA alive!
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
There's going to be a huge unbalance in the areospace industry becuase of this. More furloughs and layoffs will happen. The astronauts on the ISS will probably be shuttled down to the ground on a soyuz capsule and the program shut down until the reliability of the program can be checked. All of our shuttles are over 90 launches and columbia was on 113th flight.
Only long term benefit over this sad loss is the fact that nasa now has the ammo against congress budget cutters for a new launch/return platform.
I weep for the personal losses of life, and the losses to the space program in general. What a tragic setback!! And especially when you look at all the budget constraints, the cuts, the shortcuts (faster, better, cheaper?), you say to yourself " Could this have been easily avoided?
I wonder how many times this has to happen before the aged Shuttle is redesigned, and NASA budgets are made more reasonable.
It will be very interesting to see how this unfolds...
-ZOD-
"-where, like everyone else, I stopped in my tracks and stared, gaped, gawked, slack-jawed as a country yokel seeing his first transsexual hooker, awestruck as an atheist in Paradise, silent on a peak in Florida--stared, with my own personal eyeballs, across no more than a couple of miles of stunningly beautiful country, at an honest to God spaceship, right there at the
:
.
." I trailed off, l -" ." He gestured vaguely toward the souvenir stands and poetics,
edge of the shining sea."
- Extract by Spider Robinson, from the fiction novel "Callahan's Key", where his mismatched group of world savers were moving from New York to Florida. In the process, they make what they consider a vitally important stop on the way.
When I read this in the First-edition hard cover, it managed to get rid of that jaded feeling you get from reading NASA Budget whiners and people complaining.
After sitting watching the footage playing on loop, I walked over and pulled it off the table next to my bed and re-read that part. I remembered that I also have it as an Ebook for my Palm, so I thought I'd post it here.
It's long. It's almost an entire chapter of his book, I hope Spider doesn't mind too much, but he's been generous with his work in the past (through Baen Books) and I think he did an excellent job at passing along the sense of wonder at the feat, and the frustration at how the general public react.
For those without patience, try this second sample sample
"For two million years it had been only a fantasy, a monkey dream. For the first
fifteen years of my own life it had still been only a fantasy, something a
teacher or a scientist might laugh at you for believing in. For the next quarter
century it had been a news story-one that seemed to bore most of my fellow
citizens silly. But now it was reality-real reality; that is, the part
experienced by me-and the two million year old dream had really come true:
The species I belonged to had figured out how to climb the biggest tree there
is. We were already becoming familiar with its lowest branches."
OK, they've left, here's the full text.
WE LEFT DISNEY WORLD just before dawn, in the most orderly and timely departure
of our trip to date. A good thing, as I got us lost twice on the way. Jim Omar
and the Lucky Duck had left even earlier, at high speed in the horrid little VW
and of course since the Duck was involved the timing worked out perfectly. Just
as I was standing at the edge of the traffic jam from hell, trying to breathe
pure carbon monoxide and having one of the most surreal conversations of my life
with a Florida state trooper who wanted me to move all those ugly friggin' buses
right God damn it now, Omar and Ernie came roaring up along the shoulder, back
from Merritt Island, waving from the passenger window the stack of magic orange
stiff-paper rectangles they'd managed to wheedle out of a guy Omar knew from his
college days. It's always pleasant to watch a hard-on in a uniform detumesce.
Clout can be a beautiful thing-when you've got it.
The orange cards were distributed one to a bus, placed prominently in their
front windows, and one by one we pulled onto the shoulder and drove slowly and
smugly past hundreds of other stopped vehicles full of envious strangers. When
we came to the huge barrier that was stopping them all, beefy cops horsed it out
of our way and gestured us through. We were waved through a couple of
checkpoints, stopped and very briefly questioned at a third, then passed over a
small bridge and found ourselves on a two-lane road through flat tidal plain
country. Deep drainage ditches on either side of the road, nothing much visible
in any direction except wet-looking ta grass. The sun was up by now, and there
was fog on the ground here and theme.
Shortly we found ourselves on the tail end of a slow moving line of cars, most
of them considerably more expensive-looking than anything we had. We tooled
along for a while at about twenty miles an hour, and once or twice the line
stopped altogether for a minute or two, when more important vehicles up ahead
had a use for that particular road.
I didn't mind a bit. My hands were trembling so badly from-excitement that I'd
have had trouble controlling my bus at anything over twenty. I heard my own
pulse playing a Krupa solo in my ears, I could feel myself grinning like an
idiot, my voice when I spoke sounded to me like a chipmunk on methedrine. Zoey
and Erin were equally buzzed, and probably so was everyone in the caravan. Even
Pixel felt it; he sat rigid on Erin's lap with his head thrust forward, staring
out ahead and purring as loud as the bus in low gear.
And then suddenly we were there.
Find a spot, pull approximately into it, brake to shuddering halt, slam her in
neutral, set brake, kill engine, leave keys, crank open door, spring for the
stairs, bounce off wife, spring for stairs again, trip over cat, fall backward,
land heavily, whack skull, feel daughter leap down onto chest from car seat and
run down torso to stairs, curse feebly, spring for stairs again, fall down
stairs onto hard blacktop, whack forehead, get up, postpone checking for broken
bones or concussion and join thundering herd sprinting uphill past the souvenir
stands and portable toilets to the viewing area-
-where, like everyone else, I stopped in my tracks and stared, gaped, gawked,
slack-jawed as a country yokel seeing his first transsexual hooker, awestruck as
an atheist in Paradise, silent on a peak in Florida-
-stared, with my own personal eyeballs, across no more than a couple of miles of
stunningly beautiful country, at an honest to God spaceship, right there at the
edge of the shining sea.
Apparently Omar's friend had prudently concluded that our caravan was just a
little too flagrantly weird fom the Kennedy Space Center's main VIP site; the
passes he'd supplied us were for the secondary VIP viewing area on Static Test
Site Road. I didn't give a damn. I was forty-something years old and I was
standing in a fucking spaceport.
The weather was less than ideal; there was a good deal of ground fog, and the
air was on the chilly side. I didn't give a damn about that either. Let 'em
hold! I was prepared to wait-to stand right there in that spot without shifting
my weight or shitting my pants-for a week if necessary.
Suddenly I let out a squeak, spun in my tracks, and sprinted back downhill to
the parking area, for the binoculars we had all forgotten when we'd spilled off
the bus. I collected all three pairs, plus a reference book, the camera, and a
collapsible tall chair for Erin to sit in, so I wouldn't have to carry her on my
shoulders to let her see over the heads of the crowd. Then I sat on the bottom
step and waited for my breathing and pulse to return to normal-it seemed a poor
idea to die just now-then I got up and trudged slowly back up the hill. Stopping
along the way at a tourist-vacuum to load myself down further with two coffees,
an apple juice, film, postcards, a NASA sunhat for Erin, NASA ballcaps for
myself and Zoey, and three pairs of sunglasses. Fortunately I was able to
offload an awful lot of money. With my total mass thus lowered, I was able to
achieve escape velocity, and reached the top of the hill before my main engine
ran completely out of fuel.
While I was setting up Erin's high chair and lifting her into it with the last
of my strength, Pixel drank about a third of my coffee. I claimed it from him
and finished it, then aimed my binoculars across the Banana River at Pad 39-B,
and began serious gawking.
She was fucking gorgeous.
Discovery, she was. Flight STS-29, the twenty-eighth Shuttle mission. (STS-28,
Columbia, had developed serious problems, we were told, and would not lift until
the following August.) A heartbreakingly beautiful sight, standing there against
the sky. This would only be the second launch since the Great Hiatus that had
followed the Challenger Tragedy-the horrid pause that might well have turned
into the end of the space program, if blessed Richard Feynman had not thought of
a novel use for a glass of ice water. For a while I had feared I might never
have a chance to see such a sight as this again.
All my reading had not prepared me for how big she was. Oh, I know the Space
Shuttle is a midget compared to the old Apollo Program boosters-from where I
stood, I could see that the immense doors of the Vehicle Assembly Building off
to the left were almost twice as tall as they needed to be to pass a Shuttle.
But knowing that brontosaurs once walked the earth does not diminish the impact
of your first close-up encounter with an elephant. I could not believe they
proposed to hurl that enormous massive object into the air, so high that it
wouldn't come down until it was damn good and ready. I felt an enormous thrill
of pride to belong to a species that could even conceive of a thing so
splendidly arrogant-let alone pull it off.
There were maybe two hundred or so of us scattered across that bluff. Some were
sober serious professionals, busy setting up complex and obviously expensive
equipment of various' kinds. Dozens of others had set up simple tripods, and
were mounting and testing either cameras or video gear. An equal number was
preparing for handheld work-and perhaps half the total crowd had come simply to
watch. Two boomboxes could be heard, one softly playing anonymous music, one
somewhat louder tuned to a local newsfeed. Two giant and powerful loudspeaker
towers were supplying us with live transmissions between Mission Control and
Discovery's flight deck, but at this point in the launch sequence, exchanges
were infrequent and usually incomprehensible.
I had my breath back under control, but my heart was still hammering like mad. I
could feel it.
"Can you see okay, Pumpkin?" I asked my daughter.
"It looks foggy down there, Daddy," Erin said. Sitting there high on hem
aluminum throne in her yellow sundress and sunglasses, she looked quite regal.
"Do you think they'll launch on schedule?"
She was right: Discovery stood somewhere between ankle-deep and knee-deep in
ground fog. But the sun had risen well above it by now. "Hard to say, honey.
They never have once, so far. But they might-or they might come close, anyway.
The sun will burn that off pretty quick, I think."
Behind me, Jim Omar's voice said, "Two-hour hold, max-if nothing else goes
wrong."
"Well, tell 'em not to hurry on my account," Zoey said, tugging at Em's yellow
sundress to straighten it. "This is a nice place to sit and be."
"Amen," Omar said.
His diagnosis was prophetic: that bird was scheduled to lift at 8 A.M., and it
was only a little after 10 when they went into the final countdown.
Okay, you've probably seen film or video footage on TV. But if you haven't been
to a launch, at least as close as the thousands of cars stacked up back out on
the highway, you just don't know anything about it.
At first the world is nothing but horizon, endless ocean and sky, all of it
still, tranquil, serene. Three-hundred-and-sixty-degree Spielberg, rich and
vivid. Lazy clouds overhead, a flight of birds just visible gliding low over
marsh flats in the distance, a few boats out on the water. The stillness is not
perfect-there is the countdown bellowing out of those superb speaker horns, and
there is the internal thunder of elevated pulse-but basically the world is as it
has always been: at rest, indifferent to anything any of the scurrying ants on
its surface might come up with.
Then Hell breaks loose.
A dirty white explosion spreads in all directions. At its center, beneath the
stacked array, a Beast is born. It is mighty. And angry. Its roar shatters the
world, splits the sky, echoes up and down the Florida coast and miles out to
sea. You thought you knew what to expect, but this is louder. The sound is
tangible, hits you with physical force, vibrates up your legs from the ground
beneath your feet, scares the living shit out of you. Your first thought is that
you are witnessing a disaster even more awful than Challenger: an on-the-pad
explosion.
Then the Beast's two big brothers wake up-the giant solid rocket boosters-and
Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and Limbo all break loose together and start to argue.
The sound is indescribable, just short of unbearable. So insensate is the rage
of this new Beast that the world itself will not have it. No matter that
something the size and weight of an apartment building is sitting on its back:
it lifts from the ground on a raving column of its own fury and rises impossibly
into the air, becomes a thick growing tower of white smoke, the 128-ton Shuttle
stack balanced on top like a Ping-Pong ball on the stream from a firehose. The
bonds of Earth can be as surly as they like: the Beast is surlier, shrugs its
terrible shoulders, and slips them clean.
You realize that you are pounding your hands together and screaming "Go, baby,
go!" like an idiot at the top of your lungs, and you gather that everyone around
you is doing the same, but you can't hear any of it. Part of you wishes you had
control of your hands so that you could take photos like you planned to, and
another part is amused at the audacity of the notion that this literally
earthshaking event could possibly be squeezed through a pinhole and captured on
a piece of celluloid smaller than a matchbook. Instead you watch in reverent
terror as a utensil built by bald apes flings ninety-seven tons of metal and
plastic two million miles.
With five live men aboard.
You can read about something like that, and see it on television, and spend a
large portion of your leisure hours trying to imagine what it must be like and
thinking about what it means, and you think you get it. You're a space buff: if
anybody gets it, you do. And I suppose you do- as an intellectual concept. Then
you go there and see it with your own eyes, feel it with your own bones . .
and are astonished to discover that only now, for the first time, do you really
Get It. Until now space travel had been real to me in the same sense that World
War II was real to me, or China: I'd been told about it and had no reason to
doubt what I'd been told. Now I got it.
My automatic pilot reminded me I hadn't checked on Erin in too long; I snatched
a glance, saw her just behind me, in her chair where she belonged, and turned
back to the spectacle.
For two million years it had been only a fantasy, a monkey dream. For the first
fifteen years of my own life it had still been only a fantasy, something a
teacher or a scientist might laugh at you for believing in. For the next quarter
century it had been a news story-one that seemed to bore most of my fellow
citizens silly. But now it was reality-real reality; that is, the part
experienced by me-and the two million year old dream had really come true:
The species I belonged to had figured out how to climb the biggest tree there
is. We were already becoming familiar with its lowest branches.
In that moment, I knew, as fact, with utter certainty, that one day we were
going to climb all the way to the top. Nothing was going to prevent us. Not
presidents, proxmires, press, public opinion, economic forces, or nuclear
winter.
No, it could be delayed, but it could not be stopped. This was evolution in
action, before my eyes. As surely as we had come down out of the trees, as
surely as we had crawled up out of the tidal pools in the first place, we were
going to do this thing.
As long as we don't end the universe first, came the thought, and suddenly I was
terrified.
When Nikola Tesla had first told me I had to save the universe I thought I Got
It. Hell, I'd helped save the world, twice: what was the big deal? Glibness,
flipness, denial. Now I got it.
Sometime in the next ten years or so, I was going to be involved in something
alongside which this paradigm shifting world-shaking thing I was now
experiencing was an utterly insignificant event.
This had only required billions of dollars, millions of people, and a few
centuries of scientific advance. But for my immensely more important and
difficult task, I had access to my wife, my kid, and a bunch of rummies
personally known to me to he collectively about as reliable as an Internet
connection.
The big white beanstalk rose toward heaven. carrying a truck, carried it so high
that it appeared to dwindle away to nothing at all, while I stood there and felt
myself sweating.
I was snapped out of my fog by the sound of Long-Drink McGonnigle's annoyed
voice behind me. "Where the hell are they going?"
Low Earth Orbit, of course; what the hell did he mean? I turned to him, saw him
looking around and glaring. So I looked around myself.
The crowd was leaving.
Half of them were already gone, disappearing down the slope past the souvenir
stands and portable toilets toward the parking area. The rest were in the last
stages of disassembling tripods, packing gear, collecting possessions, clearly
about to depart. Some were taking their time about it, but clearly only because
they knew there was going to be a jam-up out in the parking lot: none of them
watched the white beanstalk anymore, and none of them appeared to pay the
slightest attention to the two speaker towers, which were still broadcasting
live transmissions.
I couldn't believe it.
Three college kids near me finished strapping up their packs and started to
amble away. I put out a hand to stop one of them. "Excuse me, but where the hell
are you going?"
He stared at me. "Daytona Beach. Why, you need a ride?"
"No, I mean. . . I mean. . . how the hell can you go?" I gestured helplessly at
the curving white beanstalk above us, and the glowing dot still visible at its
tip. "Now?"
He turned and glanced at it, turned back to me. "It's over," he said, as one
stating the obvious.
"Over?" I scroaned. "Are you out of your fucking mind? The SRBs are still
firing! It was later in the flight than this when the . .
superstitiously unwilling to speak the Challenger's name while there was a bird
in the air.
Zoey tugged 'my arm. "Jake-"
"For Chrissake," I told the kid, "they haven't even reached the first abort
point: at this point we don't know if they're going to Low Orbit or Portugal-"
"Thirty seconds to SRB separation," the speakers brayed.
"-you see? It'll be at least five more minutes before MECO-before we'll know
whether those five poor bastards are gonna live through the next four days or
not." I pointed to the nearest speaker tower. "When we do, we'll know it before
anybody else in the country. How can you possibly leave?"
He looked at me as if I were a penguin at a zoo, with mild interest and just a
trace of pity. "The show's over, Pop," he explained, and took off to catch up
with his friends, who had paused to see if he needed help kicking the old
hippie's ass.
"Jesus, what's wrong with that generation?" Long-Drink asked. "Do they think all
this is, like, a rock concert' One big spectacular special effect? And as soon
as it's off the screen it doesn't exist anymore? Is this what comes of putting
on Pink Floyd laser lightshows down at the Planetarium?"
"It's nothing to do with age," Tommy Janssen said. "Look around."
He was right. People of all ages were leaving. Even people who looked
intelligent, seemed educated. Everybody but me and my hundred-odd friends, most
of whom were looking just as baffled as I was.
"Screw 'em," Isham Latimer said. "Look up, quick."
Just as we did, the SRBs broke away.
I'd seen it many times, on film or on TV much more clearly through very good
telephoto lenses. No matter: the beauty of it struck me dumb.
The boosters pinwheeled away; the Shuttle kept climbing.
After a while my neck hurt, and there was no longer anything much to see, so I
looked down and divided my attention between the reference book I had fetched
along and the loudspeakers, translating their cryptic acronyms and following the
ffight in my imagination, as happy as I've ever been in my life.
Some indeterminate time later, I was rudely yanked back to the lower world by
the unmistakable smell of an approaching civil servant. Sure enough: a
twenty-something android with NASA patches on his shoulders. He looked harassed.
Somehow his bureaucratic intuition told him I was the closest thing to a leader
he was going to find in this group. He approached me, powered down, opened his
oral cavity, and played the prerecorded tape for this situation.
"Youpeoplewillhavetocleartheareanow."
I had been expecting him to say something stupid, but this seemed excessive. "I
beg your pardon," I said politely, "but are you on drugs?"
Confused, he replayed his tape, with an addition of his own that I took as a cry
for help. "Youpeoplewillhavetocleamtheareanowplease."
I pointed to the nearest of the loudspeaker towers. "It's almost four minutes to
MECO," I explained. The term baffled him; I paraphrased. "This launch is not
over yet. We can't possibly leave now."
Treating him like a rational being was poor tactics; the word "can't" triggered
him to go to DefCon Two. He lowered his brows the prescribed amount, swelled his
shoulders, made his jaw muscles squirm, and said,
"SirI'mafraidl'mgoingtohavetohavethisareac
"Do you know who you're talking to, son?" Omar's deep voice rumbled from off to
my left.
It's one of the interrupt codes. The kid turned toward him and waited for a
password to be entered.
"That," Omar said, pointing solemnly at me, "is Neil Armstrong."
To my mild surprise, the kid recognized the name. His apprenticeship for that
job must have been giving tour spiels at the visitors' center. The password was
valid; he had to step back down to DefCon Three.
"Sorry, Mr. Armstrong," he said, relaxing his shoulders and jaw muscles.
He'd omitted my rank, but I let it pass. He'd also forgotten Armstrong never
wore a beard, long hair, or glasses. "That's all right, son. Now fuck off,
okay?"
His eyebrows remained lowered. "Uh..."
I sighed. "What is it, mister?"
"Well, sir. .
where a few other androids were staring at us in bafflement. "We all been out
here all morning. You know, the crew. Is it okay if we-"
At last I understood. We were all at a holy event. He and his mates were at
work. And wanted to split. "Son," I said patiently, "I don't care what you do as
long as you leave us alone until MECO. That's when they turn off the big motor
in the sky-car up there."
"I mean, we're not supposed to remove the portable sanitation units until
everybody's-"
"I authorize you to leave," I told him. "If any of us shits after you go, I
promise we'll cover it up, okay?" I turned away, triggering his dismissal
protocols. He thought about saluting, couldn't decide, settled for a sketch of
one, and buggered off.
We went back to monitoring the flight. When they finally announced MECO, just
under nine minutes after takeoff, we all heaved a sigh of relief, gave each
other high fives, turned around-and found absolutely no visible sign of life but
our own vehicles, waiting in the parking lot below. Not even dust clouds
settling in the distance. We didn't see another human being until we reached the
visitors' center. There were dozens of them there, buying expensive souvenirs to
commemorate an event most of them had neglected to finish observing.
I'll never understand people. Even being one doesn't seem to help.
www.spiderrobinson.com
NAME: Ilan Ramon (Colonel, Israel Air Force) Payload Specialist
:-/
PERSONAL DATA: Born June 20,1954 in Tel Aviv, Israel. Married to Rona. They have four children. He enjoys snow skiing, squash. His parents reside in Beer Sheva, Israel.
Sounds like a nice guy
From MSNBC:
SPACE CENTER, Houston, Feb. 1 -- The space shuttle Columbia exploded over central Texas on Saturday soon after reentering the atmosphere en route to a landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NBC Dallas affiliate KXAS reported. Video images obtained by KXAS showed the doomed shuttle descending at a severe trajectory and breaking apart as it plummeted to Earth. Officials in Texas dispatched search and rescue teams to the town of Palestine, southwest of Waco, the presumed point of impact.
Does anyone else find this incredibly eerie that it the point of impact is the town of Palestine and there was an Israeli aboard???
I think the fortunes should be disabled on stories such as this because of the possibility of something inappropriate coming up. For example, at the bottom of this story:
"Isn't this my STOP?!"
graspee
everyone take a screen shot of that stuff
Radar Here
It is very sad to see that this happends again. Now I have a name for my small space shuttle model resting ontop of my monitor. I don't even want to think about what this means to the Nasa-Spaceprogram overall and of course to all the conspiracy folks...
I'm really sorry for everbody who lost loved ones in this accident.
best wishes from Munich/Germany,
Lispy
NASA engineers don't make mistakes? Was a different set of engineers in charge of the last shuttle explosion?
If you reread the post-mortems of the Challenger disaster, you'll find that the engineers warned of exactly what happened, and tried to delay the takeoff. They were overruled by management.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
mod parent up!!! +1 insightful!!!
They said on CNN that ejector seats were built for the original shuttles, where the astronauts would just punch through the Shuttle. They were only for the two co-pilots, though, and with seven people, that raises obvious fairness issues.
This is so close the the aniversary date of the Chalenger explosion it's freaky.
Perhaps the aging shuttles will need a replacement.
And perhaps it's time for international communities start to pitch in, as we all benefit from these launches one way or another.
I just wish my government had the balls to get involved a bit more than just peripheral equipment like Canadarm 1 and 2.
My heart is for the families of those directly affected, and for anyone in the space business.
It seems quite clear that the shuttle is gone, and the astronauts dead. This is very unfortunate for all involved.
What will be the consequences to the US space programme? After the Challenger exploded, US space flight decreased considerably and very gradually recovered. Will the same happen now? The greatest hope is that competition with China, a nation now promising a man on the moon within the decade, will spur the US to continue working on its various space projects. How likely do we think this is? I'd like to hear some ideas of the future.
NOAA weather radar / short range reflectivity for Mid-Texas shows a line of high return paralleling and just south of a line between Dallas and Tyler. It's time lapse. Quite a remarkable radar image.
Maybe we shouldn't give a shit about the rest of the world. That would be easier. Oh, your starving your people, too bad. Maybe we should have let the Taliban beat to death whoever violated their twisted beliefs. Maybe the rest of the world is ungrateful.
I just can't figure out how some people can be so pathetics.
"Your're the same group that is defending Sadam".
It reminds me of Bush saying: "You're with us or against us." There is no word to say how stupid, inconscious it is. In my first year of college, I learned in philosophy that saying such things is ridiculous. Some people would certainly needs more education.
I even heard that some US medias began to make speculations about terrorism ! It is unbeleivable. All I have to say is: Americans, watch out, medias want you to get affraid of everything !
Glory to Allah, this just goes to show that Almighty Allah has begun to rain His judgement upon the Great Satan and Zionist Pigs! Soon shuttles and jews will be falling out of all skies!! Praise be to Allah and His Prophet Mohammed (Peace be unto him)
mje0w!!!1!
How long before we see Palestinians dancing and singing in the streets on CNN?
The only thing that is yours, is your soul; everything else is borrowed.
What I heard from FoxNews was that insulation fell off the rocket and hit one of the wings before launch
You can see the Shuttle debris radar return here: . Go to NBC5 Popup weather, and select the Nexrad loop. Look at the line to the south east of Dallas.
I find myself at an uncharacteristic loss for words... so I'll borrow some from John Gillespie Magee:
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
President Ronald Reagan quoted this poem when talking about the tragic loss of the crew of Orbiter Challenger(1982-1986) and I believe that it is appropriate today as we mourn the loss of Orbiter Columbia (1981-2003).
HIGH FLIGHT
by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
This poem was written by a young American, John Gillespie Magee, Jr., who flew with the Royal Canadian Air Force in England at the Start of WW II. He was killed shohrtly after he composed "High Flight."
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds -- and done a hundred things you have not dreamed of -- wheeled and soared and swung high in the sunlit silence.
Hov'ring there, I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung my eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace where never lark, or even eagle flew.
And while with silent, lifting mind I've trod the high untrespassed sanctity of space, put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
90 minutes since the crash by my estimation (I may be off by an hour either way - I'm in a bit of a funny timezone) and this isn't anywhere on the Google News front page. A keyword search on "shuttle" finds it though. I wonder how their selection algorithm can be failing to notice the hottest story of the year so far?
Google News has been very slow on picking this up, only just put it on the front page and it's not even top billing (that goes to a WMD Terrorism story).
And a lot more die.
Not exactly something most people probably want to see, but heres the radar track showing the breakup... http://www.srh.noaa.gov/radar/latest/DS.p19r0/si.k shv.shtml
No. The shuttle is a monstrously complex beast that NASA kept using because it had already sunk so much time and effort in. If technologies like the Rotary Rocket had made space flight simple, reliable and cheap, this wouldn't have happened, and it wouldn't have set the space program back twenty years.
I now know how everyone felt in 1986, after the Challenger disaster.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This was obviously modded down for political reasons. The truth may be uncomfortable but that doesn't make it a troll.
I thought my .sig is particularly prudent just now. :p
Had a great view of it going up, never expected to get so close especially of such a high security launch(new job perk) Really unfortunate :(
http://tarnis.jaypoc.com/photos/sts107/
I know this won't happen but maybe this will force the monkey's in congress and at the whitehouse to fix the problems which NASA has. Beaucrecy(sp?)equipment that should not be flying, goals which seems to not fit any real agenga, and finally no money to actually do anything.
First of all we need a new delivery and exploration system.
Second we need an effective escape and rescume module built into that system.
I have a good feeling that this has effectively killed our Space Program for the next 10-15 years.
ROTFLMAO!!!!
can be found here (Google cache)
If you look at the current weather radar loops of the Houston area you can see the streak of debris going accross the sky.
i don't give a shit about the shuttle crew. More people die everyday because of things we can really prevent. This just was an accident.
/.'ers would willingly become astronauts, even when faced with the extreme risks which - while existing all along - only now are so evident?
/.'er are 'tards, so most of them would say "yes" without a seconds thought, but my point is this:
Although this particular AC is a foul mouthed baffoon, it does make a good point. I'm sure the astronauts had now illusions about the dangers of being involved in these missions.
However, my take on this tradgedy is different. I wonder how many
Ok, most
These 7 astronauts are truly Heroes.
But it's strange how the possible death of seven people can get so much attention. Yes, they were innocent and yes, they were courageous and did something good for the humanity and yes thousands of people like them die every day.
If you want to hear peoples feelings and get on the news: die a spectactular death. Is that the lesson learned from this event?
I can understand how the two towers was a major event due to the hundreds of people that tragically died from a direct attack by extremists on a nation, but this?
At least be consistent and bring us the news when some astronauts die in a car accident, if they're so honorable.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I remember watching NGTV a show all about the Space Shuttle, I think it may have been this show. But, I'm not entirely sure. I remember they did a good portion on how exact they were about analyzing the tiles on the shuttle and in making sure they were all in place.
Right now, the guys that work their butts off to get these birds to fly are feeling pretty depressed, as is NASA in general. Politics aside, I hope that NASA maintains their ambition and continue to show leadership in space.
This may be modded redundant, but...
CNN has an article from Jan28th.
The text starts with:
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) -- Space shuttle Columbia's astronauts joined Mission Control in a moment of silence Tuesday at the exact time 17 years ago that Challenger exploded in the sky.
NASA's work force, in orbit and on Earth, remembered not only the seven astronauts who died on January 28, 1986, but also the three who were killed by a fire in their Apollo spacecraft at the pad on January 27, 1967. At the launch site Tuesday, flags flew at half staff for the second day in a row.
This is not my sig.
Their is a good description of what happens during the shuttles landing at:
... however I have flown a shuttle on X-plane for what its worth.
http://www.x-plane.com/orbiter.html
x-plane is an amazing flight simulator that uses an amazingly realistic flight model - great "physics" in video game software speak - and can simulate shuttle landings. The shuttle is a glider. I'm a glider pilot, but certainly not anything like a shuttle pilot
The shuttle changes its bank during the phase of the landing it was in to reduce speed. It's not banking to try change its course, it banks to increase drag and reduce speed. The shuttle just rotates over oneo its left or right side a bit.
The shuttle switches back and forth from banking right to banking left to stay on course while performing these drag increasing maneuvers.
FYI, these maneuvers are also done with the shuttle at a very steep angle of attack - as high as 70 degrees. This angle is also used to increase drag to slow the shuttle down.
The last confirmed communication happened shortly after the shuttle made its first switch from being banked right to being banked left.
It is very possible that the switch to being banked left introduced a change in force which led to a structural failure of the wings or control surfaces which are used during the landing. Given the high drag, high angle of attack, banked flight angle the orbiter would be in at the time, the shuttle would almost immediately start spinning end over end at 12,000 mph, disintegrating almost instantly.
Nasa also reported that one of the last data events they received from the shuttle was a "loss in tire pressure". It's alternatively possible that this could happen after an internal explosion in the shuttle, with part of the explosion debris puncturing the tire.
Below is a chronology from spaceflightnow.com - Notice the change in bank angle time.
1401 GMT (9:01 a.m. EST)
Columbia is out of communications with flight controllers in Houston. Now 15 minutes from landing time.
1359 GMT (8:59 a.m. EST)
At an altitude of 40 miles, shuttle Columbia has entered Texas.
1357 GMT (8:57 a.m. EST)
The shuttle is now 43 miles over New Mexico. Columbia is now reversing its bank to the left to further reduce speed.
If you were here I'd slap you upside the head.
The Space Program represents some of our best and brightest. It represents cooperation between different countries and cultures against the backdrop of political problems.
Making jokes when 7 brave people die is not appropriate. Especially when these 7 people are astronauts who have prepared and trained most of their adult lives for their mission into the new frontier.
There is a time and place for everything. This is not the time and/or place for poor taste. Try to learn the difference.
My understanding is that the space station requires re-supply by the shuttle. After the Challenger explosion, shuttles didn't fly for another two years. Clearly the people on the space station require at the very least rescue if not re-supply. My question is this: how long can the folks in the space station last without another shuttle flight?
--LP
The astronauts on board Columbia gave their lives in the pursuit of science and the advancement of humankind, and the poem you quote helps us remember their accomplishments, even as we mourn their passing.
Thanks.
My prayers are with those astronauts and for their families. May they be forever at peace.
blog
Here, and here.Rest of collection Here.
But an ASAT weapon such as this one (a missile, not a beam weapon), would have been picked up on radar/visual scanning, so this has to be an accident.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
no, but it's probably one of the top 10 news stories of the last 10 years...i'd say it comes under the same exception as 9/11. and remember, on 9/11, slashdot was one of the only news/information sites that actually stayed up under the load.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Don't know what else to say.
it's very sad, and my sympathy to those who lost loved ones. on a lighter side... since it was the columbia's last mission.. at least it went out with a bang! (i'm sorry, i just couldn't resist) my condolences.
I write code.
The story is located in Top Stories area (not in breaking news spot any longer, it was earlier)
Here is a link to the 'related stories' by date, you can watch new items come up by the minute. To Google's credit, it's unbiasedly pulling from sources worldwide.
p.s. Dan Rather has called it "the Apollo" and "the Discovery" so far, off to CNN.
our prayers go out to the families.
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
Not that I'm condoning poking around in the debris that may be showing up in Texas, but the warnings from nasa about the debris being toxic are sort of silly. Nitrogen tetraoxide, as well and Hydrogen gas (the shuttle's propellants) would be long since burned away. Keep in mind, when picking propellants one of the main criteria is chosing something that burns like hell won't have it. In fact, from the tempratures that must have been achieved during reentry, there is little chance of anything volitilizing or otherwise posing significant health risks once on the ground. The only potential risk I can see (not being a doctor, or a rocket scientist, for that matter)is any radioactive material that may have been on board, though a) this is very low amounts. Keep in mind, you've got 7 people on board, not to mention a public which is very very touchy about the thought of potentially releasing the material in the event of a tragedy such as this, and b) a debris field likely spread over hundreds of miles. Even if a tiny piece of plutonium made it back to earth without becoming miniscule pieces of dust spread throughout the atmosphere, you'd have to be the least lucky person on earth to happen to come across it.
Is that irony or what?
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Guys, the ISS has a Soyuz escape capsule for just this eventuality. Chill out, the guys on the ISS will be fine.
A Buba Booey got through when he went to take a phone call.....
Highly inappropriate, don't you think?
No one is seriously claiming this is an act of terrorism, no reason to jump on the anti-government bandwagon again. Al-qaeda has no operatives on the International Space Station or the moon...at least as far as I know. The odds of taking out the equivalent of a ballistic missle is pretty slim. It was simply a technical failure with disastrous results. The most unfortunate part is, due to the mentality of many people, I foresee parts being sold on ebay in no time by some money-seeking texans. Nothing like another tragedy to place dollar signs in people's eyes...
OK:
1) As has been mentioned, there was no missle fired that could hit 200,000 feet. Iraq may have built a "supergun" with the capability to launch objects into space, but a) its firing would have been pretty obvious and b) the odds of it hitting its target are about zero, while the chance of its discovery was absolute. So no -- this wasn't a surface-to-air attack.
2) Neither was it some kind of EMP pulse. Ignoring the height, this is a ship that needs to be able to survive the extraordinarily hostile EMP environment of space -- that magnetic field that the sun's particles slam into, giving us those nice Auroras, don't exist where the shuttle goes. The ship was built to withstand EMP -- the odds of a remotely invoked meltdown in its electronics are effectively nil.
3) No, they couldn't have known it was going to fail. Random crap happens all the time, even small tiles of foam coming off. The ships are built to be four-times redundant; you don't want your ship falling apart if a simple tile comes off. I'd be surprised if this had anything to do with the insulation stripping off.
4) No, the space program is not going to be shut down. To be blunt, China ain't going anywhere but up, and with an entirely fresh, completely modern space program at that. This is a tragedy. This is horrifying. But there will be future missions.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go mourn now.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Momma, I've got two strong hands.
And they're fine as far as hands go
I can shoulder the future, I can face the wind
For the dream that I must follow
It's a dream that can kill with its beauty
It's a hurt that can heal with its pain
And with all of these miles that lie before me
I may never get home again
But I'll carry the songs I learned when we were kids
I'll carry the scars of generations gone by
I'll pray for you always, and I promise you this
I'll carry on, I'll carry on
I kissed the earth on my daddy's grave
Said goodbye to my brave young companions
But when they hoist that sail I know my heart will break
As bright and as fine as the morning
I don't know where this road will take me
But they say there's a place there for a man
And I'm only afraid that my dreams may betray me
And I'll never get home again
But I'll carry the songs I learned when we were kids
And I'll carry the scars of generations gone by
I'll pray for you always, and I promise you this
I'll carry on, I'll carry on
And oh, I can shoulder the future, I can brave the wind
Oh, we go on, we go on, but we never get home again
So I'll carry the songs I learned when we were kids
I'll carry the scars of generations gone by
I'll pray for you always, and I promise you this
I'll carry on, I'll carry on
- Rich Mullins
"A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band", 1992
The preceding comment has been reviewed and declared to be compliant with HIPPA Phase II regulations.
CBS is reporting that the Russians sent up an unmanned supply vehicle this morning, and also that there is an escape craft of sorts sufficient to return the ISS crew to Earth without a shuttle flight.
If I were a religious man I would be praying...
I can see this being the death of the nuclear powered spacecraft idea - imagine having bits of nuclear reactor falling over texas right now?
David C
Slashdot never fails to disapoint. Some "genius" decided to post this unoriginal joke. I for one am not going to give him the satisfaction of a direct reply. He's a spinless fucking idiot.
However, if one of my dim-witted co-workers or relatives (or even a complete stranger?) feels the need to tell this childish joke, I am going to unload a fuck-load of geek wrath upon them.
I've been marking up a map with locations reported by CNN.. it shows the path the shuttle was on as it went down. It's here. - Steve
"For thou Lord, wilt bless the righteous;
with favour wilt thou compass him as with a shield.
--Psalms 5:12
God bless all 7 of you astronauts, we will
remember you in our hearts.
Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thraktuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.
I know I'm adding to already rampant speculation (what else can we do at this point)...
But can anybody comment on the likelihood of an impact with orbiting objects or debris? I figure you knock loose a few of those heat tiles...
let's face it, the overly affluent have so corrupted the process through nepotism and patronism that I'm not surprised at all. Expect more of the same due to rampant upper class incompetence ...
I just couldn't help remembering this article:
w .n ytimes.com/2002/05/12/technology/ebusiness/12NASA. html
http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://ww
Could it be that one of those old chips or drives conked out at the wrong time? I had an original IBM PC with an '086. It just died on me suddenly. Bad timing is all that's needed.
The shuttle had a new glass cockpit, but old electronics otherwise. They worked, and were expensive to replace, so it's done in stages.
Columbia was built in 1978, first flown in 1981. thats 3 years. Now, scroll the time back to the beginning of the design process. Even if Bush handed NASA an unlimited budget the day he made it into office, we wouldn't have a new shuttle to use today.
Meanwhile countless 727, DC-9 and other jets make multiple flights a day in airframes built in the 60's and 70's. Like the manufacturers of those craft, NASA had the best materials, even the best of the best.
Now, terrorism? Yeah, the terrorists have a missle that can hit a Mach20+ target. *sarcasm*
Readers don't have to introduce the idea of terrorists, I was watching the broadcast on NBC for less than 5 minutes and the subject was broached, here's even a quote from CNN:
Bush and his administration have made the '00's the decade of fear. Rather than "we have nothing to fear, but fear itself", we have the fear of terrorists hiding under every rock, behind every tree, lurking in every shadow. Now this disaster and the fear is already being considered on national TV, where it should be completely absurd and beyond any scrutiny, the fear brings it up.
Seven explorers died today. Get off your political high horses, and think about that. Accidents do happen.
My thoughts are with the families of the crews.
I wondered if they had made any changes after Challenger, which might serve to protect the crew in these conditions. I haven't given up hope, but I have stopped watching the TV. My friends and I are still planning a mountain bike ride today, when we get to the top of the mountain it will be hard not to look up and pray.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Here is a link to what I consider definitve proof on radar: http://www.intellicast.com/Local/USLocalWide.asp?l oc=kfws&seg=LocalWeather&prodgrp=NEXRADimagery&pro duct=BaseReflectivity&prodnav=none
The dense reflection on the right shows what I believe is debris.
do Shuttles carry flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders? they could be extremely helpful in somthing like this, assuming they survived the event...
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
I worked for a NASA sub-contractor in Houston during Challenger accident. I, like my co-workers, was watching a very public shuttle launch back in January of 1986. We had already grown somewhat weary of watching them like everyone else, but this one was special. So we all gather in the cafeteria to watch. What happened seconds into the mission is still seared into my memory. Watching people you know die is difficult. Watching your co-workers cry for hours on end... Jesus, it was a bad day.
I still have to turn away whenever media shows the footage. It's way too painful. So now I have new images to go along with the old ones. God bless these seven astronauts, their families, and the whole NASA and international space community. I know what you're going through.
Don't anyone think that putting human beings in a box and hurtling them into the air at ballistic speeds is safe. Nothing about it is safe. But the astronauts do it, and they're glad to do it.
I would gladly be on the next mission if I could.
A clever person solves a problem, A wise person avoids it. -Einstein
Offtopic: -1
m ba bwe-Train-Crash.html [nytimes.com] (registration required)
7 People die in a shuttle accident; everyone freaks out.
At about the same time, at least 37 people die in Zimbabwe in a train wreck; no one cares
http://nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Zi
Any conjecture about what this means for the Space Station? How many astronauts/cosmonauts are currently up there and how difficult is for them to return now that the shuttle will be out of commission for a year or two? I haven't been following the program closely and don't know how often Russian spacecraft get up there.
we will see a slashdot story about the sale of shuttle parts on eBay being shut down. (Don't do it, the shuttle parts are still owned by NASA, and you'll get FBI agents raiding your house searching for the stolen property.)
so they screwed it up and died, shit happens, not the astronauts fault that NASA built a shitty piece of hardware to take them out into space.
blame the us government for that!
It was traveling at SIX times the speed of sound... which just adds to your point...
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
...may yet be exaggerated. Whether this will truly be a setback for the space program depends on you, and people like you, who care about progress and the future of humanity. Look around yourself today and I bet you'll find that most people don't care about what just happened - most people are preoccupied with the menial simple tasks we all have to do to get by.
But some of you out there do care about the future, and it is up to you to convince everyone else that if we don't focus our efforts on furthering our reach as a species then we will be doomed to a brief and pointless existence as a tiny fungus on an insignificant planet whose overall contribution to the universe has been nill.
Our only hope for progress is to eventually get off this planet. If the world would stop arguing for a minute over what color God's dick is and what chosen people he best likes to swing it over, then perhaps we could see that we are all sitting on the same goddam rock and eventually it's going to get old.
It's up to you, most people don't care because I'm talking about the long view which means a thousand years. Today's tragedy is insignificant in that timeframe, but it is significant to us today. If we are not careful, the ignorant and self-serving politicians among us may seize on this as an opportunity to laugh at scientific progress and dismiss it as an idea which has failed. But one failure does not fail the idea. IF you believe in progress, you must help now and prevent the stupid people from destroying the dream - the dream that some day we can rise up and leave this earth together and ultimately fulfill the true potential of humanity.
It is up to you.
Dictionaries are for loosers.
we should act and not talk. make the world a better place. it might be nice to be able to categorize or group terrorism..., but that just makes a problem, not a solution. my thoughts on iraq are that we should go in and reform the country for the people, not the government, then the people can choose for themselfs, as much as i know about are foreign polocies, what i see on cnn, are that there are always strings and they further the interests of are country, when in fact its are planet that we should be looking to further. GLOBALIZATION WOOO!
Al-Qaeda is known for its audacity and boldness in killing Americans and Israelis, and this is clearly terrorism.
Unfortunately the parent post is currently marked (-1, Offtopic) when it clearly is on topic, just rather ambitiously stupid.
However, in this case I'd say it's also prophetic, because we know there are a lot of stupid people in the world. And conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this event. It will undoubtedly permanently enter the memestream of extremist wackos of all stripes. I predict the next iteration will be something like: "The US deliberately blew up its own shuttle with the Israeli aboard to give the government more reason to strike against the Arabs -- just like at nine-eleven! That's why they keep telling us not to touch the debris -- they don't want us to discover the truth!!"
The question I have is: Is there any way to preemptively counteract these sort of insane hypotheses?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
The Astronauts Memorial Foundation was established after the Challenger disaster. It constructed the Space Mirror memorial at the Visitors Information Center at the Kennedy Space Center, and now provides funds for educational projects.
Excerpt from http://amfcse.org/ -
The Astronauts Memorial Foundation
The Center for Space Education
Mail Code AMF
State Road 405, Building M6-306
Kennedy Space Center, FL 32899
Telephone: 321-452-2887
Fax: 321-452-6244
An online donation form is here:
https://www.givedirect.org/give/givefrm.asp?Action =GC&CID=776
During a pre-launch interview with Payload Commander, Mike Anderson, he said this would be the heaviest shuttle ever upon landing due to the number of science experiments on board. Could they have been pushing the design parameters?
Phoenix
The SR 71 Blackbird flies at a maximum altitude of about 80,000 ft with a top speed of about 2000 MPH. Countries with real military resources have been trying to shoot these things down for decades with no success.
The shuttle was at 200,000 ft going 12,000 MPH
It wasn't terrorists.
I understand the tragedy, but it cannot be ignored that there was a seventh astronaut onboard Columbia.
Her name is Kalpana Chawla. Times of India has the story here.
Text as follows:
Kalpana Chawla did India proud
PTI[ SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 01, 2003 09:25:13 PM ]
WASHINGTON: Kalpana Chawla, who is feared to have perished in the Columbia space shuttle mishap along with six others, had done India proud when she embarked on her first space mission on November 19, 1997.
The Karnal-born Chawla, the first Indian American astronaut, began her career at the Ames Research Center at Nasa in 1988.
A graduate in aeronautical engineering from the Punjab Engineering College she began work at the Ames in the area of fluid dynamics.
Following her successful tenure at the Ames, Chawla in 1993 joined the Overset Methods Inc in California as vice president and a research scientist in charge of simulating various body functions for future space missions.
Nasa selected Chawla as an astronaut candidate in 1994 and she joined the 15th group of astronauts in March 1995.
After an year of training and evaluation, Chawla was assigned as a crew representative to work on technical issues for Nasa's Astronaut Office Extra Vehicular Activities, Robotics, dealing in space walks.
She was instrumental in the testing space control software in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory.
Chawla's received recognition here and was assigned as mission specialist and prime robotic arm operator on the STS-87 and was involved in the manual capture of an orbiting satellite.
Born in Karnal in Punjab, Chawla did her schooling from the Tagore School in the city and took a degree in aeronautical engineering from the Punjab Engineering College.
She went on to complete her Masters from the University of Texas in 1984 earned a doctorate from the University of Colorado.
"Unlike most of you, I am not a nut." - Homer J. Simpson
How about, 'never'? Get your countries straight.
Though, I notice you tripped over the word planted in the CNN story. Nice job. --But you weren't supposed to actually think, "Palestine". It was intended rather, to ever-so-innocently plant a seed in the ever-fertile brains of CNN's consumers. Twitch a synapse or two and let the viewer think they are making their own connections.
But there will be time for all of that garbage debate later. Right now, It's time to respectfully hold your hat and wish those brave scientists a fond farewell.
-Fantastic Lad
Mark me off-topic perhaps, but when flipping around for any new information on this tragedy, I landed on CBS w/ Dan Rather and they had a "caller" who said they have a piece of shuttle debris in their backyard. When he got on live w/ Dan, after a lil converation he said he had "one of BabaBooeys teeth in his back yard" and then proceeded to call Dan an idiot. While I am all for satire and perhaps some playful interruptions of fluffy Hollywood events, or even boring pontificating news interviews, this was extremely TASTELESS in my opinion that someone would use this opportunity to promote Howard Stern's aging BabaBooey B.S. I hope the person involved gets his just due (originally said:the shit kicked out of him) when someone figures who he is.
The space shuttle is an amazing technology, but all the shuttles are going to fly until they can't.
This is an acceptable risk, and with the aging shuttle program Columbia is a timely wake-up call.
It's time to redesign the shuttle
- why does it have to re-enter so fast? (not to evade terrorist missiles) It should be able to fly itself anywhere after re-entry.
- crew ejection
- tiles falling off
- can lift off and land in poor weather
- more monitoring to know if something can go wrong (not acceptable to have a tile break off and not know what the consequences are)
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
I am not religious.
If you are pray yourself and let the rest decide what to do.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I was at the barbershop this morning when a mother walked in to pick up her kid and said the "Challenger" blew up and I thought the lady was crazy for obvious reasons. We then turned on the TV there.
Jan 27, 1967: Apollo 1 fire
Jan 28, 1986: Challenger explosion
Feb 1, 2003 Columbia breakup
--LP
All the recent deep-space probes and Mars probes are witnesses of the infallibility of NASA. How about we send you up on the next shuttle?
"High Flight" Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there, I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air. Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace Where never lark, or even eagle flew - And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand and touched the face of God. John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
I can't help it - I'm a 19D.
A question if I may, for those with more knowledge than I.
It has apparently been reported that a small part of the shuttle came adrift and may have caused damage during launch.
I'm curious to know if the space shuttles actually have the ability to abort flight mid-air and safely return to earth. I mean before they leave our atmosphere, but after take-off.
My point is that even if the engineers had decided that there was a significant risk as a result of the reported damage during the launch, was there actually anything that could have been done anyway? Were the astronouts *really* doomed by design?
Just to add some more info...s you can see some of them can reach over 200km but thats km not miles. Also they are huge and need a separte vehicle to haul them around. I think a few interesting things to note.(1) The shuttle had sustain some sort of tile damage at takeoff but they had inspected the damage and said it would cause no problems min you one of the shutttles crew had a PhD in Aerospace Engineering so I won't dispute that. Another interesting thing is that the shuttle had very little fuel which I only assume is SOP. So In my mind I rule out a fuel leaks or such things. Thr next factoid I heard was of the 113 shuttle missions now only 2 have been fatal. I somewhat doubt this means the end of the space program. Although I feel resonable sure that we won't be sending any more fo a little while following and investigation and current budget crisis. What does disturb me is the only 2 shuttle missions I have had more interest in the the others (the Challenger w/ MaCaulfe(sp?) and now the current tragedey w/ the first Isreali astronaut) go up in flames. It will be interesting to see if they can find the cause.C .HTM
here is a site about russian sutface to air missles
http://www.wonderland.org.nz/rasa.htm
a
and for the conspiracy theorists here is a list of american surface to air missiles.
http://www.probertencyclopaedia.com/F5
It's all Politics
Moron. It was 40 miles up moving at mach 6. How could it possiblly be terrorism?
You should be ashamed of yourself. Ignorance and insensitivity are not virtues. You should be forced to publicly admit your identity and your ruthless comment to the families and friends of the crew, and to not be allowed to ever use a computer again from anything but command line. You are a contemptable immature and stupid person.
First of all, it's "regime." Second of all, you don't know how this is going to impact NASA. This might lead to a full investigation of NASA, how things are done there, and many of the problems that have become entrenched in their way of doing business. Don't start making uninformed statements about the long range when you don't even know what the current situation is. Let's suppose a bomb was planted on board. This appears to be very unlikely but let's suppose it is true since we don't know what happened yet. So then, the Bush administration (don't call them a regime you narrow-minded little fucktard) would be resolved to not let the terrorists win and ensure that NASA was given more money. Your idle thoughts are not only inappropriate at this time but also so vague and without backing that they are almost laughable - although I can't really laugh about all this right now and you've only pissed me off asshole.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
Do whatever it is that you do when faced with a deeply important and tragic event that hits to the very heart of any person with the soul of a scientist and the heart of a free-thinking person, yet is still caring and considerate enough to put aside your overly politically-correct knee-jerk reactions and feel actual sympathy for another human.
A few ideas to consider before slamming me with your "Overrated" mods:
Prayer is not always to God.
People believe in many different gods. Or none. That's what makes us interesting.
Sometimes people just pray.
There is *nothing* wrong with praying, despite what "Anton LeVey" said.
Prayer is often a precursur to real action - it makes you consider things carefully.
You may be wrong about a great many things.
I am not religious and I rarely ever pray, but I did today for these lost scientists. If you can't deal with that, go fuck yourself.
I am rarely surprised by the shallowness and insensitivity of people.
I sure was today.
Ok, now feel free to mod this comment down and out of sight.
-- My Weblog.
but, with a crew on the Space Station, a long delay will not be possible this time.
Do you know anything about the ISS? The reason there's only three crew members? Because the Soyuz "lifeboat" attached to the ISS to be used in case of an emergency can only hold three people.
So no, there is no rush to get the shuttle back in service to retrieve the ISS crew, the crew can easily return on the Soyuz capsule. However, once the lifeboat is used, they won't leave the station manned without a replacement.
Considering the financial woes of the Russians, it's likely NASA will shut down the ISS until the shuttle program is back up and running.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
This has been a terrible disaster. Hopefully now the world will wake up from wars, and realise there are greater things to do in one's life (the united exploration of space).
May those so recently departed find their wishes in the afterlife fufilled; my thoughts are with their families.
Things like this happen when people start cutting budgets. They just repaired the microcracks in the fuselage. Anything going wrong during take off should have had a high priority. Those astronauts took a calculated risk. It may be sad but it was inevitable. The people on the ground should realize that we cause this by letting Nasa's funds get cut. Why should it take putting people's lives at risk. Space isn't just a destination. Wasn't there a RedHat Box on that flight? This is negative press
http://wwwa.accuweather.com/adcbin/public/local_ra dar.asp?nxsite=kshv&nxtype=r1&type=loop
Here are a few givens:
-It's not the result of ground based aggression
-This was one of the oldest STS that NASA has
-Foam fell off the shuttle on liftoff and hit the wing
-NASA declared the loss of foam and possible damage within 'acceptable margins'
-The Columbia is non-operative and the crew is (will be) dead
When we look to the Challenger and the organizational decisions which led up to its destruction, we see a persistant pattern of increasing the amount of acceptable risk (oh, it didn't blow up THIS time, so this is ok) which increased the probability of a total loss of shuttles. NASA and Morton Thiokol worked outside of acceptable limits, outside the data which had been collected for temperature and O-ring failure (by a large margin, too!) and said that there was no data to prohibit them from launching, vs. the data does not support a launch b/c we have no quantifiable data on its affect on STS launches.
Upon liftoff, after seeing the foam hit the wing, NASA administrators decided not to abort the already in progress liftoff and land at the preplanned emergency areas in Europe and to proceed normally, within 'acceptable margins.'
NASA was not helped in the recent satellite mission that ended of destruction in the satellite, simply b/c the outsourcing was done in standard measurements and NASA was working in metric. No one caught this, and a satellite to Mars plummeted to the ground. There's also been the number of satellites lately that have exploded on their rockets on the launch pad.
One can blame the shuttles, but surely, it will be held that it was NASA organizational culture that has once again doomed another STS mission. Yes, I understant the complexity of sts launches, let alone their missions, but it cannot be denied that when insulating foam falls of a thruster and hits a wing of an aircraft, it's a big deal and warrants an abort and inspection.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE???!!!!!
Several people just DIED and all I see are post worrying about how this is going to set back the space program. People are dead. Show some respect.
(And please ban anyone who post something funny)
Here is some information on how it could be terrrorism.
I remember reading that the station has several options that should keep it safe:
1) Supplies are often shipped via unmanned craft.
2) A Soyez (sp?) reentry capsule is attached to the space station that's available for evacuation and recovery of all personnel aboard the station.
The US currently has 3 people there. They were scheduled for replacement in March (along with the first female shuttle commander...another event that may be delayed)....I saw something on CNN saying they'd probably be okay until late spring before any drastic decisions even needed to be considered.
Original video of breakup, in real player format, about the size of a postage stamp. free registration required
still video slideshow of the breakup & astronauts.
it's not going to stop until you wise up, no it's not going to stop. so just give up.
...it would probably have happened on the ground as the shuttle was being prepared for launch.
I am old enough to remember the first flight of the good ship Columbia. Please bear in mind a few facts:
The Columbia was the first Shuttle to blast off. The Enterprise was basically a glider that was used to test how well a Shuttle could land.
It's old. 22 years old. It has flown 25+ missions and literally millions of miles.
When the Columbia first landed in the early 1980s, there was concern for the safety of the Astronauts during re-entry. Nobody was entirely certain about whether or not the ceramic tiles would hold, and it was speculated that if a tile broke loose before or during reentry the entire heat shield would be compromised enough for the ship to break up under the stress of the friction of the atmosphere.
I am not saying that this was the work of terrorists...there are so many things that can go wrong during reentry that a completely accidental breach of the heat shield is probably the most likely cause of the disaster. However, very simple "monkey-wrenching" of the heat shield could have caused this as well. If an infiltrator broke a tile or two in such a way that it wouldn't be readily apparant to final inspection, or maybe pried one or two loose...
I have no doubt, however, that either Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or Hesbollah, all three and/or any combination of the three will claim responsibility for this event. I don't think AlQaeda will, because they seem to only take credit for things they actually have a hand in. Also I don't think that you will hear anything from the Palestinian Authority other than conciliatory words.
Weird coincidence: smack dab in the middle of the debris field is a Texas town called Palestine.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Space shuttle reference manual
[Taken from here. Emphasis mine... --LP]
President Reagan's Speech on The Challenger Disaster
Oval Office of the White House
January 28, 1986
Ladies and Gentlemen, I'd planned to speak to you tonight to report on the state of the Union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans. Today is a day for mourning and remembering. Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss.
Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground. But, we've never lost an astronaut in flight; we've never had a tragedy like this. And perhaps we've forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle; but they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, but overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. We mourn their loss as a nation together.
For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we're thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, 'Give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy.' They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.
We've grown used to wonders in this century. It's hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been doing just that. We've grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.
And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them...
I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program, and what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute. We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue. I want to add that I wish I could talk to every man and woman who works for NASA or who worked on this mission and tell them: "Your dedication and professionalism have moved and impressed us for decades. And we know of your anguish. We share it."
There's a coincidence today. On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, 'He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.' Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake's, complete.
The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honoured us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.'
To have those things survive the fires of the Holocaust and make it into space, only to be burnt up along with our first astronaut...
From the Wall Street Journal's site:
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)--Israel's first astronaut held up a tiny Torah scroll aboard space shuttle Columbia on Tuesday, fulfilling a promise made by a Holocaust survivor 59 years ago.
Astronaut Ilan Ramon showed the Torah to Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, during a televised conference.
Watching with emotion from a NASA control center in Greenbelt, Md., was the Torah's owner, Joachim Joseph, a 71-year-old atmospheric physicist at Tel Aviv University who is overseeing an Israeli experiment aboard the shuttle.
The scientist received the Torah from a rabbi while both were imprisoned at a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1944. Joseph had just turned 13, and the rabbi secretly arranged a 4 a.m. bar mitzvah ceremony in the prisoners' barracks.
"After the ceremony, he said, `You take this, this scroll that you just read from, because I will not leave here alive. But you must promise me that if you get out, you'll tell the story,"' Joseph recalled.
The rabbi was killed two months later.
Joseph was freed from the Bergen-Belsen camp in a prisoner exchange in 1945, one month before it was liberated by the Americans and British.
Ramon, whose mother and grandmother survived the Auschwitz death camp, visited the scientist's home two years ago and saw the Torah. "He was deeply affected. He almost cried," Joseph said. The astronaut asked if he could take the Torah with him into space.
"This represents more than anything the ability of the Jewish people to survive despite everything from horrible periods, black days, to reach periods of hope and belief in the future," Ramon told Sharon and other Israeli government officials in Jerusalem.
Joseph said: "I feel now that I finally was able to fulfill my promise to Rabbi Dasberg 50 years ago, more than 50 years ago, and then on a grand scale, and I'm very grateful to Ilan for making it possible."
^___=
On the Net:
Tel Aviv University: www.tau.ac.il/geophysics/MEIDEX.home.htm
Woopty Doo Basil, what does it all mean?!
I can not believe what i heard on MSNBC this morning as these tragic events unfolded...near the start of this tradgedy MSNBC anchor women (can't remember her name) takes a call from a so called NASA person who then makes the comment sbout Howard Stern and Jackie being on board or having something to do with the explosion. This is such crap. Granted the news agencys should be more carefull when taking calls but the scum who did this should be sent to jail. I hope some one recorded it so the exact dialouge might be posted and the cell phone number traced to find the fuck head who did it. RIP brave shuttle crew...and I am sorry that your souls had to hear that crap.
The shuttle has now, after all, had many, many successful missions. Back when Challenger lifted off, it was still relatively unproven. Heck, shuttle launches haven't made the news for years. It's all become routine.
Of course they'll need to find out what went wrong. They might ground the fleet in the meantime. But it's unlikely to be a significant design flaw, simply because it's unlikely that we've ridden the wave of probability this long without something going wrong.
We should pray for the lost souls on that ship.. . Pray for the family. . . . God bless you all.. . . .
I may be bad with names, but I'll never forget your IP address
Just updating.
This was filed on the AP wire (and shown on the Washington Post's web site) just 32 minutes before the shuttle came down. Kind of eerie when you look at what David Brown said. -- Columbia Streaks Toward Florida Landing By Marcia Dunn AP Aerospace Writer Saturday, February 1, 2003; 8:28 AM CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- With security tighter than usual, space shuttle Columbia streaked toward a Florida touchdown Saturday to end a successful 16-day scientific research mission that included the first Israeli astronaut. The early morning fog burned off as the sun rose, and Mission Control gave the seven astronauts the go-ahead to come home on time. "I guess you've been wondering, but you are 'go' for the deorbit burn," Mission Control radioed at practically the last minute. Ilan Ramon, a colonel in Israel's air force and former fighter pilot, became the first man from his country to fly in space, and his presence resulted in an increase in security, not only for Columbia's Jan. 16 launch, but also for its landing. Space agency officials feared his presence might make the shuttle more of a terrorist target. "We've taken all reasonable measures, and all of our landings so far since 9- 11 have gone perfectly," said Lt. Col. Michael Rein, an Air Force spokesman. Columbia's crew - Ramon and six Americans - completed all of their 80-plus experiments in orbit. They studied ant, bee and spider behavior in weightlessness as well as changes in flames and flower scents, and took measurements of atmospheric dust with a pair of Israeli cameras. The 13 lab rats on board - part of a brain and heart study - had to face the guillotine following the flight so researchers could see up-close the effects of so much time in weightlessness. The insects and other animals had a brighter, longer future: the student experimenters were going to get them back and many of the youngsters planned to keep them, almost like pets. All of the scientific objectives were accomplished during the round-the-clock laboratory mission, and some of the work may be continued aboard the international space station, researchers said. The only problem of note was a pair of malfunctioning dehumidifiers, which temporarily raised temperatures inside the laboratory to the low 80s, 10 degrees higher than desired. Some of Columbia's crew members didn't want their time in space to end. "Do we really have to come back?" astronaut David Brown jokingly asked Mission Control before the ride home. NASA's next shuttle flight, a space station construction mission, is scheduled for March. The next time Columbia flies will be in November, when it carries into orbit educator-astronaut Barbara Morgan, who was the backup for Challenger crew member Christa McAuliffe in 1986.
I am offended that you would presume to tell me how I should feel or respond to this incident. (Mind you, I've only read the +4 comments up to this point.) If I want to laugh to feel better, then I will laugh. If I was the age I was during the first shuttle explosion, I would participate in space shuttle jokes. But you have no right to tell me how to feel.
This has been a terrible disaster. Hopefully now the world will wake up from wars, and realise there are greater things to do in one's life (the united exploration of space). May those so recently departed find their wishes in the afterlife fufifilled; my thoughts are with their families.
Fly, Columbia..
Thunder toward tomorrow on an oxygen stream,
Thunder toward tomorrow, fire flame and rocket song,
Mark a new time of man, boost your candles, light the dawn, fly, Columbia
Foundation of the future, courier of dreams, thunder on.
Sunshine brightens the horizon, tension rings the morning haze,
The shuttle standing proud against the wind,
Knows the distant stars her delta wings will never grace,
Countown, pulses race, the launch begins.
(chorus)
Columbia, the promise of better days to come
Columbia, new mistress of the sky
Sail in orbit free, track the moon and chace the sun,
Fly, Columbia, for humankind, fly.
(chorus)
Lyrics by Diana Gallagher
How about, 'never'? Get your countries straight.
Though, I notice you tripped over the ever-so-innocently planted seed word in the CNN story. Nice job. Twitch a synapse or two and let the viewer think they are making their own connections. (Not too tough, thanks to the inch-diameter dots C-freeking-NN provided us with to connect. "Ramon, 48, took part in the 1981 bombing of the nuclear reactor in Iraq." Gee. Thanks guys. What RESPONSIBLE reporting. Not leading in any way. Could they be any more blatant? Jerks.)
But there will be time for all of that garbage later. Right now, one ought to respectfully hold one's hat and wish the innocent and the brave a fond farewell.
-Fantastic Lad
I'm sure the pun is unintentional, but do the news channels really need to refer to this story as "breaking news"? It seems horribly insensitive.
I pray for the families and friends of those lost.
...and efficiency above all is really good!!! Don't get distracted
by this slight misfortune. We managed to get a 0.00001% gain in productivity by outsourcing everything!
PS: The above is sarcasm.My condolences to the families and friends of the victims.
Some of you won't believe it, but CNN just showed some video of the shuttle debris falling in slow motion, and a black disk flew right in front of the camera. That's right, a BLACK DISK FLEW RIGHT BY!!! I'm sure somebody at CNN just lost their job for letting this slip through, and of course they won't replay the video. Nor will they show ANY video footage of what happened BEFORE the shuttle started falling apart.
I know it sounds crazy, but my wife and I both witnessed it, watching with our jaws dropped. We saw it together and that's all the proof we needed. I'm not saying aliens were involved with the crash, but they might have been watching. It was a historic mission and a lot of people were watching.
Some intersting observations:
First Israel passenger ever
Debris falls near Palestine Texas
On this flight, there was a scientific partnership, Palestinian and Israeli researchers joined forces for first time ever to organize a science project onboard the space shuttle Columbia. I wonder if this 'project' had anything to do with it? Hmmm...
Shuttle lifts off on Jan 16th
They spend 16 days in space
They were due to land at 9:16am
hmmm...
here
.
A Mossad space based weapon took them out, so they could blame Arafat as the crew contained the first Israeli
in space
I thought Ra was an Egyptian god, not an American one.
Of course, this is a tragedy but its not the end of manned spaceflight as some people are saying.
... lets go to Mars!
Perhaps the end of the shuttle but remember all the other NASA disasters we overcame.
Since today underlines how dangerous launch/reentry is I think it illustrates that we should not be taking such big risks for dinky reward (ie to and from space station)
How long before CNN and all the other news outlets show Palestinians and Iraqis dancing in the streets?
Not only was there an Israeli on board, but he was one of the pilots who hit the Iraqi reactor.
And then after they show Saddam's smug face on TV, saying it was God's will because of this fact, how long before the Dubya opens up the supersized can of whoop ass?
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
Prayer will not provide comfort neither peace to me, and will provide undestanding to none.
I am sick an tired of religious people assuming that what works for them works for all.
Most importantly for Christians, which I assume are the majority of religous folks around here, Jesus himself in one of his parables stated very clearly that those prayers done more with the intention to boast than with the intention to reach for the creator, should be seen with suspicion. If you want to pray pray, but don't start the "please all pary with me" which feels suspicisoulsy phariseic.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Godspeed to the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery.
http://flhurricane.com/images/shuttledebrisfieldra darloop.gif
A few moments after I walked into the office this morning I heard the news about the shuttle. After a minute or two of conversation with my colleagues I was here, reading what my fellow /. readers had to say; what they felt.
/. means to me. Information and news is only one aspect, now seemingly much less important than the thoughts perspectives, rememberances, conjectures, predictions, and sentiments of the people.
/., and by this I mean the people who post, you're the reason I come here.
Until now I had not realized what
So thanks
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Jesus was a liberal jew.
And besides, everone knows Allah hates jews and would never allow a filthy zionist to hurt one of His faithful.
mje0w!!!1!
Three now. Four including the original Enterprise. I wonder if they'll retrofit her now, to replace Columbia?
For that matter, are/were there any astronauts/cosmonauts aboard Alpha? How are they going to get home now? I don't think there's going to be any shuttle missions for quite a while. Are we going to have to get lifts from the Russians?
How about the whole ISS project anyway? Is this going to toast that for good, too?
I live in an apartment so I cannot fly a flag of my own, but my heart and thoughts are with our astronauts. Their selflessness, sacrifice, and courage will not be forgotten. They are the ones who rushed in where angels feared to tread to preserve our place in the stars. I am an american and I mourn openly and cry freely for our our fallen hero's. My flag flys at half mast in my heart.
-Darkseer
BOFH, My model for being a sysadmin :)
Space flight is dangerous. I hate to sound cold and calloused, but any time you put a human being inside a machine with hundreds of thousands working parts and fly several times the speed of sound, the risk is just HUGE.
This brings up another question: why are we still using shuttles? Shuttles are almost 30 years old, are extremely expensive to operate, and do little to further man's exploration of space. (You may say that we save money because the shuttle is recyclable, but you are dead wrong. It takes more money to relaunch the shuttle than it does to build a rocket, have that rocket burn up on re-entry, then build that rocket over again from scratch.)
I just hope this doesn't halt space missions for 5 or 6 years like Challenger did.
My girlfriend and I last night were discussing the possibility of trying to see a shuttle launch this year. We both thought it would be a cool vacation.
To see, the next day, that another disaster has struck the program is disheartening.
That this disaster will undoubtably cripple the space program for years is very sad.
My condolences to the families as well.
After we grieve, we have to search for answers. One of the things that I saw, going over the crew bios, was that this wasn't one of the more experienced crews. This was the pilot's first flight. It was only the mission commander's second flight.
I absolutely am not putting this at their feet. However, it obviously will be one of the questions raised during the search for answers.
MSNBC has the crew profiles embedded in their story.
First, I want to say that my heart goes out to the families and astronuats that tragically perished during there decent to Earth. With that said, I want to also say that we shouldn't abandon the sapce program due to this accident. Even children fall a few times when learning to walk. The space program is very, very important because it gives us the ability to explore and research scientific data.
Someone that is used to looking at the noaa radar for Dallas/Fort Worth, please look at http://www.srh.noaa.gov/radar/loop/DS.p20r/si.kfws .shtml and tell me what the hell the lines shooting out the the southwest are, and do the normally show up...
commander Rick D. Husband,
pilot William C. McCool,
payload commander Michael P. Anderson,
mission specialist David M. Brown,
mission specialist Kalpana Chawla,
mission specialist Laurel Clark,
mission specialist Ilan Ramon.
A new impetus to get a next-generation reusable orbiter going.
There have been so many abortive attempts to do this, including the awesome Delta Clipper.
You're an idiot.
It is in extremely poor taste to speculate about terror having anything to do with the accident. Everyone who knows anything about space travel, knows that re-entry is extremely hazardous and we've only been very lucky so far in more than forty years of manned space flight.
It is important to realize that this tragedy happens in the middle of an intensive International Space Station (ISS) construction schedule.
I don't think that NASA will be able to ground the space shuttle fleet like it did in 1986. First, ISS is a very costly endevour with many international partners that has taken (and will take) years to complete. This is not the kind of thing you abandon.
We couldn't de-orbit it without some de-construction considering it won't burn up entirely as smaller objects do.
I suggest we all recognize that this is a huge personal and institutional loss by wearing black arm-bands in the coming week.
We have to weather this tragedy... more so, we need to emphasize to the public that space flight has always harbored substantial risk and always will. This doesn't mean that it shouldn't be undertaken or encouraged... it does mean that we shouldn't waste such a substantial risk on something as politically motivated as the ISS. ISS should have real goals... not just political manned space flight bullshit.
jhall@astron.berkeley.edu
They don't know any better than to celebrate death and destruction. It is not that they must succeed but that everyone else must fail. That is their only hope. I agree that NASA engineers are among the best in the world. I will not go as far as to say that they do not make mistakes but I would certainly trust them with my life on a mission tomorrow if they would let me.
What you said was very polite and in no way offensive. Those who replied to you are trolls of the worst kind. Thank you.
I'm very sad and introspective myself about this.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA DEBRIS!
well this one is really fake, i checked the coordinates and that's located 5 km from my home. It's near Cologne, Germany. But funny! The current high bid is USD 99Million. Well, the bidder is also fake?
I was born the year before the astronauts walked on the moon. As a toddler, I watched in awe as astronauts shook hands in space, then parachuted out of the sky and splashed down in the ocean. As a teen, I cheered when Columbia first went up, and cried happily when they landed like an airplane.
When I was 17, I remember walking the halls of high school hearing whispered rumors that the shuttle had blown up, and spent the rest of the day watching it happen. Over and over on television, the media showing us even Christa McAuliffe's class burst into tears as their teacher died. I remember my tears at the loss, my anger at the Shuttle Jokes that appeared soon after.
I woke up this morning, seventeen years later and cried again, the oldest, my sentimental favorite, the Columbia and her crew were lost. I pulled out the yellowed, laminated front page of the paper from April 14, 1981, headline reading "Those Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machine", Young and Crippen grinning in black and white.
God damn it. Please, let's not lose our space program. We need that kind of hope in these dark times.
And please, no shuttle jokes.
Chris
While the some materials of the shuttle may be toxic, any of the little fuel carried on re-entry should have burnt up.
I might be wrong but I think they may be saying that to stop people from collecting pieces to keep
and any shit like this SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA DEBRIS! (Even though that one is obviously fake)
anyway Red Fuming Nitric Acid is nitrogen tetroxide (N2O4) and Hydrazine is monomethyl hydrazine (MMH)
From John F. Kennedy Space Center - KSC Fact Sheets and Information Summaries
Hypergolic propellants are fuels and oxidizers which ignite on contact with each other and need no ignition source. This easy start and restart capability makes them attractive for both manned and unmanned spacecraft maneuvering systems. Another plus is their storability -- they do not have the extreme temperature requirements of cryogenics.
The fuel is monomethyl hydrazine (MMH) and the oxidizer is nitrogen tetroxide (N2O4).
Hydrazine is a clear, nitrogen/hydrogen compound with a "fishy" smell. It is similar to ammonia. Nitrogen tetroxide is a reddish fluid. It has a pungent, sweetish smell. Both fluids are highly toxic, and are handled under the most stringent safety conditions. Hypergolic propellants are used in the core liquid propellant stages of the Titan family of launch vehicles, and on the second stage of the Delta.
The Space Shuttle orbiter uses hypergols in its Orbital Maneuvering Subsystem (OMS) for orbital insertion, major orbital maneuvers and deorbit. The Reaction Control System (RCS) uses hypergols for attitude control.
The efficiency of the MMH/N2O4 combination in the Space Shuttle orbiter ranges from 260 to 280 seconds in the RCS, to 313 seconds in the OMS. The higher efficiency of the OMS system is attributed to higher expansion ratios in the nozzles and higher pressures in the combustion chambers.
If the crew of the ISS has to come down in the Soyuz, where would they land? In the US or in Russia?
Some in Dallas, and sites south-east of Dallas, Nacogdoches, Palestine and St. Augustine, so far all in Texas.
Phoenix
Disaster magnitude? Hmm. Do you measure that in dollars, lives lost, or shaken public confidence? My first thought this morning was: why don't I get this upset over a downed twin-engine aircraft with seven passengers? Somehow this is bigger, but I hope it's not just because the plane they were flying was a lot more expensive..
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
Thanks. I vaguely remembered an escape route/craft of some kind but didn't know that we had working unmanned supply vehicles; that's promising. Hopefully your response will get modded up as much as my inquiry...
--LP
How was it they put it in Armageddon, they are flying a craft where all components are from the lowest bidder? That gives you confidence....
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
also note
1357 GMT (8:57 a.m. EST)
The shuttle is now 43 miles over New Mexico.
Columbia is now reversing its bank to the left to
further reduce speed
http://www.broadcast.com/learning_and_education/sc ience/space/nasa/nasa_television/
h tm
Supports 56k and broadband. Official meda channel for NasaTV if you don't have access to satelite.
More links available on google.
http://www.unitedspacealliance.com/live/nasatv.
don't forget to send us a postcard.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
You should be looking at a dictionary or grammar book.
The students doing experiments from STARS. My harvester ants experiment thread and everyone's reactions. Everything was going so well... :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Which is exactly what I was asking myself when the Challenger exploded.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
I think this radar map tells the story better than blurry amateur vids. It's a radar map taken by the national weather service showing a huge trail as
1 .p hp?warnzone=laz001
debris fell from the shuttle.
http://www.srh.weather.gov/data/forecasts/LAZ00
The truly pathetic part of this guy's post is that the author's probably tucked away safe and sound in his parents' basement.
And oh yeah, if I ever meet you, I will kick your ass!
take a trip down the slaughterhouse & watch some of the billion animals killed very year by factory farming, that should turn a few things.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I'm not religious.
-- My Weblog.
Well, This is ... History. I hope all turns well. //begin biased rant
I hope this teaches them to not toy with nasa's budget again.
Maybe the AlQuada had a man on the inside
of NASA. We outsource quite a bit these days.
Humor aside, I'm sick of this propaganda on
tv. Presidents need wars to make them look
good. The past few presidents have had
wars. Chances are there was no bomb on
the space shuttle nor was there a stinger
fired at it from afar. The new Airforce
laser would have blasted it most likely.
Facts are it was bound to happen. A 13,000
mph bullet hammering through the ruff edges
of space is a death sentence. Maybe this
time around we'll not worry about money as much
when building a space casket. Why not mold
an entire ship out of the tile materials.
Research some composites or something to take
the heat. Retro-Rockets. God, we got the tech.
We know how to build it. But crap we don't
have the money? Why do we need money.
I say, set aside some private organization like
the Airforce or Navy to build the damn things.
No matter what the personel do, they get paid
the same thing depending on their pay scales.
That is they get paid the same thing if they
are building bombs or building space ships.
Not the case with contractors and high paid
scientists. They need a million to take a
dump in a rent-a-john.
l8r
Here.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- With security tighter than usual, space shuttle Columbia streaked toward a Florida touchdown Saturday to end a successful 16-day scientific research mission that included the first Israeli astronaut.
The early morning fog burned off as the sun rose, and Mission Control gave the seven astronauts the go-ahead to come home on time. "I guess you've been wondering, but you are 'go' for the deorbit burn," Mission Control radioed at practically the last minute.
Ilan Ramon, a colonel in Israel's air force and former fighter pilot, became the first man from his country to fly in space, and his presence resulted in an increase in security, not only for Columbia's Jan. 16 launch, but also for its landing. Space agency officials feared his presence might make the shuttle more of a terrorist target.
"We've taken all reasonable measures, and all of our landings so far since 9-11 have gone perfectly," said Lt. Col. Michael Rein, an Air Force spokesman.
Columbia's crew - Ramon and six Americans - completed all of their 80-plus experiments in orbit. They studied ant, bee and spider behavior in weightlessness as well as changes in flames and flower scents, and took measurements of atmospheric dust with a pair of Israeli cameras.
The 13 lab rats on board - part of a brain and heart study - had to face the guillotine following the flight so researchers could see up-close the effects of so much time in weightlessness. The insects and other animals had a brighter, longer future: the student experimenters were going to get them back and many of the youngsters planned to keep them, almost like pets.
All of the scientific objectives were accomplished during the round-the-clock laboratory mission, and some of the work may be continued aboard the international space station, researchers said. The only problem of note was a pair of malfunctioning dehumidifiers, which temporarily raised temperatures inside the laboratory to the low 80s, 10 degrees higher than desired.
Some of Columbia's crew members didn't want their time in space to end.
"Do we really have to come back?" astronaut David Brown jokingly asked Mission Control before the ride home.
NASA's next shuttle flight, a space station construction mission, is scheduled for March. The next time Columbia flies will be in November, when it carries into orbit educator-astronaut Barbara Morgan, who was the backup for Challenger crew member Christa McAuliffe in 1986.
And how were they originally scheduled to be transported back to Earth?
The Green Hills of Earth
Let the sweet fresh breezes heal me
As they rove around the girth
Of our lovely mother planet
Of the cool, green hills of Earth.
We rot in the moulds of Venus,
We retch at her tainted breath.
Foul are her flooded jungles,
Crawling with unclean death.
[ --- the harsh bright soil of Luna ---
--- Saturn's rainbow rings ---
--- the frozen night of Titan --- ]
We've tried each spinning space mote
And reckoned its true worth:
Take us back again to the homes of men
On the cool, green hills of Earth.
The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
ALL HANDS! STAND BY! FREE FALLING!
And the lights below us fade.
Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps a race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet ---
We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on the friendly skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
The seven astronauts were explorers and would have understood, even though there was always a chance they wouldn't get their 'last landing' they did what they had to do. Others will take their place, the 'arching sky' will always be calling us, there's too much still unknown to give up now.
hm. Flamebait. whereas outright ridiculing and deriding somebody for daring to believe in something beyond The Great Almighty God Science and trying to take solitude in that belief is...Funny. really, will you please rationally explain what you so have against religion? it's not like there's a bunch of bible-thumping Fundies here claiming this was God's way of punishing the Sodomite americans and that we all need to convert now or die...it was just somebody asking for prayers, a request that you're perfectly free to ignore. i notice the post about not modding funny is getting knocked down as a troll...you people must have thought 9/11 was an absolute scream.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
This is excellent news for my short position on the market!
Hmm... So a few people died and the nation mourns. Sick... You are all SICK!
I never hear ANY sadness for the more than 20,000 civilians who have died as a result of US bombing in Afghanistan!! 20,000! And now you are all sad over a handful dead... You people never cease to amaze me.
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek
1. This is indeed a tragedy that this happened, there is no question about that.
2. However, I believe that Astronauts know the risk involved during manned space flights. A lot of people find it completely unacceptable when someone dies in these missions, but there is a big risk involved with going to space and returning to
Earth. These people voluntarily went to space as
explorers, and exploration is often a risky business. It is to be expected that once in a while something will go wrong. No deaths for 17 years is infinitely better than the troubles that explorers faced hundreds of years ago.
3. We can't suspend launches for two years like with the Challenger. Even if NASA plans on suspending the Shuttle and the ISS program, they'll need to use Shuttles to get people off of the thing.
4. The Space Shuttle program is aging.
It is probably high time that a new space vehicle is designed, one that takes advantage of newer technology. While this will not decrease the
risk of going into space very much (especially of going to Mars), this is probably as good a time as any to look at a new type of spacecraft.
5. Perhaps it IS time to privatize NASA. There seem to be lots of rich people willing to blow $20 million here and there for thrill rides into space. If technology makes it feasable to go to Mars and colonize it one day, I'm sure that there would be private parties interested.
6. I highly doubt that this was a terrorist attack. I don't think terroists have the means
to hit a spacecraft 200,000 feet up.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
For anyone interested in Texas or Louisiana geography when hearing about reports of debris, this MapQuest map may provide some helpful orientation. The towns I've heard mentioned so far are Nacogdoches (TX), Palestine (TX), and Shreveport (LA). The shuttle was heading southeast to land in Florida.
Almost all debris reports so far focus on Nacogdoches. Palestine and Shreveport stories seem to be more focused on hearing sound from the incident. Here's the best article on debris I found just now while searching Google news.
--LP
"...do Shuttles carry flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders..."
The shuttle, like most NASA spacecraft, is continuously monitored by ground stations. Crew conversations, control inputs, flight data, systems telemetry, everything is recorded in incredible detail. NASA has already started the process of reviewing these records for possible clues.
There is nothing like the so-called "black boxes" (they're actually bright orange) carried by commercial aircraft. For most any kind of failure, the ground telemetry is sufficient, and for the few cases where it is not, it is very unlikely that any kind of recorder could be recovered.
If an accident occurs during spaceflight, you have a practically infinite search area. Simply getting a spacecraft out to any given point stretches the limits of our current technology. The odds of finding the right point are literally astronomical.
During re-entry, the spacecraft is traveling at thousands of miles per hour, hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. Between re-entry stress and the impact force, simply building a recorder that could survive would be decidedly non-trivial. Even assuming you did build it, it would likely be very heavy (shielding). Increased weight means a hugely increased cost -- it costs approximately five thousand dollars per pound to launch something using the NASA shuttle. And the search area for the recorder would immense -- something falling from that height, at that speed, could land practically anywhere.
I'm not saying it isn't a good idea, but the technical challanges and engineering costs are huge, and the improvement over the ground telemetry systems would be marginal.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
What would have happened if exploration had been written off as "too risky" after that? I guess those of us here in the New World (at least, those of European descent) are lucky that our ancestors were greedy enough to continue onwards despite those risks.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
The ISS is routinely resupplied by the Progress series of cargo ships launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. These are basically automated, unmanned Soyuz vehicles designed specifically for the purpose of bringing fuel, oxygen, water, and other supplies to space stations. The astronauts aboard the ISS are in no immediate danger due to the possible delay of the next shuttle launch.
need yet another seven astronauts
What would have happened if exploration had been written off as "too risky" after that? I guess those of us here in the New World (at least, those of us of European descent) are lucky that our ancestors were greedy enough to continue onwards despite those risks.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
"High Flight"
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
A callous observation but true: Will this be the well deserved end to manned space flight?
Now manned space flight is really cool, but the space-station is nothing more than a multibilliondollar orbiting box where most of the time, effort, and money goes to insuring that those inside the box stay alive.
The space shuttle costs substantially more than conventional throwaway rockets to operate, and isn't really that much safer (experience suggests about a 1/50 chance of failure, which seems pretty close to the Feynman appendix if memory serves me).
What we learn from space these days comes from automated sattelites and automated space probes. OK, so on the last shuttle flight, we learned that ants behave really weirdly in zero gravity (Save the queen! Which one's the queen? I'm the queen. No, you're not! Freedom, horrible horrible freedom!), but couldn't you put an Uncle Miltie's with a web cam, toss it on a pegasus booster, and get the same result for a microscopic fraction of the cost?
It is tragic that seven lives were lost, but for years its been obvious that the space shuttle and space station weren't producing much useful science, or useful servicing (for most sattelites, its cheaper to build and fly a replacement than have a shuttle "service" them), or useful engineering.
If this represents the near-term (10-20 year) end of manned space flight, we should rejoice. With the billions of dollars wasted insuring that ugly bags of mostly water can survive the trip no longer being spent, perhaps we can go back to conducting real science in space, or spend that money better here on earth.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Now the terrorists are clever enough to blow up a space shuttle on the US territory. huh.
Please Americans. Don't be overwhelmed by the *thoughts* of fear. The fear is an imaginary creature that you American created in your minds. I know that this is a tragic accident, but the way American presses react to this tragedy --- creating another terrorphobia with means of this accident, which also cost valuable human lives, is disgusting. Are these truly the press media from one of the world's best democratic countries?
Americans live in a safe place. I don't know whether God blesses America, but I'm sure that God already blessed the American Continent. There is the goddess of the Pacfic on the left and the Atlantic on the right. Canada on the north and Mexico on the south. You've also got the most powerful military force in the world to protect your country. Terrorists threats do exist. However, it will be another absurd thing if Americans still worried about their security under these circumstances.
Just eliminate the fear and be the proud Americans before the 9/11. The worst enemy is the terror in your minds and I am afraid that the terror is being created by other American people. This accident is a tragedy. I will pray for the dead people. And I will also pray for the American people so that they can become the people when they were faced with the previous Challenger accident in the past.
Honestly, I've heard this told to me on more than one occasion. I, like some people, deal best with grief & shock by trying to laugh about it. It's never meant as truly mean spirited, and it never means that I don't care. It's just that that's how I deal with things.
I realize that this is offensive to many, which is why I don't post things like that here, and I would never tell a joke to someone directly affected by this. I do have tact. I just have a weird way of handling grief.
You're damn right to post as an AC. When things like this as significant to the world as space shuttles go down, people put a lot of emotional investment into it.
Though, I consider it a good thing that no media reports based on body count alone, I will concede you are right in the regard of under-reporting of events in Israel.
Bored with karma, be a fan/freak
Satanist!!
I just checked the weather radar over the United States and found some interesting results. First, there were three of rapidly-disappearing streaks over the San Joaquin Valley, near Beale AFB, and near Reno, NV, laying parallel to the shuttle's path. Shortly after that, there were two simultaneous streaks north and south of Tuscon, AZ. Shortly thereafter there are also a lot of smaller, very intense echos in the area around Holloman AFB and El Paso, TX. Then a persistent cloud that of the time of this posting is drifting from between Lufkin and Longview, TX toward Alexandria, LA.
If these streaks and point echoes are what I believe them to be, that is, parts of Columbia, she was in trouble before she made landfall in California or very shortly thereafter. The images we've been seeing on TV are several minutes after the first possible indications of trouble and show Columbia badly damaged.
May God bless all who are affected by this tragedy.
...manned spaceflights go in both directions, whereas unmanned flights usually only go in one direction. This would explain why Feynman was of by a factor 2x
You dumbass.
Linux was running on an embedded computer soley used for communication, not to control any of the systems on board. Such a toy would hardly cause the shuttle to explode into a fireball.
You are the worst kind of fucking troll. Normally, I don't even care about trolls, or the linux zealots on the other side, but now you are using NASA's disaster as feed for your trolling with absolutely no rationalized basis for your argument.
Dipshit.
I saw reprots that "terrorism is certainly not considered as a cause" in this tragedy. All these journalists can think of is terrorists trying to fire some sort of rocket at the Shuttle (which, of course, would have been impossible to achieve). What nonsens!
All you have to do is try to think as a terrorist:
what's the weak point of the Shuttle? The thermal protection: if only ONE tile falls off, the heat buildup would make the tiles around the breach fall off, effectively causing the area of the Shuttle above this point overheat and cause this kind of breakup.
how to make this happen? for example, just put a tiny stripe of C2 plastic explosive in the groove between two tiles. C2 doesn't explode easily, it needs rather high temperatures to explode (and no, it does NOT need atmosphere to ignite).
how to get it there: find a volunteer inside NASA.
The last point is, obviously, crucial. Difficult? Sure! Impossible? Not at all impossible.
Related to this, I always thought that having such a high number of small tiles in the thermal shield increases the failure chances way too much, since it's enough that ONE tile falls to cause this kind of tragedy. A fewer number of bigger tiles, while perhaps more expensive, would provide a dramatially higher security.
Sigged!
you'd like to do that - but then how would you be abkle to steal their oil? or bully them into obedience - do what we want, pass the DMCA laws we want, reveal to the irs which americans are hiding their money in your banks, or we'll take away your aid.
NasaTV will broadcast the official nasa press release & update at 1:00 EST. Watch it wouthout all the fluff on broadcast tv.
1. I would assume there is some type of "black box" that records shuttle data and voice comms, isn't there? That could help figuring out what happened if they get it.
2. Not to play monday morning quarterback, but couldn't NASA look at the Shuttle from the ground using high resolution cameras to inspect Shuttle damage? Didn't they inspect a shuttle like that once before?
3. Although I would assume a missing heat tile caused the destruction, and I don't feel comfortable hitting the conspiracy button, isn't there the possibility of sabotage from within? How many people have access to the Shuttles?
4. What happens to manned space flight now?
This is a very sad day for all, especially the astronauts and their families.
This is an interesting radar image showing the scale of the breakup that illustrates quite why wreckage has been found over an area of hundreds of miles.
Well, at 900 comments, probably nobody's going to see this, but if you do: this has the potential to destroy the space program. We live in a time when nobody considers space flight to be particularly important. The loss of the shuttle would be a perfect excuse to put NASA more on the back burner than it was before.
So talk to your friends, tell them why space flight is important, and even more importantly, tell your congressmen what you think. They are the ones that control the money going into the space program. If nobody lets them know that we want space flight to continue, we might lose it entirely.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
First of all, I'm an atheist so a higher power(s) doesn't figure into this for me. Personally, I think either a tile failure (potentially caused by the falling insulation at lift-off) or failure of some other system caused by the immense stresses of re-entry are the likely culprits.
That being said, there are potential repurcussions from this that could be quite dangerous...
Put yourselves into the shoes of someone for whom science is not a factor, someone whose life is ruled by their religion... let's pretend you're hard-line Islamic. In that frame of mind, the Americans and Israelis are almost pure evil on earth to you, right?
Now consider that the first Israeli is going up to space... lots of celebrations, hoopla, news reports on the TV from Israel, etc... and he's going up into space with 6 Americans. But something goes very wrong and the shuttle burns up over Texas spraying debris over a large area.
Now if you were the person I just described, Allah has punished the evil Americans and Israelis by "raining fire" over Bush's home state of Texas and, interestingly, the debris is centred on the town of Palestine.
Now it doesn't really matter to such a person that the shuttle ALWAYS comes in over Texas and therefore goes over the town of Palestine every time - to that person, it's clearly a sign from Allah.
The danger is that it presents a potential rallying point for people willing to believe, and that's the last thing needed in the Middle East right now.
Just something to consider...
that using the same shuttle over and over again is probably not a good idea. I can only hope NASA will make this case and push for more funding. Hell, I wouldnt mind if they made argument that terrorism was the cause so they COULD get more funding.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
enough said...
... there's simply no reason why we should continue using the ancient expensive dangerous shuttle technology, when there's been MUCH better stuff developed.
Check out the milnet page on VentureStar, which is apparently being funded by black-budget ops (speculation -- but something is happening, the Air Force doesn't warehouse dead NASA projects out of the goodness of its heart). Link here
Had to pull the page from the Google cache, as much of the X-33/VentureStar info has disappeared from the web. But there's still plenty of stuff from non-governmental sites.
One of the X-33 design goals was to reduce cost per pound of payload from $20,000 to $2000, but in my mind, the more efficient and reliable engines, lack of strap-on boosters, slower reentry, no ceramic "bricks" for heat protection make good enough reasons to move forward with such a replacement for the shuttle, even if it had zero cost advantage in lifting payload to orbit.
There's no good reason to continue using the obsolete and dangerous shuttle technology forever.
Here's what I've got to say.
First of all, stop this nonsense about terrorism. A direct attack can be easily ruled out. The shuttle was too high and too fast for any missile to have hit it. The weapons technology simply doesn't exist. Even if it did, we would have seen it on the tapes. Sabotage is an extremely unlikely possibility. The program was under extra tight security due to the presence of the Israeli astronaut (and it was tight to begin with). A homemade terrorist wouldn't stand a chance in hell of getting anywhere he could do anything, nor is it likely he could figure out what need to be done. A pro saboteur might stand a remote chance, if he didn't mind having himself and the people who sent him being terminated with extreme prejudice, which doesn't sound like any pro I've ever heard of.
Everything we know so far, and can infer, suggests there was a catastrophic systems failure. The cause of that failure is unknown. It could have been something as small as a very tiny damage or control failure causing the shuttle's body approach to shift, damaging the less-shielded parts with the extreme heat, pushing the shuttle into an uncontrolled tumble and the subsequent breakup.
What will happen now, is the investigation will begin. Every photo and scrap of video will collected and analyzed and pieced together. Every piece of debris will be collected with its location to find out where it came from. By the time they're done we'll probably be able to say exactly what the series of events was, right down to what part of the shuttle each of those streaks in the sky was. We may never know the exact root cause though.
Of course that won't stop the usual suspects from making unsubstantiated oblique insinuations, or the usual opportunists from claiming credit. Just like 9/11, people will use it if they can. I can say with little doubt that it won't affect GW's schedule a bit. We might even get to see him try to connect the Iraqis for pathetically transparent political reasons, just like 9/11. Without a doubt the media will spin everything into a tawdry, sentimental, over-commented affair.
I don't pity the astronauts (although I do pity their families). They knew the risks well, including the bureaucracy-created ones that spelled doom for the Challenger, and they took the chance anyway. They were doing what they wanted to do. And likely they would not want their deaths to stop others. Which is sad, because the ultimate victim of this may very well be the manned space program itself.
Whether it was a careless, avoidable mistake like the Challenger or something truly unavoidable like micrometeorite damage, it was inevitable that something like this would happen someday. NASA never recovered completely from Challenger - indeed, according to a pilot of the Columbia I spoke to once who quit the program after that disaster, NASA didn't even really learn and change from it. They've had a number of very public failures, not the least of which is the money pit that is the ISS. We just lost 25% of our shuttle fleet. The remaining 3 birds will likely be grounded for some time. Voices have been saying for years it's unnecessary to send people into space when machines can do the job as well and cheaper. They will probably get their way now.
At this point it there's a good chance human beings will stop going to space to work - although I still have hope someday we may go there to live.
Except when China puts their man in space and makes the usual vainglorious speeches, we might just be shamed right back up there.
Since sputnik, competition has fueled the manned space program. Perhaps that will keep it alive now.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Obvious flamebait, but it has to be said: The server was used to test mobile IP as stated in the article! I presume you want NASA to use wintendo to run the shuttles and operations; if they did, Cape Kennedy would be a huge crater by now....
"The only clear view is from atop the mountain of our dead selves." - Peter Carroll
First and foremost, my prayers and heart go out to the families of those lost. I pray they had it a little better than the Challenger 7.
.horrible.
Second, this is so ironic and tragic. I was in DC this last week for some training, and as we were waiting to go to the airport to come home (Dallas) yesterday we spent a few hours at the Air and Space Museum. My first time there. The poor guy I was travelling with had to put up with at least 2 hours of me ranting and raving about the pathetic status of our manned space program and how little we've progressed in the last ~40 years in relation to the technology and knowledge we do actually have.
Then to wake up this morning to this. .
I can only hope that NASA handles this practically. Learn from what happened, make appropriate adjustments, and continue on with the program. For us to scale back the manned program, or keep it grounded for over-long would be an insult to the lost lives of these 7 individuals. They knew the risk, as did NASA going in. The determination was made by each of them individually that the risk to themselves was of a lower priority than the mission at hand.
Rest in peace my friends. We thank you for your effort and sacrifice.
G
This is a terrible disaster. Getting out of bed and switching on the CBC (radio) I couldn't believe my ears. Were the explorers themselves OK? Trail of debris? Oh no...
As a young engineer, I can't help but think of the Challenger disaster. During my engineering education, the disaster was used for illustrative purposes in a number of ways -- it demonstrated pure engineering failure (design failure) certainly, but also demonstrated compromises made in engineering because of political/business pressure, a compromise that can not be tolerated when human safety is at stake. And we learned a lot from it.
Today's event is truly a disaster. But we must make the most of it. We have to thoroughly investigate, to complete satisfaction, until we learn what caused the accident/failure. Then we fix the problem to the best of our abilities and make sure the same mistake isn't repeated.
And then, most importantly, we try again. We must continue with scientific exploration of space. The benefits to humanity are many: development of new technologies; new solutions to problems here on earth; and most importantly... exploration and discovery.
And that's why, in my eyes, the explorers on Columbia deserve our utmost respect and praise. They risked their lives exploring beyond earth for humanity's benefit. It would truly be an insult to these fine people to cut back on space exploration because of this accident.
Accidents like this one should not make us halt exploration. They should renew our motivation to improve our designs, and then continue upon the original goals with improved technology!
So does this mean that the ants in space experiment posted a couple days ago on /. is gone?
"We've grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we've only just begun, I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the faint-hearted. It belongs to the brave." Ronald Reagan, Jan. 28, 1986
this sig deleted by another sig
Fox has an amateur video of the Shuttle over CA. Flying sideways with big chunks of the wings missing.
NASA was also worried about a landing tire pressure. Heat build up would quickly cook the tires.
It is of course to early to say what happened. But consider this;
Bush appointed an ACCOUNTANT as NASA administrator, not a space scientist. It is a totally bizarre thing to do. When the head of an agency is primarily concerned with counting beans and not the mission of the organization, prioities get out of whack. That might not be so bad if you are talking about the Agriculture Department, but in this case it could have had some sort of impact.
Sending a crew of people into space requires a certain amount of reasources. If you have a bean counter in charge, who knows what kind of corners may have been cut in the name of saving some money.
Again, its too early to say if this played ANY role, but for me it would be a line of inquiry.
-
Chatmag has a live chat room for news, including the shuttle disaster at;
http://www.chatmag.com/chat/newschat.html
Except that this mission was actually a "real" mission because it didn't go to the space station... they were performing experiments... as the space shuttle was originally designed to do. Yes, some of the experiments were not very practical (the ants) but those were by high school kids. Quite an experience for those kids I would say. I would have loved to have that opportunity when I was that age.
This mission, even though it ended badly, did have great success. They got the first decent photo of "elves" (electrical phenomena that sometimes occur in the atmosphere above lightning storms) and I'm sure there were many other successful experiments that took place... experiments that can only take place in space and can only be performed by humans.
This is a tragedy yes. But there is a bright side. And the space program should not be shut down because of it. If anything this should be an inidicator that it's time to move on to a new fleet of shuttles.
The long term solution (circa five years)would be to completely replace the STS with a new, cheap and safe reusable launch system.
Expect the cancellation of "Prometheus" shortly, the billion will be needed to replace the Columbia instead.
Expect massive criticism and the selection of a NASA scapegoat by US congress, some of your congresscritters will want to destroy the entire space effort.
Expect speeches by Bush Jr and President Cheney about the necessity to beat the Red Chinese and the former Soviets from being the only ones with a space presence.
Space is too important to give up because of an old and slowly decaying STS. Replacements can be cheap and fast. If any of you have read "Encounter with Tiber" by Buzz Aldrin and Steven Barnes you know what Im talking about.
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night.
On ebay, there are three mission programs currently going for ~$60 with 4 days left. There is one STS-107 mission patch which has a current bid of over $200 with days left.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
I am tired of hearing the news reporters saying that everybody took the shuttle launch and landing for granted. I for one watched in awe everytime they showed a launch or landing. In that same thread I was cut to the heart when I heard the news this morning. I suppose some took it for granted, but it was mainly the media that did. People do not understand the amazing thing that is accomplished everytime we shoot something into space because it is not reported like that. Heres hoping they find whats wrong and fix the problems so that we can continue to achieve these great accomplishments and maybe we weill begin to see them as such.
The planned schedule is here:
http://www.qsl.net/w2vtm/shuttle.html
It shows 5 more flights planned for this year (2003), and 7 shuttle flights in 2004. Do you guys think this will be delayed or canceled because of this?
After Challenger blew up in 1986, it was over 2 years before another space shuttle was flown.
How about Russian flights? How do you think this will change their schedule (also shown at that link -- 3 unmanned Progress and 2 manned Soyuz flights are shown).
You can find local coverage of one of the debris fields from the Lufkin Daily News (this is the biggest newspaper in the area). There is also a page of photos.
This is a Map of Nacogdoches, Texas (depicted by large red star southeast of Dallas):
i ty=Nacogdoches&state=TX&csz=Nacogdoches,+TX&slt=31 .603310&sln=-94.655212&zip=&country=us&BFKey=&BFCa t=&BFClient=&cs=7&name=&desc=&poititle=&poi=&uz=75 961&ds=n&mag=2&off=w
http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?Pyt=Tmap&addr=&c
The shuttle was said to have crossed over California, Southern Nevada, New Mexico, Dallas,Tx before crashing.
Shown on a Channel 5 in Texas. It shows an earlier video with the space shuttle going across the screen. A bright dot comes off of the shuttle. Then another. Then a second later, the vapor trail starts.
When a plane the size of a boeing or something similiar crashes you're likely to hear about it in a small column or newsitem. Even with dozens of casualties...
Now the space shuttle crashed in an accident killing 7 astronauts. These people knew the risks when they started this journey which is part of their profession.
Why does the first newsitem hardly get any attention (last time most news stations only had periodic updates) while live coverage of the shuttle is currently going on full time ?
I think some people should check their priorities.
That's not working in Russian's space program.
The last dead occured in 1971, 3 people died during landing.
FUNNY? WHAT the HECK do you /. people think of yourself?? Show some respect!!!
God bless the friends and family of the astronauts.
Interesting facts aside, this is a terrible tragedy. After an appropriate period of introspection and mourning, I hope that our government has the foresight to use this as the impetus to rethink the space program from the ground up, and reinvest in the types of endeavors that made the U.S. recognized leaders in the advancement of science and human exploration in the 1960s. It is time for NASA to be completely redesigned, and a new human space initiative begun with the bold, risk-taking nature that Americans have always been known for.
Unfortunately, our current governemnt is led by what is most likely the most short-sighted administration of the past 100 years. The chances of this President using this tragedy constructively as a catalyst for postive change are about the same as one of the Shuttle astronauts phoning in from a payphone in East Texas.
I'm a lawyer with excellent karma. Something's gotta be wrong.
Common sense sense to implies that it is - after all, a few innocent people are dead in their prime. Let us look at the big picture though.
Space travel is a tricky business, for it involves physical extremes thoroughly hostile to human life. Accidents are bound to happen, every so often. Is this worth the while? I think so. Space travel is an exploration undertaking that will dwarf anything we humans have accomplished before in the exploration endeavors. The price in human life is therefore likely to be large.
As far as the deceased astronauts are concerned, I envy them. What a magnificent way to go! Just think about it: those guys were living what is very likely the most exciting exploratory activity nowadays. More likely than not, they loved what they were doing.
It is of course regrettable that the effort cost them their lives. But I can't think of a better way to go than doing something you really care for, you really enjoy. I am sure that they and their families were aware of the risks involved, and accepted them.
The bottom line is, I hope that this will not put the brakes on space traveling again. We must accept that deaths are going to happen, and just keep going. If we take no chances we won't get anywhere.
Like: "Legacy" being the industrial term for "working"?
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
There is a Soyuz docked at the station at all times. The reason there are only 3 permanent crew of the station is because only 3 persons can safely return in a Soyuz. The press conference is about to begin.
Columbia is I believe the only shuttle that cannot dock with the station. (was, I suppose I ought to say.)
Project Orion died in '64. Nuclear power in general was called into question. But why would a little that stop the government from pursuing such a promising technology as nuclear propulsion? If I were them, I'd pursue it in secret in somewhere like Area 51.
Ever heard of the Aurora?
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I don't mean to offend, but you obviously don't know what you are talking about.
The space shuttle is an amazing technology, but all the shuttles are going to fly until they can't.
Of course. Why would they stop using them if they were still good? The orbiters were designed to be able to launched at least 100 times. The Columbia, while over twenty years old, was still well within its operational lifetime. There are commercial jetliners twice as old as Columbia still in active service today.
Furthermore, it isn't like this was some beat-up automobile that someone was still trying to coax a few more miles out of. Each orbiter is subject to a complete inspection after every launch. Systems which can no longer do their job are upgraded or replaced. NASA's shuttle fleet is probably the best maintained equipment in human history.
"...why does it have to re-enter so fast..."
Because it is in orbit. An orbit is achieved by traveling fast enough that your rate of fall toward the center of gravity (Earth, in this case) is canceled out. I believe the orbiter travels at a relative ground speed of something like 17,000 miles per hour.
In order to decelerate from that great velocity, they use the atmospheric breaking. Just as the breaks in your car use friction to slow the car, the orbiter uses atmospheric friction to slow the orbiter.
It is an inherently dangerous situation (second only to launch in risk), but an unavoidable one.
How?
It's a reasonable question. There is a good reason every spacecraft ever flown by man has used an unpowered re-entry: Fuel. You would need a lot of fuel to control that kind of velocity. That means added weight, and weight is everything when it comes to launching a vehicle from a gravity well. Every pound of weight on the space shuttle costs approximately five thousand dollars to launch.
A powered landing would not only be impractically expensive, it would likely be technologically impossible. It makes no sense.
Again: How? Velocities of thousands of miles per hour. Altitudes of hundreds of thousands of miles. Temperatures of hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit. It isn't like they can just jump out. To survive, you would basically need to build another spacecraft. See above about weight.
The heat shield is one of the weaker points in the design of most spacecraft. Keep in mind that building a realistic heat shield pushes our materials technology to the edge. While you might think that building a single surface with no seams would be better, but that is not so. It would in fact be considerably harder and more expensive to build. It would also be much harder to maintain. The shuttle's tiles can be easily replaced when they inevitably degrade. Not so with a single surface.
On one hand, you're suggesting infeasible or impossible improvements. Now you suggest they subject it to unnecessary risk? Why?
The space shuttle is already one of the most heavily monitored devices ever built by man. Huge amounts of data are constantly transmitted, recorded, and analyized by computers and people, both onboard the spacecraft and on the ground. What do you suggest they do differently?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Now the US may also have reason to want to mothball ISS...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Hey, where's your pioneer spirit?!
Seriously, while any loss of life is tragic, space is a risky place. Everyone who works in the business knows that, and the astronauts this time knew the risks they were taking.
So far we've been very lucky, with little loss of life. This has probably caused us to be blasé about the risk, and to forget about the danger. One effect of this disaster will be to concentrate people's attention on the risks.
This may not be such a bad thing, though. In the developed world, we don't like risk; we tend to assume that we deserve good luck and easy lives, and our first reaction to anything else is often to look for someone to sue. (Case in point: for forty years both east and west lived with their feared and hated enemies training nuclear weapons upon them, and we all lived with it. These days we can't even stand the simple possibility that a tiny enemy might have any such weapons.) Whether we like it or not, life is risky; space exploration is simply the sharp end of this.
Space exploration is vitally important, if for no other reason than (at the risk of getting all Gene Roddenberry) it's the last frontier; the last place where people go into the unknown, where people go in order to take risks. The day the human race decides to stay in its comfortable homes and not reach further is the day it starts to decline.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of- wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never Lark, or even Eagle flew -
And while with silent lifting mind, I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
- John Gillespie Magee, Jr, 1922-1944
You are an amerikan asshole there is war someware what do amerika do thay send some troops so thay can test there new wepons. [ I think usa need some emp's to realise there not in controll of the rest of the world ( i dont say that there is annything better but fore the grace of [ whoewer you serve ] stop kill everyone you se outside your contry [ USA S FREEDOM = THE RIGT TO WATH TV ]
Im located in Fort Worth and heard the boom (quite clearly) shortly after 8 am, and saw the trail across the sky. How tragic to lose these people who are braver than most anyone else...
"Self-destruction might be the answer" --Tyler Durden
Just wondering but some of these pictures of 'debris' appear to me to be fake.
Surely, there would be larger craters (of what didn't burn up). Anyone got any thoughts or theories?
NOAA radar image
My memory is a bit sketchy, but haven't people been saying for years that the shuttles in the shuttle program were well past their intended life cycle? Don't we remember hearing about NASA engineers that had to get shuttle parts off of eBay and other unorthodox methods, because the parts were so old and discontinued? Weren't these insanely complex machines built by the lowest bidder?
I was shocked in '86 when we lost the Challenger. But to even feign shock at today's events is to pretend that those shuttles were brand spanking new, that NASA is continously underfunded and overmandated, etc... I bet they're going to blame the engineers, NASA itself, or some other baloney, instead of placing the blame sqaurely on the shoulders of the congressmen who, year after year, denied additional R&D funding and blocked any attempts to replace the aging fleet b/c of the business interests of some of his "constituents"Sad? Yes. Tragic, actually. Unexpected? We saw this coming years away.
Governments are not necessary.
That's if they managed to do something to the shuttle it self.
Otherwise there's only one known power in the world with even the possibility of shoting a missle at an object that high. The states. Are you going to say that they shot it down themselves now?
This is why wearing space suits was made compulsory during landing (also for NASA, who were briefed on this). At least one of the flight crew would wer the suit in case of problems.
See my journal, I write things there
Humor has always been, and always will be, an essential part of coping with tragedy and horror. Look at all the jokes about death. It's also a way of approaching social taboos (death, sex, and religion cover a huge swath of all jokes). While politeness demands that we always shy away from the hard questions and unpleasant insights, humor helps us keep a sense of perspective.
I agree wholeheartedly that I do not want to hear tasteless humor which cheapens the difficulties NASA faces, the courage of astronauts, or the tragedy of these deaths or any loss of human life. But I also would not wish for laughter to be left out of our society's coming to terms with these things.
Not all jokes are tasteless jokes.
That means you should unfold your hands and give blood, give donation money to the families of the victims, and call your Congressmen and Senators and tell them to not terminate space exploration -- right now!
Sure, people, take any advice from someone who would make a post like this.
Such a lovely person...
I just had a thought that runs counter to pretty much everything I've read on here today. As horrible as it might be to say, this catastrophe might be actually end up being a good thing for the future of the space program. The general populus has forgotten about the space program for years now. This disaster puts them back in the news, along with the portrayal of astronauts as the brave adventurous scientists that seek to bring new advances to the people of their country and of the world. The folks who lost their lives today will be shown as heroes to Joe Sixpack once again, and might serve to rekindle a sense of adventure and pride in them. Also, it shows that this program has been forced to use old technology and scrape by on minimal budgets for far too long; and that with proper funding, this tragedy could have been avoided. Perhaps this will serve as a wake up call to Congress that we need to properly support this vital piece of the scientific advances that this country and this world needs. I just don't see us abandoning manned space flight, and more funding is the only viable alternative.
Fly
Redesign of an complex existing system like
the shuttle would probably be impossible.
BUT, I have to wonder if, given the
(possible)survival of the crew compartment
in both challenger and oolumbia might
suggest incorporation some better emergency
system in either the remaining fleet of
shuttles or on the next generation of
reusable vehicles. Examples of designs
meant for high mach egress are the B-58
hustler and the XB-70 individual clamshell
pods, fully contained crew compartment
ejection systems existed on the F-111
and others. Also there were some
wild ejection systems drawn for the
DynaSoar era of space militarization
systems of the 60's that even included
orbital reentry of a pilot
http://www.astronautix.com/craftfam/rescue.htm
Of course it is easy to sit and
armchair this event, but I wonder
if they are going to make some changes.
Perhaps, like all editors, they give preference to people that know how to spell and aren't annoying them with constant worthless submissions.
Get over yourself. People died on a scientific mission and all you can think about are Slashdot conspiracies.
Laws are for people with no friends.
it's not like there's a bunch of bible-thumping Fundies here claiming this was God's way of punishing the Sodomite americans and that we all need to convert now or die
Interesting. So you have no problem with ridiculing other people's beliefs, but you expect your own to be held sacrosanct. Does the word "hypocritical" mean anything to you?
This might be a little callous, but I think it's at least part of why this is such a bigger disaster - there's a lot more planes, trains and cars moving around every day, and they're not nearly so engineered as a Shuttle...and they still actually have a lower accident rate than the Shuttle, which is 2 for 107. I'd personally expect a lot better performance from something that's that overbuilt; it's like a fully loaded, completely redundant IBM/SUN/SGI/&c. server spontanously failing 1 in 50 instances.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
At least it wouldn't have been a total loss if there was a boy band singer on board.
On one of the video tapes (shown on FOX, I believe), it showed the shuttle flying normally, nose pointed to the bottom of the TV screen. The camera zooms out, and you can see the dot of the shuttle and then the smoke trail starts. This seems to be the actual moment of the start of the disaster. The trail comes out towards the side of the screen, although the shuttle appeared to be oriented in a different direction. This (to me) implies that the shuttle was travelling sideways, which we all know is not what it was designed to do. I imagine that if that really is what occurred, they had no chance.
President Bush: As a taxpayer and a voter, I strongly urge the U.S should continue the Space Program, including the Shuttle program. Otherwise, we're just a bunch of sad primates without the nerve to put our feet in the water.
My condolences to the families and friends of the Shuttle Columbia's crew.
"Just because you're a genius doesn't make you a smart guy!" -- Narrator, Powerpuff Girls
It's a way of signalling one's humility and mortality in the face of something really big and scary, something you seem not to have a clue about.
blog
These people didn't die because the government didn't buy them a new ship. Freak accidents happen, especially when you are trying to do the rather extreme act of sending people into space. Current estimates are that the odds of any particular manned space flight ending in disaster is 1 in 100. Hell, unmanned ones fail four times as often.
The space shuttle is an old system, but this also means that it's very well tested and understood. It's probably safer than anything new would have been because they've got a hell of a lot of practice with them. Now, if they come back and reveal that the accident was caused because the shuttle was too old, then that's one thing. But let's not go attacking the government until there's a reasonable justification for it.
I'm confident that nobody at NASA would allow that shuttle to go up if they weren't completely confident that it would come back in one piece. Generally speaking they are overly cautious most of the time.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
For Giving Their Lives.
I live in Nacogdoches, Texas, which is near where some of the debris fell. At around 8 this morning, I heard a low rumble, almost like an earthquake or something. Then the house starting shaking off and on for about 20-30 seconds. My first thought was to check the major appliances in the house (heat pump, hot water heater, etc.) simply because we don't get earthquakes in this neck of the woods. My wife also got up and said the house was shaking and it woke her up (and it is no small feat to wake her up early on a Saturday morning).
I ruled out any problems with the house and went online hoping maybe to find seismic information or news about an explosion or something. Within a few minutes, I saw the alert on CNN.com suggesting they'd lost contact with Columbia. I instantly knew that's what the rumbling was and I started to fear the worst.
It's not terribly uncommon to hear sonic booms when the shuttle goes over (we seem to be in the path when the shuttles land at Cape Canaveral) but it also isn't uncommon to have low flying B-52s and B-2s. Needless to say, this is a horrible tragedy. Personally though, it's one thing to see it on TV. It's quite another to have it take place in your back yard.
It'll be extremely interesting to see if the things that happened during take-off with the insulation/heat tiles is the result of someone pushing for launch, and being sloppy about safety.
Isnt't the reason why the Challenger blew up that some bolts couldn't take the freezing and reheating or something like that? One engineer told, but no one would listen...
CBS is reporting multiple sources in NASA are looking at a possible left wing failure. This is the same wing which was possibly damaged by the foam falling off the fuel tank on launch. CBS was earlier reporting that last communication from the shuttle was relating to a inordinate tire pressure change also (not specific on which wing), could explain heating up of the left wing because of a heat shield failure, leading to heating up of the tire, increase tire pressure, catastrophic wing failure, shuttle gets out of alignment on re-entry, and it tears apart.
Again, this is only prelim reporting but would make sense in relation to visual reports of spiraling etc. Wing failure, goes into a spin, breaks up.
---
Aliens Make First Contact With Mankind
Posted by CmdrTaco on Friday Aug 13, @4:22PM
In an amazing turn of events for the hmuan race, a spacecraft landed in the middle of Iowa just over an hour ago. The three intelligent orbs of light aboard the ship have already given the world knowledge of interstellar travel, an understanding of advanced nanotechnology, and peace in the Middle East. They have promised that none shall go hungry again, that an age of plenty will be had by all, and that our only limitations in the future will be our imaginations.
FP (Score: 0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 13, @4:23PM (#32174720)
I wonder if they've ever been inside a black hole.
If the crew of the ISS has to come down in the Soyuz, where would they land? In the US or in Russia?
It depends. In an non-emergency, the Soyuz capsule will probably land in the usual recovery sites in Russia, since they are the best equipped to handle the recovery.
If it has to come down without waiting for a re-entry window, it can come down practically anywhere; it's designed to land on solid ground, but can also handle (though apparently not too well) water landings.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
What about simple sabotage? Everyone is noting how complex a Space Shuttle is. Cut a line here or there. Change the adhesive used to attach the tiles.
One again, as I said highly unlikely to impossible. I believe it was a mechanical failure of some sort.
But flying 2 jumbo jets into the Twin Towers, destroying the towers and killing 1000s of people was unlikely too. So I retain some skeptism of "accidents" especially on such a large target.
Brian Ellenberger
This morning when I heard the news, I was just getting started on the chapter "We're on fire!" of the book Flight, My life in mission control by Chris Kraft. This book provides a very interesting alternative viewpoint to the manned spaced program than the usual journalistic lack of information or astronauts famed biographies.
Here we get plenty of gritty details, in particular all the technical problems that they had during flights, and there were plenty. The well publicised Apolo 13 was only one of them, as virtually every mission was riddled with loss of control, loss of comunication, targetting error, or even worse, like rocket misfire on the pad with astronauts on top ! Just to show how close they were many times from major failure. Today was just one step over the limit.
A very recommended read for all you engineering types. And the others.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Even here in Portugal, where I live, a small country we were affected by what happened. We had some scientific projects regarding living in space that could result in good information for future space projects (like man in mars).
R.I.P.
var sig = function() { sig(); }
Many more than seven brave people die every day and I don't hear you slapping everybody who makes comments about them.
What about the people who spend their entire life doing what they've been told to do - go to school, get a job, get married, have kids - then find that one day they've been downsized because the CEO wants a new condo in France, their spouse tells them they want a divorce and they can't get a new job because they're obsolete, overskilled and no longer economically viable, so they kill themselves? What do you say about them? These people are probably just as valuable as these astronauts and yet I don't hear anybody mourning them.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
I can't believe people like you are so ignorant about something like this.
First off, taking this opportunity to say that BSD sucks? honestly...do you have nothing better to be doing?
Fuel cells....the shuttles have been using fuel cells since the very begining of the STS (Shuttle Transportation System) program. They are perfectly safe, and there has never been (including today) a problem with them on the shuttle.
and thank god that there was an Israeli on board. This is a great step foreward for the American Govn't, NASA, and the Jewish people all over the world.
It's people like you who make people as a whole seem stupid
No, I am not a praying type myself.
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
At 9:00am Eastern. Tracking and communications lost contact with the Orbitor Columbia and was viewed to break up over the east side of texas. They were flying at over 200,000 feet and 12,500mph at the time. Wether it hit something, broke up, or had an internal explosion is unknown. 7 Astronauts died, unofficially announced but the American Flag at KSC is at half mast. There was no way that they could have made an emergency escape because of how fast it hit the fan. Comlumbia was the strongest built of the fleet, if another is as strong it would be Discovery. This was the 107th Shuttle flight. The Space Shuttle has the best track record in the world; but how many in congress are going to listen to that. We still have three able launchers and a full inspection underway. But Congress continues to choke Nasa of money, maybe now after the third disaster they'll do it. Nasa hasn't released much. All I know is this just shot my Popular Science article right in the foot. I know it's a selfish statement, but it's the truth. But it is odd that this happened during one of the safest legs of a flight. We still have 3 Astronauts on the ISS, but they are in no danger; They'll most likely stay an extra few months while Nasa and Congress bitch at each other. I just hope this doesn't stop NASA, or else our development is screwed and the Astronauts will have died in vain. Mike ASA Mission Specialist, Pilot This mission was not just a routine trip to the ISS. This was the first scientific research mission in a very long time. This also included the first Israeli astronaut. For the first time since the Challenger mission, a the teacher in space program was reinstated and the kindergarten teacher who was the backup for Challenger finally got her chance to go. Also, there is a program organized to allow children all over the country to send their expiraments into space and communicate work with the astronauts. Note, Security was very high around columbia and the crew to insure safety from sabotage. The Columbia was a 22-year old craft--NASA's oldest shuttle--and this was evidently supposed to be its last mission. As someone just pointed out on another mailing list, that seems old indeed when you consider that few people drive 22-year-old cars. This was the 113th flight in the program's 22 years and was this craft's 28th flight. On launch day, a piece of insulating foam on the external fuel tank came off during liftoff and was believed to have struck the left wing of the shuttle. Leroy Cain, the lead flight director in Mission Control, had assured reporters Friday that engineers had concluded that any damage to the wing was considered minor and posed no safety hazard. Shuttle commander Rick D. Husband, Pilot William C. McCool, Payload Commander Michael P. Anderson, Mission Specialists David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla and Laurel Clark and Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, were on board. http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/sts-1 07/mission-sts-107.html
Colin
ASA Pilot, Mission Specialist
As well as being a long time aviation buff, I'm also a racing fan. One thing that I know for a certainty is that no pilot, driver, or rider ever wants to stop in spite of tragedies or the loss of freinds and peers.
Same with engineers. Something doesn't work right, then get it right the next time!
That said, the people that put out the most effort in this kind of endeavour are the ones that should decided whether or not there is to be a cessation of exploration! Taking the time to ponder the reasons for the failure is one thing, and any good engineer would do so. But an outright halt to the space program isn't going to happen.
Good!
As many of you have posted, the shuttle was flying at 12,000 mph and at an altitued of 200,000 ft. Unfortunately, there is no way they could survive at that altitude even if there was an escape hatch. According to some friends of mine that work at NASA, there is no "escape hatch" on the shuttle. Everything that goes on the shuttle must meet strict guidelines before it is allowed to go into it. An escape system could not be put onboard because it is just too heavy. They (NASA) has not been able to get on onboard since the early rockets which would actually propell the astronaut through the rocket. Even if they had an escape hatch, it would only be for the front two seats and could not accomidate all seven aboard.
May God be with them in their families in this tragic time.
hey stay away from the wreckage its toxic. BS they just want to keep all of the cool souvenirs for themselves.
and i hate to say it but. maybe they will commission a new fleet of space vehicles. the SP was old and should have been retired 10 years ago,
If the crew compartment can survive until the ground - why not have an emergency system that deploy's streamers for slowing down the compartment until a parachute can be deployed...
This is a lack of elegance in design...
Rest in Peace...
DFW's outstanding local coverage of the tragedy (the anchor is a pilot and really knows his shiznit about aviation tech) pointed out what must have been a huge piece breaking off before the contrail begins. I immediately said "bay door". He followed with that a moment later.
It's obviously way early, but it's possible that the shuttle bay door was not secure, the ram pressure of reentry levered it open, the shuttle tumbled due to new aerodynamic forces, and the rest is, sadly, history.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
If your worst enemy accidentally tripped and bonked his head you'd celebrate, too. It doesn't mean that you tripped him. Especially when he's 200,000 feet straight up and you can't reach that high.
Certainly if my worst enemy tripped over I'd have cause to celebrate. However if seven people died, who were helping push the boundaries and better human civilisation, then I would call anyone celebrating their deaths sick in the head.
As previously noted, this tragedy comes far too close on the heels of the anniversaries of the Challenger explosion and Apollo 1 fire.
However, the moment I read the post I thought - "It's a hoax - I've read this before." I was thinking of the opening scene of Stephen Baxter's novel Titan, in which the space shuttle has an accident on re-entry and begins to break up, killing most of the crew (some egress and survive, since the accident happens lower in the atmosphere, i.e. at a slower speed).
Baxter described the futility of trying to keep a 30 year old design aloft. Let's hope the rest of the novel isn't as prescient (the mothballing of NASA, a US slide into fundamentalism, sole military access to space, and war with China).
I grew up in Nacogdoches, TX. I had friends in many of the surrounding towns. I went to college for a while in the DFW area. (BTW, the CNN story calling Palestine "outside of DFW" is true but implies a greater degree of proximity than is the case, they're several hundred miles apart with DFW being closer to Oklahoma and Palestine being closer to Louisiana, given the rate at which the Shuttle was traveling I guess that's not a suprise).
Given the security surrounding shuttle launches, I'd be very suprised to learn anything about this being a terrorist act. As others have pointed out already, it is a tragedy but an event not outside the realm of possibility given the complexity of the spacecraft and the hostile operating conditions of re-entry. I mourn for those seven brave souls, and hope that our country in specific and humanity in general does not pause from the great leap forward into space because of their loss.
I think judging from the aftermath of the Challenger explosion, we can see the worst case. I hope that perhaps this time we see the best case: development of cheaper, more efficient, and safer-by-virtue-of-less-complexity single stage to orbit (SSTO) vehicles. I think that for far too long our space program has been tied to the Shuttle, perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the methods we use for people and materials to let slip the bonds of gravity.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
do you really think the US would take the risk of letting US astronauts use the Soyuz life boat? Doubtfull.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I haven't got mod points, but I hope somebody else has so more people see this.
See my journal, I write things there
This is a pic that looks like this tank that fell on the Nacogdoches County airport. Forgive the bad quality. It was taken from a home video that was shown on the local news here. I live just a few miles from it. Scary.
The tank.
From ???@??? Fri Jan 01 00:00:00 1999a d.com!news-xfer.newsread.com![classified]!newsread .com!news.good.net!enews.sgi.com!newsfeed.mathwork s.com!wn13feed!worldnet.att.net!207.217.77.102!new sfeed2.earthlink.net!newsfeed1.earthlink.net!newsf eed.earthlink.net!newsfeed.jpl.nasa.gov!zagami.jpl .nasa.gov!baalke
From: baalke@zagami.jpl.nasa.gov (Ron Baalke)
Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle,sci.space.station
Subject: NASA finalizes Contract With United Space Alliance
Date: 1 Feb 2003 00:36:35 GMT
Organization: Jet Propulsion Lab
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Distribution: world
Message-ID:
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James Hartsfield
Johnson Space Center, Houston Jan. 31, 2003
(Phone: 281/483-5111)
Allard Beutel
Headquarters, Washington
(Phone: 202/358-0951)
RELEASE: C03-001
NASA FINALIZES CONTRACT WITH UNITED SPACE ALLIANCE
NASA has settled negotiations that increase the value of
a two-year extension of the Space Flight Operations Contract
(SFOC) held by United Space Alliance, LLC, in Houston, by
$59.91 million.
NASA's exercising of the two-year SFOC extension, which
supports the Space Shuttle Program, was previously announced
in August 2002 with negotiations continuing. This final
agreement on price, terms, conditions and scope of work for
the contract, through Sept. 30, 2004, brings the total value
of the two-year contract extension to $2.90 billion.
The SFOC is NASA's prime contract for support of the Space
Shuttle and provides operations services for the
International Space Station. The effort under this contract
entails the provision of space flight operations including
all work necessary and appropriate to support scheduled space
flight missions through the two-year period. This is a cost
reimbursement contract with award fee, incentive fee and
performance fees.
The principal places of performance of work under this
contract are United Space Alliance facilities in Houston,
Huntsville, Ala., the Kennedy Space Center, Fla.; and major
subcontractor facilities in Huntington Beach, Calif.,
Houston, and Cape Canaveral, Fla.
-end-
I don't think I can say anything that hasnt been posted already. I just want to express my deepest condolences to the crew, their families, and to the American people. Being a canadian engineering student, I have always dreamed of working for NASA in the USA, a lifelong dream, that I one day hope to accomplish.. although working for the Canadian Space Agency would also suffice. This is a very sad day on so many levels. On the level of the loss of life, as well as on the engineering side... as the Challenger explosion in 1986 set back the American space program... I can only hope that NASA presses on, and that congress doesn't stifle funding even more. Also a sad day to the American people, as well as here in Canada... astronauts were my childhood heros, and still are. Godspeed STS-107 crew... Godspeed.
"If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."
- Gus Grissom, responding to a reporter, at a press conference for the first manned Apollo mission.
Agreed. Hell for losers.
Laws are for people with no friends.
It has been a while since I have pulled out my copy of the album Signals (Rush, 1982) - but the very last song on that album is going to be on my request list for the local DJs this week - since it is about the awe that they felt surrounding the first flight of Columbia - the very same awe that I felt back then.
The song is (c) 1982, Core Music Publishing:
- - - - -
Countdown
Lit up with anticipation
We arrive at the launching site
The sky is still dark, nearing dawn
On the Florida coastline
Circling choppers slash the night
With roving searchlight beams
This magic day when super-science
Mingles with the bright stuff of dreams
Floodlit in the hazy distance
The star of this unearthly show
Venting vapours, like the breath
Of a sleeping white dragon
Crackling speakers, voices tense
Resume the final count
All systems check, T minus nine
As the sun and the drama start to mount
The air is charged
A humid, motionless mass
The crowds and the cameras,
The cars full of spectators pass
Excitement so thick you could cut it with a knife
Technology...high, on the leading edge of life
The earth beneath us starts to tremble
With the spreading of a low black cloud
A thunderous roar shakes the air
Like the whole world exploding
Scorching blast of golden fire
As it slowly leaves the ground
Tears away with a mighty force
The air is shattered by the awesome sound
Like a pillar of cloud
The smoke lingers high in the air
In fascination
With the eyes of the world
We stare...
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
There is an article in that issue about Shuttle Orbiter re-entry that is very good.
It starts on page 324 through 328.
When the Challanger exploded, I was a kid in high school. When the Columbia burned up, I was taking my kid to a doctors appointment. I feel just as bad as I did 17 years ago.
My deepest sympathy goes out to the families of the crew.
Viv
Gmail invites for ip
Take a moment to think of all the people that died while going west to the americas back in the day.
Sure, you might say we have more technology, but by no means do we have the technology to travel to and from the cosmos like we do to cross the oceans now.
Alot more lives will be lost, and there will be nothing we can do about it, except hope we learn from our mistakes.
Everyone knows there is a higher risk of death or injury to these brave people.
But that is just a chance you have to take.
God help those families, and God help maned exploration of space.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
This might be a little callous, but ... I'd personally expect a lot better performance from something that's that overbuilt; it's like a fully loaded, completely redundant IBM/SUN/SGI/&c. server spontanously failing 1 in 50 instances.
If you shot a fully loaded IBM server into orbit, I'd personally expect at least 7 dead on reentry.
One of my favorite quotes was spoken by JFK in 1962 when he said,
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
(Correct me if this is misquoted, I found this version of the quote on the internet.)
Maybe we should have taken Kennedy's words to heart. Maybe we should not have given up so easily on the now canceled and extremely difficult Venture Star project.
From all the bits of news I've read, it sounds like the heat shielding tiles of the space shuttle may have catostrophically failed today. It may have been due to the impact of a piece of foam from the main fuel tank shortly after launch. Apparently the final voice communication from the astronauts was something regarding tire pressure. I speculate that if the heat shield were compromised on reentry, that tire pressure could have gone up due to heat exposure. This would have triggered sensors and informed the crew of a problem seconds before something exploded. The explosion could have been tires or could have been fuel or anything else under pressure or flammable. The shuttle is made of lightweight materials, so any explosion would be disastorous. (Im not saying that lightweight materials aren't strong, but the engineering thresholds probably dont permit NASA from making an explosion proof shuttle; especially considering it was designed in the 1970's.
I read a while back that one of the primary objectives of the Venture Star project was to eliminate the need for heat shielding tiles (which may have catostrophically failed on the Columbia today). Inspecting these space shuttle tiles, if I recall, costs NASA $70,000,000 and a huge number of man years per shuttle mission! Another aim of the Venture Star project was to eliminate external fuel tanks and rocket boosters. The rocket boosters were responsible for the Challenger disaster and now the main fuel tank may have been the cause of the heat shield failure.
Let us not forget one of the main discoveris of this Columbia mission... the burning of Brazillian rainforest is contributing to global climate change.
Dont be fooled by those who say this event will stop manned missions to space. I think this will someday drive us to create much more advanced vehicles. Manned missions are not a practical way to explore space or do science, but heck, I wouldn't mind checking out another planet...or looking back at my planet from far away even if I die doing it. Maybe we need a space tourism agency, with goals separate and apart from NASA.
PS. The quote is an excellent example of chiasmus
January 28, 1986 - Challenger Disaster
"Judith Resnik - first Jewish astronaut killed"
February 1, 2003 - Columbia Disaster
"Ilan Ramon - first first Israeli astronaut killed"
looks like they forgot their carbon rod. or... gee, another repost from CowboyNeal! or... when's /. going to stop posting OLD news?! didn't this happen, like, 17 years ago?? :sigh:
heaven
You can
watch MSNBC video on Realplayer.
I'm sorry, but is this really the time for petty squabling about the most politically correct wording for a sentiment that everybody is feeling right now?
He didn't squabble; he just used the term he was comfortable with. You're the one who seems to want to make an issue out if it, for reasons I can't imagine.
Not sure it this was mentionned already, but in an interview days before the launch, one of the seven astronauts on board (M. Anderson) was saying that, for this mission, the shuttle was gonna be packed with equipment and that it's gonna be the heaviest load ever for a shuttle flight.
On a personal note, I was 16 when Challenger was lost, and now, 16 years later, we lose Columbia.
Years ago, in a discussion of space shuttle safety, Henry Spencer said that he thinks the Space Shuttle is only about two nines safe.
In other words, there is a 0.99 or 99% chance that a shuttle mission will not end in disaster, and a 1% chance it will. Those are not good odds; if your car was that dangerous, you would never drive it.
Before the Challenger disaster, there were some NASA documents that estimated the shuttle at five nines reliability (0.99999), according to the book What Do You Care What Other People Think by Richard Feynmann (who served on a panel investigating the Challenger incident).
I have seen several posts saying that now we should realize how dangerous space flight is; we should never send radioactive stuff aloft; etc. Actually, we should realize how dangerous the space shuttle is, and get started on building something safer now. With a better design, it should be possible to fly to orbit with four or five nines of safety, instead of the two we get with the shuttle.
The best thing the government could do: announce a valuable prize of some sort (tax-free money, or a guaranteed promise of X number of launches that will be purchases for $Y million each, or whatever). NASA is no longer capable, as an organization, of the can-do engineering that got us to the Moon. NASA cannot be entrusted with designing a shuttle replacement.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Given that 1/5 of the Chinese haven't ever heard of AIDS, I wouldn't expect them to lead the world into anything but nuclear war.
Mc Cool was from Lubbock and Husband was from Amarillo. The accident occured over their homes. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The deep brown earth of Texas takes back her children.
In general, the real experts refuse to speculate as to causes. You are best served by ignoring anyone who discusses causes without first laying out hard engineering evidence.
The general process we will now see is this:
1. Impound and secure all available data and have all involved parties (such as flight controllers) make notes on the events while they are still fresh in their minds.
2. Collect all debris, and note where each piece was found.
3. Start analysis, based on the known facts.
This is a case where the structure clearly broke up in flight. Because of this, the breakup sequence will be of great interest. It is usually determined by examining the pattern of the debris on the ground. In recent years, sophisticated analysis of radar returns have provided extraordinary insights into breakup sequences.
Telemetry from the shuttle (sent via the TDRS satellites) may also prove to be very valuable in this case. Shuttles are very well instrumented with sensors that show heating, structural stresses, control system inputs, and, of course, attitude, motions, and accelerations.
There is a blackout period for returning spacecraft, where they are enveloped by a plume of high temperature gas. The temperatures are high enough to strip electrons off, so the gas is a plasma which blocks radio transmissions. At this point, NASA is indicating that they were receiving telemetry, and that the loss of communication was the first (and prime) indicator of a mishap.
If memory serves, there are black box recorders on board shuttles: both a Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and a Flight Data Recorder (CDR). It seems to me that Challenger CVR tape has never been made public, but makes for rather sobering listening. Don't expect the CVR to be made public. Many countries (such as Canada) forbid the public release of this type of recording.
My heart goes out to those of you who are suffering. Please feel free to contact me with complete privacy.
Biggest asshole ever
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I know it's redundant, and everyone else has said it.. but anywho.
This is a very sad day, and it hits me even harder than knowing that someone died because these were fellow geeks who were in this for knowledge, exploration, and possibly intellectual reasons of their own. I normally am hardened to death of people, but this is enough to make me feel sad inside. I've always wanted to go up there, and I'm sure alot of people here have also. It's a geeks dream to touch the stars:) I sure hope they didn't feel anything.. I know it's a far shot, but it's a nice hope.
I also hope that political individuals don't use this as a reason to halt all space exploration and focus elsewhere. We were so close.. so close...
At least we lost them while they were doing something they wanted to do.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Wishing well of other people's endeavours for a cause that will benefit us all - no, I don't think that is 'unpatriotic' - or at least surely only in a dictatorship which accepts no dominance apart from its own.
A terrible thing has happened but as many other posters have commented, the actual death toll is insignificant in terms of human loss, compared to the number of people who die at sea, are killed in mining accidents, starve in developing countries, die in wars every year if not every week. I think it's more about the confidence of the US to accept this as part of participating in dangerous ventures. I also wish well all peoples and countries who explore the unknown and hope we can work together to make it happen. There must be so much knowledge out there held by scientists bound by their governments from sharing life saving knowledge for reasons of political advantage - let's hope that accidents like this can help things change and more sharing results.
don't want to be a jerk, but just wondered
1) over Texas...
2) slapper worm recently...
is there any way that messing with
communications to shuttle could
cause it to misorient and break up?
does shuttle rely on ground based data feeds
and are those communications secure?
feel very sorry Nasa & crew families
hope drive for space exploration continues
This is a horrible tragedy, and I find it heroic that the people at NASA are, inspite of their imense grief, immediately working very hard to piece together what happened in the hopes of finding out what might have happened to cause this catastrophe.
I simply wish the media would leave the speculation to the experts. I can't think of anything much more offensive than seeing some journalist spouting off speculations as to "what may have caused this". I don't know if they don't realize just how rude they are behaving, but I for one find it highly offensive. Simply tell us what facts are available, and leave the speculation to the experts who are right now racking their brains trying to determine what might have happened while at the same time trying to deal with their grief over this tragedy.
This is not the time or place for offhand "peanut gallery" scenarios.
RFC2119
So who's laughing now.
It sounds as if the accident happened around 200,000 feet. It is doubtful that any government could shoot down a craft at that altitude.
While I agree that it is extremely unlikely this was anything other than an accident, you're wrong. Ever hear of the missile defense shield? Incoming ballistic warheads need to be intercepted REALLY high and REALLY fast.
But given the age of that shuttle, it probably just fell apart.
The day ends here at India with this sad news :(
Esp since one of the astronauts was from India, My heart goes out for all the brave men and women and their family members!!
raj
Sarovar.org Hosting for open source projects in Indi
The blast from an EMP weapon would be several orders of magnitude stronger than the "hostile electro-magnetic pulse [sic] environment" space has.
But no more than the wild-assed speculation by our 'news' agencies live on the air. I don't look at it as prank callers as making light of a tragedy. I look at it as prank callers exposing this 'better to be first than to be right' shit that mainstream media calls news. They're just exploiting a system that already lacks any semblance of dignity.
Cars tend to be retired after a ten year service. I'm no aerospace nut, but it seems to me that 25+ years is a bit much to ask of a highly coordinated piece of machinery, such as the space shuttle. Maybe NASA was asking for it in a way?
28.8K - mms://63.250.199.211/nasa288
56.6K - mms://63.250.199.213/nasa566
100K - mms://63.250.208.26/nasa100
300K - mms://wmevent9.adns.dal.yahoo.com/nasa300k
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
During its history, 4 people died onboard Soyuz spacecraft during the 36 years of its service. Both accidents (1 and 3 cosmonauts dead, respectively) happened before the commencing of the Shuttle program. The bottom line is 25 years of service without fatal accidents. None of the last three major modifications of Soyuz were involved in any.
The Shuttle program has a shorter history of 22 years of spaceflight, killing 15 people in two fatal accidents (8 and 7 respectively). If I were an insurance company, I would recommend Soyuz.
It's a great loss. I cried; something a man in my culture isn't supposed to do, but I'm still having trouble seeing the screen for the tears.
They were reaching for the stars. They knew they might not make it, and they did it anyway.
If I had the same chance, I'd sign up in a New York minute. There are worse ways to die than going out in a blaze of glory while reaching for the stars.
Concealed Handgun License Courses in Plano, Texas
My understanding is that the space station requires re-supply by the shuttle. After the Challenger explosion, shuttles didn't fly for another two years. Clearly the people on the space station require at the very least rescue if not re-supply.
The have a Soyuz capsule they can use to return to Earth. Also the station can be supply by Progress capsules.
Use this link instead ...
k shv.shtml
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/radar/latest/DS.p19r0/si.
(you just had a random space in your URL)
Space.com has a series of pictures put together with captions that were taken during the past 2 weeks on board the shuttle.
You can also find a copy of the mission patch and an explanation at spaceflight.nasa.gov (don't remember the direct link, sorry).
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
(comment blank in memory of the 7 astronauts)
It is correct that the shuttle had an emergency egress system. The system involved a (relatively) lengthy procedure; The shuttle would first have to be stabilised in a low-speed glide, the crew hatch (port) would be jettisoned and an egress pole extended from the hatch. The crew would then extricate themselves from their seats and attach their emergency lanyard to the pole and pull themselves out the hatch, the pole guiding them away from the wing.
This procedure required a stable automatic glide at less than 30,000ft. The very nature of the requirements for this egress system indicate that its expected use was for undercarriage faults or events where the shuttle would be untrimmable for landing: the shuttle would be expected to make an automated landing attempt after the crew had exited.
Another possible note here is that the egress hatch is apparently situated on the lower deck, below & aft the flight-deck.
Interestingly, the first four orbital shuttle flights (STS1-STS4) which only comprised two crew; pilot & co-pilot, the shuttle was fitted with a pair of Martin-Baker ejector seats.
The pyrotechnic seats were of simmilar design to those used in the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird aircraft.
On pulling the gun-sear handle, the canopy over the forward flight-deck would be pyrotechnically separated and the seats would fire on telescopic exit poles.
This system was said to have been effective up to 100,000ft although I have no information on whether this was true for both launch and return stages.
We will always remember the brave crew of Columbia STS-107 - some of the worlds last true pioneers.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
In the chatter about Israel's first astronaut, Illan Ramon, it seems to be forgotten that Kalpana Chawla was born in India, and got her BSc there, before getting her PhD in the US. Although she now appears to be a US citizen, I would expect that India has been very proud of her, and is probably as much in morning at her loss as Israel is at the loss of Ramon.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
CBS just revealed the Iraqi reaction to the incident...
Iraqi officials are overjoyed. They see it as nothing less than Allah's retribution for America's evil actions.
What a surprise.
"Don't worry, it's not loaded." --Terry Kath
In skydiving it's not uncommon for someone to get killed. Typically when that happens the people at the dropzone continue to skydive on that day, not out of any disrespect of the person that died, but because dying is just another part of life and it should not interrupt what people do.
Similairly when a person in skydiving has a near death event, it's also typical that they immediately go back up and do another skydive as soon as they're able to. It's kind of a cliche, but "getting back on the horse" is an important part of life. When people don't go back up, it's not uncommon for them to leave the sport entirely, ie. give in to their fears.
Space travel is dangerous, and shit's gonna happen. No matter what decisions are made, how safe you play the game, eventually somewhere somehow something bad will go wrong and with the dangers and forces involved with space travel that will usually mean people will die.
But that should not cause any interruptions in the space program. Just because a shuttle went down doesn't make them unsafe. In fact considering how often they go up, I'd say 1 shuttle down every 18 years is pretty damn good. NASA needs to get another shuttle up and get back on the horse ASAP.
Unfortunately what will probably happen is that the space program will be suspended while everyone plays the blame game. Fingers will be pointed, a lot of If's will be thrown around: If they hadn't dismissed the damage done to the wing at launch - If they had rehauled the shuttle more carefully in '99 - If more money was spent on the program - If we weren't using 20 year old technology - If, if, if...
If you skydive long enough, you'll see people die. The forces are extreme enough in the sport, that small mistakes can become lethal. Space travel involves forces even more extreme: here we had a craft screaming through re-entry into earth at 12,000 miles per hour. I can't begin to imagine the kind of stresses those forces put on a space craft.
Eventually the odds are going to catch up with those involved, something nobody thought of will happen and with such extreme forces involved, people will die.
But death doesn't mean you put all life on hold.
When you push the limits of human experience, the price is risk. But life without risk is meaningless.
My friends and I happened to be vacationing in Orlando over the week of the shuttle launch. Being the excitable nerds that we are, we researched the launch times and locations exhaustively, then threw it all out the window, jumped in the car, and drove east towards the coast.
Just before we hit Cocoa Beach, we drove over a causeway which afforded a clear view north and south. Dozens of cars were parked on the shoulder, their drivers milling about with cameras and binoculars. "Must be the place," we figured.
We sat on the rocks at the edge of the water, chatting and goofing off until launch time. Someone behind us was listening to a radio broadcast, and called out the countdown aloud. I was surprised at how excited I was. You see these things every day on TV, but it really is different being there in person.
A bright spark - brighter than I would have thought possible - pushed off from the horizon and rose into the sky, tailed by a billowing contrail. Eight minutes it took for the spark to travel from the launchpad out into space. I'll never forget it.
"for reasons I can't imagine"
Exactly. Now shut up and go back to sleep.
When I was a young boy, our 3rd grade class was interrupted by the news of the shuttle disaster. My reaction - full of eight-year-old optimism - was, "That's wrong. The shuttle can't blow up."
I cried a few days later when someone told me the joke about Need Another Seven Astronauts.
Years later, I read Feynman's book, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, in which he explains that the shuttle tragedy was not, in fact, unexpected; it was overdue. The inescapable conclusion of this book was that the shuttle does not do what Americans expect of it.
It is with this in mind that I say, "Not Another Shuttle Accident! Please stop sending up rickety artifacts, and wait to return to space until we can demonstrate that we're actually making progress."
can't say that I care. we should give them exactly what they want, a market for their oil and nothing more. I really don't care what they do to their people. we don't steal their oil, last I saw they were getting fairly wealthy from the purchase of their oil. if those nations want to suppress their people, fine. their people can rise up if they wish. What the hell does the DMCA have to do with this anyhow? you sould rather paranoid of anything the government does.
Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) have been used for decades as power sources for aircraft, as some of the others have mentioned. Here is some information on their construction. Basically the plutonium is in a more stable ceramic form PtO2 (the risk of plutonium isn't so much the radioactivity, it's that plutonium is incredibly toxic) formed into spheres. Each sphere is encased in iridium, and a stack of these is in graphite. Suffice to say there's more construction on top of this, but the whole module is designed to withstand reentry by itself, and I believe are supposed to take a powered descent (rocket takes off, does a 180 and slams into the ground with engines still burning).
Karma whoring, but it's not on the first page yet, so:
n asa.transcript/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/02/01/shuttle.
Do you have a
I believe the US government prosecutes for theft of US Space Shuttle wreckage, theres no 'finders-keepers' rule here. So if you're a 'finder' its best to be a 'helper' and alert the authorities.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
NASA does the best it can considering that it's budgets are constantly being cut and it's projects are constantly being cancelled - and by whom? By creeps like that child-president in the White House; the same creeps that will use these untimely deaths to further their own political agendas. The true tragedy is the public's ignorance as to the root of these issues. Don't blame NASA! Don't buy into the hype!
These men and women of the shuttle Columbia loved space and space exploration. There can be nothing better we may do to give honour to this tragedy than to give their fellow colleagues the chance at manning serious space exploration. THANK YOU>
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
This is exactly how I feel
(With the greatest respect and admiration for the deceased and sympathy for their families.)
The symbolism of this tragedy is counter-productive and out of balance. The loss of a 737 with 160 people aboard should be just as tragic, if not more so. The simple fact that the entire nation is engrossed in this event testifies to the depth of symbolism we attach to the journey of humans beyond the atmosphere and gravity of earth.
We can do this, space travel, we have decided to do this. If we have decided that this is something the human race needs, then the occasional tragedy must be expected. We must not allow the sensational nature of the event to color the decision. Just because it was on film, just because of the astounding physical properties; the speed, the height; these things should not be allowed to amplify the relative horror.
The kind of thinking that would demand that manned space flight be stopped because of the - entirely predictable - chance of spectacular failure, is the kind of thinking that would have ended any type of mechanized travel after the first passenger jet disaster, ocean liner sinking or the first time people died in an overturned horse-carriage.
MjM
I'll take science over religion any day. When was the last time you heard of a researcher strapping exposives to his body and blowing up a shopping mall to protest the laws of thermodynamics?
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
that the mission into space will continue. I'm glad that's his attitude. Let's hope he's right.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Bush: "...Our journey into space will go on..."
So maybe the program will go on.
It looks like the latest information shows a hydraulic telemetry failure just before everything else ceased transmission.
At that stage in re-entry, the shuttle is entirely automated. No human control is needed, the RCS thrusters are used by the on-board software to ensure a correct attitude. If a failure occurred in the stability and control systems - the airflow turbulence would have forced a turn in a couple of seconds - and the pressure of the airflow would have shattered the frame in an instant. Perhaps the tank insulation that fell off during launch had a major effect after all.
I just hope they didn't feel anything.
God rest their souls
Pimping my Karma Whore since 1847.
How long till someones tries to sell very used space shuttle parts on Ebay?
While this is a real downer, they've had a pretty good safety record, not had an accident for over 16 years. They have people up in space now that are depending on more launches to get them home -- so there isn't really any practical way to ground the program. I don't see this setting them back as far as continuing with their planned operations and missions is concerned.
It may also accelerate development of a new launch vehicle. Not that they have a great track record with developing new ones.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
I know they have (or at least had as of the early 90's) at least 4 abort scenarios for launch. Which one is used obviously depends on when the problems emerge, and exactly what they are. While they are still on the ground, the crew can be evacuated quickly. I believe they also have one called Abort Once Around (AOA), where the shuttle makes one orbit around the earth, and then returns. I can't recall exactly what the others entail, but they do occur without leaving the atmosphere, and probably involve early booster and external tank separation, followed by the orbiter just gliding back home.
Also, there are reports of a piece of the external tank insulation falling off and becoming lodged on the shuttle, but NASA reported that this should just be a minor problem. Certainly nothing like this - I'd venture a guess that it later either fell off the shuttle or burned up on reentry.
Granted, I haven't heard anything about these since Space Camp years ago, but it's surprising what one can learn there.
My heart goes out to those that perished and their families. I remember watching Columbia's first flight in April 1981 with John Young and Robert Crippen. Space travel was always a passion of mine. I'm sitting here wondering if this may cause the US government and NASA to finally commit to a next generation shuttle craft. I was highly disappointed that the Venture Star program (X-33) was cancelled mainly because they couldn't build the fuel tanks properly. There is a lot of good tech their that could go into a Next Gen Shuttle. I hope they give it new consideration.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
The bottom of the shuttle has a heat shield. The crew have no control over what happens when re-enterting. Lets say something went wrong with the computers on board the shuttle or/and computers controlling the shuttle from the space centre. When the shuttle enters the atmosphere, the black shield is facing the brunt of re-entry therefore is the most heat-fortified part(other than the exhaust systems and nose) of the shuttle. If any of the computers fail to maintain the shuttle in the correct position, then the shuttle might have tilted or turned 180 degrees(there is a chance that the shuttle at this point will abruptly veer of course and its wings and tail will face extreme stresses) BUT stayed on course. Now with the heat shield below the shuttle no longer facing the brunt of the atmospheric entry, there is a chance that the ceramic tiles could not handle all the heat(many a time it has been reported that some of these ceramic tiles have been burnt and some(3-4) have fallen off) and this started the disintegration of the shuttle. This is a sad day for India and the rest of the world. God bless them.
Go hump a goddamned tree you fucking pinko commie liberal.
The proudest moments of my professional life were spent working on the shuttle program. I felt that I was working on something important, something that would have a lasting impact. There are tears in my eyes as I write this. I am at a loss for words... There is a prayer in my heart for the families of these astronauts.
Lasers Controlled Games!
It was about 2 and a half years. Unless we see some amazing restraint from some powerful people this time, I'm betting Disovery and Atlantis won't be going back up at all.
Have you ever had first hand direct knowledge of a story being reported in the media? Did they make glaring errors? They have in every instance I've been able to judge directly.
People in the media don't know anything, they just know how to ask questions and transcribe the answers into something marginally readable by the average clown.
As soon as I found out what had happened and listened to what NASA had to say, I came to SlashDot to get better information. Sure, I have to think about what I'm reading and take responsibility to filter the good information from the crap, but at least the good information is there.
Americans come back through Soyuz all the time. Does anybody know how these guys were scheduled to come back, by the way?
...34 die in a train crash in Zimbabwe.
I do agree that this is mostly to put off collectors, there will be very little evidence left over as to what caused this disaster and NASA will need all the pieces it can find, together with location data.
They won't have much fuel left, but they always check about contamination on the ground after normal landings.
See my journal, I write things there
More information will be broadcasted at 3:00 PM EST on NasaTV.
The upper limit on this is food.
Which means that one of them can last a long time, indeed.
Of course, this is total speculation and it will be a while before we know anything definitive on the causes of this...
I'm not a space expert, but the most sensible thing for my country (I'm Russian) would be to fully support ISS operation with its Progress and Soyuz spacecrafts, until the things are sorted out with the Shuttles. Perhaps cough up some extra cash on the Russian side, yes. That would also be a politically correct thing to do.
This would mean the construction activity is halted (Shuttles were to deliver most/all new modules), but at least the station can be operated in its current configurations for the time being.
I view the dual delivery systems (STS + Russian crafts) as a partial redundancy built into the ISS program. Don't we now have the exact case when this redundancy should be used?
Any knowledgeable person to comment?
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Microsoft engineers shuttle disaster to take focus off failure of "Trustworthy Computing"
It's obvious that a SAM couldn't do this. But: since the shuttle is controlled by autopilot most of the way down (down to 50,000 ft according to Bill Harwood on CBS) then what are the chances of someone sabotaging the flight program? If there were foul play, this would seem more likely.
btw, also according to Bill Harwood on CBS, the initial investigation is looking at the telemetry from the left wing, possibly pointing to big structural failure there--
There are frequently posts about happenings in NASA posted on Slashdot - ie - Mars, asteroid sitings, etc. If this story isn't "stuff that matters", I don't know what is.
"Well sir, we're just not making as much money as we used to when the space race was important...."
"Hey, everyone, look over here... first teacher in space!" Boom. Money pours into NASA's coffers.
"Well, we need extra money for the war effort, and people just weren't that interested in the International Space Station..."
"Hey, everyone, look over here... first Isreali in space!" Boom. Money pours into NASA's coffers.
I'm not big on conspiracy theories, but this was the big thing on my mind this morning when I saw the news. I doubt I'm the only one thinking it.
Three Patches
A plaque with three patches
reminders of days we've lost
to live seeking the light
yet crying in the dark
hopes and dreams fly yet
held only in courageous hearts
for the multitudes fear the future
and few are those with sight
life is not for faint of heart
nor death a threat to life
for a life lived safe is sterile
courage makes our death defied
a life you'd gladly give
is never taken that is true
for charity is how the race lives
and fights extinction time anew
-soup (GNUrd, Speaker to Machines) "Laugh at yourself- Why should everyone else have all the fun?" -Romanchek's 6th Ru
If this represents the near-term (10-20 year) end of manned space flight, we should rejoice. With the billions of dollars wasted insuring that ugly bags of mostly water can survive the trip no longer being spent, perhaps we can go back to conducting real science in space, or spend that money better here on earth.
You are crazy. We should abolutely not rejoice. IMO, our number one priority as a species ought to be figuring out a way off this rock. We have all of our eggs in one basket. As for better spending our money on earth, that's the worst argument ever. If we waited until all our problems are solved down here, we'll never get anywhere.
Related Official NASA Links (feel free to repost at other sites):
STS-107 Mission Status Reports
Last Night's Status Report (deals with possible landing times)
Future Scheduled STS Flights
NASA TV Webcasts
Fox News showed a magnified view, and you could see from the spiraling contrail that the craft was spinning rapidly before it disintegrated. I'd say it was spinning about 10 revs/sec. around its long axis. Not a tumble, definitely a steady spin. The exact spin rate will be helpful for NASA to determine exactly what the craft's aerodynamic configuration was at that point. To me, it looked like what I'd expect to see if a shuttle lost a wing at Mach 15.
OMG, Dan Rather is such a goober.
The're talking about how the astronauts on the ISS will be using the Russian space capsule to get back and he's all "are you sure we can trust this tiny little Russian thing, who knows where it was made"
These tv news anchors make slashdot look intelligent
There is an archive of radar images of the debris field. Someone else posted a link to NOAA's live radar images, but this loop starts at the time of the accident.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I'm not sure what caused the artifacts in these photos, but it does appear that things have been dicey on previous re-entries.
Oh, please...
The orbital tracker works by displaying where the shuttle should be based on the description of its orbit; it is not a real time tracking system. RTFD.
Med school aphorism: when you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.
everyone please - one tragedy a day is enough. Its bad enough to lose the space shuttle, dare we also risk losing perfects?
please do not post anything funny - hes not bluffing .
Some people will do anything for a buck
"Need Another Seven Astronauts."
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
She outlined the bailout procedure.
[1] Explosive bolts blow out the hatch. The hatch blows out at, IIRC, sixty miles per hour. The shuttle has to be below a certain speed threshold, or the hatch will not clear the shuttles wing.
[2] Then another explosive charge shoots a pole out the hatch. This pole is intended for the astronauts to hook up to, like a world war two paratrooper. The plan is that this pole may allow the astronauts to slide out of the shuttle's slipstream, and out of danger of striking the shuttle's wing. Note: this requires the shuttle to be flying in a stable orientation, at relatively slow speed.
[3] The astronauts have to unhook their seatbelts, walk over to that pole, and hook their static lines to the escape pole, and then jump out.
Bondar estimated it would take at least one minute to complete these steps.
When you were a kid, did you ever roll down the window of the car, and stick a piece of paper out the window, while mom or dad were driving down the freeway? Did you notice how the turbulence whipped it around? I read a book about the Air-India bombing. The authors described how all the corpses had all their bones broken in multiple places. Even at speeds of only hundreds of miles per hour sticking one's limbs into the slip-stream causes the same kind of whipping motion.
Why do some newscasters and their so called experts keep saying that we need to use a shuttle to return the people on the ISS back to earth? Why couldn't they just use the Soyuz capsule to return to earth? What would they do if there was an emergency on ISS, wait for a shuttle to me ready? I don't think so, they would use the emergency capsule that is built into ISS, the Soyuz capsule. Is it a coincidence that Soyuz holds three people and there are three people onboard ISS?
Enough rambling about this, I just can't stand it when the newscasters and there experts pass on obviously false info.
God bless the 7 astronauts and there families.
-I'll hang up and listen...
... flights by humans. Remember: the Hubble repairs and upgrades. Just as we can't perfectly send humans into space, we also can't perfectly send robots or equipment. And as probes get more sophisticated, their size will mandate their construction in orbit. Humans will be needed for that.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Hopefully, as a consequence of this strategy, manned flights will be scrapped for the foreseeable future and we can concetrate our efforts on unmanned probes.
I just did a search for "shuttle Columbia" on eBay, and lots of things were listed this morning just after the news broke. One that stuck out was an STS-107 mission patch, listed for a starting bid of $100. Other stuff that was already listed as been bid into the stratosphere this morning.
The fucking vultures that try to make money off things like this, and the souvenir hunters that reward them just make me want to vomit. I hope eBay pulls the plug on Columbia-related things for a while.
This is horrible thing to have to watch a second time. I know there are going to be calls for a complete ground - up redesign of the space programme and vehicles, but this won't neccesarily make things safer. Reliability in this field comes from having a good basic design and incrementally improving it, tweaking its design for saftey, learning as you go along. Just as complex sofware systems and operating systems have their bugs winnowed out over time. Sozyuz had an appalling saftey record in the early days, but it's a very safe design now. Sure, it may be the Ford Model T of spacecraft, but designwise it's kernel 2.2, not kernel 2.5
/usr/games/fortune > ~/.signature
Remember this? At the time, I thought these plans were a political ploy to get more money. Now I wouldn't be surprised if they happen, even if the shuttle fleet isn't grounded for long. Trips to ISS took so much of the shuttle fleet's capacity that I doubt they'll be able to do it with only 3 machines.
That was back in March, 2002.
paintball
The tradgy of the re-entry burn up of the Columbia reminded me of Challenger disaster. I was a grade school student at the time and all the AV carts were rolled out so we could all view the events on live TV. It was significant at the time since there was a schoolteacher on board. The event is forever burned in my memory. The first real death and destruction I ever witnessed. A few years later there was a compition held to name the replacement shuttle. I suggested "Phoenix" at the time (no, I didn't intend it to be offensive, it seemed to be a good referance). NASA sent us back a letter, I don't recall the exact wording, but the effect was, the name was considered but passed on. This is one depressing day =(
Fox News is reported that the Columbia was going Mach 7 at the time it was lost. They (and everyone else is reporting that it was going 12,000 mph.
m os.s html, 12,000 mph at 200,000 feet is Mach 17.
According to the Atmospheric Properties Calculator at
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/design/scripts/at
My prayers to the friends and family of the astronauts. May we move on to space!
I strongly recommend looking at Richard Feynman's account of serving on the committee to investigate the Challenger crash.
He describes being shocked at how the figure one crash in 100,000 launches was floating around, with no justification behind it. When he talked with actual engineers, they had realistic views of the reliability of their particular sub-systems.
Anyhow, the real figure was expect one disaster every one hundred launches or so.
So two disasters within the first 107 launches is withing the predicted envelope.
I feel sure all the astronauts are aware of this figure. If they were doing their homework they would have to have learned this. I feel sorry for their friends and family, but they too should have been aware of the gamble the astronauts were choosing to make.
it's good to see SOMEBODY making money. Given that billions of dollars of our taxes just vanished in a puff of smoke, we should get as much as we can out of it. I say sell HBO the movie rights.
During this time of tragedy, I have uploaded a couple of clips of space shuttle breaking-up for /. readers:
e ak ingUp_1of2.rm
e ak ingUp_2of2.rm
SHUTTLE VIDEOS
PLEASE SAVE THESE (right click and select "Save Target As" on IE) AND CREATE MIRRORS:
Shuttle breaking up (clip 1 of 2)
Shuttle breaking up (clip 2 of 2)
Hourly Bandwidth limited Mirror:
http://www.geocities.com/koodakabaada/ShuttleBr
http://www.geocities.com/koodakabaada/ShuttleBr
involving astronauts have been within 5 calendar days of each other....January 27th (67), 28th (86), and now February 1st....if you ask me, that's pretty creepy...
Even if you're not superstitious, maybe the most honorable thing to do would be to halt future launches/landings near end of Jan/beginning of Feb, and simply hold memorials to honor those lost...
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTI CLE_ID=30816
Who knows at this point -- but its an interesting theory....
"An Italian astronaut who's been on two space flights says an incorrect angle of re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere could have caused the space shuttle Columbia to disintegrate. "
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
During this time of tragedy, I have uploaded a couple of clips of space shuttle breaking up for /. readers:
e ak ingUp_1of2.rm
e ak ingUp_2of2.rm
SHUTTLE VIDEOS
PLEASE SAVE THESE (right click and select "Save Target As" on IE) AND CREATE MIRRORS:
Shuttle breaking up (clip 1 of 2)
Shuttle breaking up (clip 2 of 2)
Hourly Bandwidth limited Mirror:
http://www.geocities.com/koodakabaada/ShuttleBr
http://www.geocities.com/koodakabaada/ShuttleBr
Senators Challenge Shuttle Safety Spending
WASHINGTON -- Raising the specter of another shuttle tragedy, senators and others warned Thursday that NASA's growing budget woes are putting astronauts' lives at risk.
Pressure to deal with a projected $4.8 billion cost overrun on the International Space Station project and other factors have caused National Aeronautics and Space Administration managers to treat space shuttle safety upgrades as optional, officials said Thursday. Numerous pending safety improvements to the orbiter vehicles and their ground-support infrastructure have been targeted for cancellation or deferral.
"I fear that if we don't provide the space shuttle program with the resources it needs for safety upgrades, our country is going to pay a price we can't bear," said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.
[...]
"We're starving NASA's shuttle budget and thus greatly increasing the chance of a catastrophic loss," Nelson said.
The lone NASA official to testify, William Readdy, deputy associate administrator for the Office of Space Flight, did not dispute Nelson's assessment.
This article about mothballing the columbia seems sort of ironic in retrospect..
Feb 1, 2003: Useless Post
I hope they find a way to send food to people stuck in International Space Station.... considering the time it takes o build a shuttle
During lift off, insulation from the outer fuel tank hit the left wing. During reentry, the left wing broke apart first. Why didn't they send someone to have a look at the wing while the ship was in space?
"Can you hear me now?"
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,418 462,00.html
"TIME.com: What are the possible scenarios that could have caused this disastrous accident on the shuttle's reentry into the Earth's atmosphere?"
Go back to kuro5hin, jackass.
this is not the time for that kind of talk. Your just showing yourself to be a fat assed computer geek with no life......
NASA briefing on Columbia accident just reported the following:
7:57 CST Temperature sensors in the wing area went offscale low, indicating sensor failure
7:58 CST Temp sensors in structure/body of vehicle on left side/wing area went offscale low, indicating sensor failure
7:59 CST left inboard & outboard temp and pressure sensor changes, alert on tire sensor pressure shows on crew displays, last transmission from crew trying to respond to the alert
Approx 8:00 CST all vehicle communications and data links lost, speed mac 18.3 altitude a little over 217000
I'm not very knowledgable of NASA happenings and what not, but it seems like the shuttle design we use has been used for quite some time now. Given everything NASA's learned over the past fifty years, and the advancements in technology since this shuttle design was put into use, maybe its time for something new. It would signify continuance and renew interest in space exploration.
This country's been through a hell of alot the last few years, but we always keep moving forward. Hopefully this tragedy will result in an increase in NASA funding somehow, rather than any sort of penalty.
So, this is what happened:
1. Somewhat cold weather on the morning of the launch contribute to the formation of ice on the external tank. This wasn't record cold, but cold enough even though the day was perfectly clear down here.
2. Shortly after launch, the 'extra' ice breaks off, impacts external tank insulation.
3. Ice and insulation strike the wing
4. Heat ablation tiles are damaged in an area of the left wing
5. NASA experts don't believe any thing is damaged on #4 and there is no method to inspect the wing in orbit (no hand-grips, no jet pack, no camera, no oribiting satellites with capability to check(?)).
6. On re-entry, the weak tiled area super heats, showing up as the sensor problems several minutes before loss of Columbia.
7. Eventually the heat is enough to cause structural failure or internal heating to the wing resulting in an explosion/loss of control of the shuttle.
8. The result being imminent breakup and loss of the vehicle and crew.
The questions will be:
a. Should the experts have been more skeptical of potential damage.
b. If so, what steps should have been taken to confirm damage and
c. If damage found, what could have been done (not much).
There exists a new SETI@home team.
In memoriam the crew of the Columbia.
That is all.
The difference between ignorance and apathy? I sure don't know, and I don't care either.
In regards to the tiles falling off while re-entry, I heard from a "expert" on one of the big news shows that if one tile were to fall off, that it might cause other tiles around it to fall off too due to the enormous aerodynamic stress that the shuttle would be experiencing (not even taking heat into effect). I'm sure this is something that NASA has and will look into, but if they are required to put the rows and layers ceramic tiles onto the bottom of the craft (or atleast verify they are all in place) by hand before every flight, it seems like it can leave room for error to me. But I'm no scientist anyways.
Check this out!!! The washington post reported that the shuttle landed safely!
4 3-2003Feb1.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A99
Yes, I also think terrorism is too easily overlooked--especially, when you take into account the electromagnetic weapons that have been used for quite sometime now. They can far exceed the range of ordinary ballistic weapons.
t m
....so the real worry in the coming MidEast War may well be the threat right here in our cities.
This would be quite a symbolic hit with the first Israeli astronaut on board. Someone in the Iraqi government has already said they are happy the shuttle exploded and see it as God's retribution for the Israelis blowing up one of their nuclear reactors.
Also, the Russians are not for the U.S. led war against Iraq. It threatens their interests there. In fact, they are for Iraq and WILL protect their oil interests. I have been waiting to see the Russians make their move. I figured they'd just use these horrific scalar interferometer weapons to decimate the U.S. military when they tried to attack Iraq (still very possible!)
Read below to get a glimpse of the Russian capabilities in this regard and then visit the Bearden site for a more complete picture.
So here's the explanation that strikes me as most plausible if this was indeed terrorism:
http://www.cheniere.org/correspondence/011303.h
The Tom Bearden Website
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 22:59:57 -0600
Dear Steve,
The Russians were indeed using the shuttle launches for convenient target practice, offsetting the shots from the launch so as not to hit the vehicle and kill it. Bob Gladwin took a picture of the actual strike of one of those weapons, offset from a shuttle launch in latter Nov. 1985, and we published it. About two weeks later, on Dec. 12 the same or a similar weapon hit the Arrow DC-8 in Gander Newfoundland.
So they were indeed practicing using the scalar interferometer weapons against shuttle launches, and probably would also have included test shots against the shuttles after launch (during boost phase and shortly thereafter).
For a mathematical explanation of how scalar interferometry works, see M.W. Evans et al. (15 authors), "On Whittaker's Representation of the Electromagnetic Entity in Vacuo, Part V: The Production of Transverse Fields and Energy by Scalar Interferometry," Journal of New Energy, 4(3), Special Issue, Winter 1999, p. 76-78. That entire issue of JNE is devoted to some 60 papers in O(3) higher group symmetry electrodynamics. So the full technical justification for everything we reported with respect to the scalar interferometry weapons, is now in the literature.
We also know that by the end of 1985 the Russians planned to be ready for control of space, the oceans, etc. with these weapons. He said so years earlier, in a meeting in Europe with the heads of the Communist parties in Europe. He specifically indicated that the use of "peaceful coexistence" was allowing this to be developed and prepared.
With the kill of the Arrow in Dec. 85, we then should have seen more kills as a very gradual pressure started being built up. Indeed that happened, because we did see the kill of a Minuteman missile, the kill of the Challenger, etc. In each case there were quite clear indicators.
Thus many of those suspicious flashes --- associated with the fatal Challenger launch and the launch of other shuttles --- probably were weapons tests. In the case of the Challenger, the Russians (KGB) apparently had already decided to kill it, and so one would expect multiple fatal shots, continuing in a manner where they had already demonstrated our guys would not recognize what had happened, because our fellows back then knew nothing of scalar interferometry, and would not believe it.
That series of shots and interventions came to a sort of screeching halt when a friendly little nation simply destroyed several very large Russian missile storage facilities and such strategic targets. One shot knocked out one-third the missiles in one of the large Russian fleets. So it quit being fun and games for the KGB at that point, because that little nation already had at least working prototype quantum potential weapons and could have blasted Russia right off the face of the earth at the time. And the Russians knew it. It was not sweet reason and diplomacy that backed them down; it was an iron fist.
In the aftermath of all that activity, which eerily stayed well behind the scenes and was never recognized for what it was by the open news, the Soviet economy eventually collapsed, the Berlin Wall came down, and you know the rest.
What is not commonly known is that the potential "big strategic strike show" started again on two occasions in 1997. We got by without the first strike (scheduled in February) and then the second of those strikes was scheduled to occur on May 1, 1997. That strike intention went almost right down to the wire. It was very narrowly averted in the nick of time, by the friendly little nation readying to unleash the quantum potential weapons (to which a certain change had to be made to get by a counter that was implemented). The strike was within two days of being launched (and it would have destroyed the West in about two hours) before it was then forced to stand down. Several other colleagues and I played a very minor role in that affair. Eerily, just about the time that great strategic armada was standing down, Secretary of Defense Cohen was making a revealing statement (referring to the earlier scalar interferometry weapons) at a conference in Georgia where he said:
"Others are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves. So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations. It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our efforts, and that's why this is so important." [Secretary of Defense William Cohen at an April 1997 counterterrorism conference sponsored by former Senator Sam Nunn. Quoted from DoD News Briefing, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, Q&A at the Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy, University of Georgia, Athens, Apr. 28, 1997.
I don't think either the Secretary, the President, or the U.S. Intelligence community had the foggiest notion of that great armada and its schedule to attack, or the fact that it was just then forcibly standing down. We missed Armageddon by a hair's breadth.
Contrary to standard opinion, the so-called "Cold War" was never as cold as represented. Behind the scenes there were continual strategic maneuverings and preparations for the most spectacular strategic attacks ever dreamed of by the human mind. We got through it (at least until now) by the grace of God and by the guts and stamina of a friendly little nation also having some of the most powerful weapons on earth.
Let us hope we continue to get through it. Unfortunately, the war we have entered now is of quite a different nature, but if it unleashes biological warfare (smallpox and anthrax, e.g.) and nuclear detonations in our cities (hostile nuclear weapons are already here; read Lunev's book), then a real holocaust could well be unleashed.
Best wishes,
Tom Bearden
Subject: More evidence of Challenger 'shoot-down'?
Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2003 16:22:11 -0600
I was reading through the play-by-play timeline of the Challenger disaster, and found this interesting tid-bit:
T+45.217
A flash is observed downstream of the shuttle's right wing.
T+48.118
A second flash is seen trailing the right wing.
T+48.418
A third unexplained flash is seen downstream of the shuttle's right-hand wing. 70 mm tracking camera close-up: A brilliant orange ball of flame, apparently, emerges from under the right wing and quickly merges with the plume of the solid rocket boosters. This phenomenon, observed during analysis of tracking film after launch, has been seen on previous launches.
This sequence was captured well before the vehicle exploded. Is this an EM 'missile' that they saw? Notice that this has been seen on previous launches (evidence of low power testing by the Russians?)
Just a thought.
http://spaceflightnow.com/challenger/timeline/
Steve
Dang, it'll suck to be an engineer at NASA now. It looked like the public sector would be sheltered from the outsourcing/downsizing/general destruction of the middle class in this country. But I can see it coming: "Yeah, I used to work for NASA too" "Oh wow...sorry to hear that. Those were the days, eh?" "BOTH OF YOU GET BACK TO WORK! WE GOT CUSTOMERS WAITING!"
to get away from fucknuts like you
It seems pretty clear that what probably happened was that the insulation that hit the left wing during takeoff must have dislodged one or more of the heat-shield tiles, and that these started coming off as the Shuttle was passing from California to Nevada during reentry. This must have compounded to the point where there was a sudden spike in temperature in the vicinity of the first sensor loss, and then spread to the landing gear area. The heat buildup there first caused the spike in temperature and pressure that was reported, then probably melted everything, killing the sensors. At that point, the aluminum airframe in that wing was probably soup. The resultant loss of attitude would then have led to the breakup of the craft that was filmed over Texas.
It seems that we are likely to find that there is blame to place here, and that it ultimately lies with the flight director. It was his call not to take any extraordinary measures, such as a space walk, to inspect the area of the insulation collision and resultant left wing damage.
They were docked at the Space Station for a time during this mission. They therefore had all the resources that they would have needed to identify and correct the problem. This didn't happen because the insulation strike was written off as "inconsequential."
I expect that heads will eventually roll on this one.
And damit don't burn the french fries again.
Anyone remember the movie Space Camp? There was a scene near the end where the woman flying was struggling to keep the shuttle at a certain angle to keep the heat on the tiles and not any other part of the orbiter. If you went outside of the range, unprotected areas of the shuttle would be exposed to 3000 degree temps and instantly incinerate, compromising the shuttle integrity and essentially just turn into a fire ball. Current reports from NASA was the orbiter was at about 207,000 feet and just over Mach 18.
One of the most poignant things about this tragedy is the NASA personnel required to go in front of the world press and try to explain what they know about what happened. The pain in their voices is obvious. How much do you think they would prefer to be commiserating with friends and loved ones instead of fighting not to break down in front of a bunch of television cameras and microphones guessing as to how their friends and colleagues died?
Just now, a reporter asked the NASA official on the stand what the crews' last words were! Jesus!
Why don't the CEO's of airlines have to do this?
MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Does anyone know how to donate to NASA? I'm not sure if it's even possible, but I want to do something to support the space program. This tragedy is even more far-reaching than the lives and the families of the astronauts -- it threatens the future of space exploration. The best way to honor the astronauts is to continue manned space missions with renewed vigor. I disagree with the view that this disaster is senseless. More can often be learned from failures than from successes, but although more funding for the space program is the obvious answer to me, I fear the the opposite will be the result. I encourage /.ers to write their congresspeople in support of the space program.
Shut. The. Fuck. Up. Asswipe.
The hand check is there because it's the most accurate method known -- our brains are ridiculously accurate pattern matchers. Making machines that can automatically approximate a tenth of the accuracy of a human being at complex recognition tasks is a major feat.
As for the aerodynamic stresses...it's certainly possible. But I suspect the entire frame was built to be resilient against the loss of a small tile directly exposed to searing heat and pressure...if it wasn't, we'd be celebrating shuttles that successfully landed -- do you realize how many tiles are on the shuttle?
This may have been a freak occurance. God knows, everything else about this is...
--Dan
All they did was orbit.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
My reference was to the number of Space Shuttles themselves.
Source
Sadly, this information is no longer correct.
True. But celebrating something happening to someone you dislike (even if the reason you dislike them is that you're a sick, anti-semitic psycho) isn't the same as causing it.
The Washington Post article at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A100 88-2003Feb1.html discusses the possible damage to the left wing during liftoff, the lack of a robotic arm to observe any possible damage, and the subsequent events during landing.
According to NASA:
1. No capabilities to repair a tile while in orbit. No capability to check for a damaged or failed tile while in orbit. No Canadarm on board. No EVAs, or attempt to check condition of tiles.
2. Temperature sensors in left wing (inboard and outboard elevons) and in left main wheel well went dead (off-line low) during re-entry. Sensors are not connected or related by a single point of failure (box). NASA recognized that there was no comonality between them, and that this signaled a problem.
3. Foam that broke off during launch struck the left wing. NASA not sure if it was the leading edge, underneath, etc. Curiously while they didn't know where it actually hit, they did determine that there was no danger to the crew or craft.
4. They had taken a film of the external tank as it broke away from the orbiter during launch and were anxious to examine it when the shuttle got home. They didn't (or couldn't?) transmit it while in orbit (typically this is done when the shuttle gets back).
5. Question from press: Did you use telescopes or any equipment to examine the impact point on the wing while in orbit. NASA: We have tried before, but were not successful (drag chute door came off in earlier mission). We elected not to take any pictures this time because we couldn't do anything about it anyway.
Bad bad bad. I don't know what to say. Let me summarize:
- Foam breaks off fuel tank and strikes left wing of orbiter.
- NASA examines video of lanuch and gives it the a-okay.
- NASA has film on the shuttle of the tank where the foam came off, but doesn't transmit it to mission control for examination.
- No attempt during 16 days to re-examine or re-asses the damage to the wing.
- Final failures before terminal condition occurs in left wing of orbiter.
- Failure occurs during maximum heat and stress on wing.
Over the next few days I think the press is going to kill them. It's going to become obvious that they didn't take seriously enough a key event which occurred during launch.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
FCT (First Conspiracy Theory):
A Mossad space based weapon took them out, so they could blame Arafat as the crew contained the first Israeli in space
Except for the tidbit that Arafat doesn't have that capability. Even if Israel had that capability, why would they do something totally beyond the ability of their enemy, then hope some idiot (no offense) blamed it on them anyway?
When my brother was getting potty trained, he would occasionally take a dump in his drawers, then tell Mom that his sister did it. Congratulations, you've taken the DCT award from him.
The media seems to be focusing on the issue that it may have been the foam peice that struck the left wing that is the "smoking gun" and caused the tragedy, though NASA keeps downplaying that.
One point that was really drilled on in the second NASA press conference on this was that there is no way that they could repair a tile if they found it to be damaged after the flight is already in space.
So what if they had found conclusively that the foam piece HAD damaged some tiles? What could they do? Really there is nothing they can do, except downplay it, cross thier fingers, and hope it doesn't affect landing....
And then when they do have problems with landing, then what? They continue to downplay the foam piece because they dont want to be criticized for trying to find something to do even when they had nothing they could do.
- metal fatigue?
- tiles falling off?
- controls failed?
- human error?
All the while we repeated how terrible and sad this was. Our last hypothesis, inspired by last week:It wasn't gleeful laughter, but much needed.
This is freaking hillarious!!
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/news/20030201.news.bus hconf.01.ram
Simple, and eloquent.
One Token Ring to Rule them All, One Search Engine to Find Them, One WAN to bring them in, and TCP/IP Bind them...
When a shuttle is in the middle of the "lifting off" process, I imagine it's impossible to say, "wait... we might have a problem, let's just cancel this whole thing". Perhaps NASA knew that this insulating foam piece could have caused serious damage, but chose to keep it under their hats, because, what good could it do at that point?
If this hypothetical scenario is true, would the astronauts have been alerted? Maybe not, even though astronauts are chosen for being fairly calm in dire situations, it still would be a risk.
-------
Incite and flee.
Worse is the fact that independant space vehicle programs either peter-out, or when they have a good hint of becoming successful, they get heavily leaned-on by the big wigs.
Now, what's gonna happen next?
They gonna bring down the remaining astro-nuts that are on the space station, and NASA will simply mothball the space station.
No one will get to space for 10 years after that (except maybe the Chinese), and the space station will decay just like Skylab did.
Whoever you are, if there is a hell, i hope you burn in it.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
and people seemed to just stop buying stuff
Sad commentary on society when that's what it takes to get people's attention. When was the last time that this happened??
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
This is a terribly sad day - and I feel for the friends and family of the crew.
But Astronauts are well aware of the risks when they do this. Maybe not before the Challenger disaster - but certainly nowadays. There is something like a one in a hundred chance of dying when you travel to orbit. I doubt that any astronaut would argue that it's better odds than that.
For some people - many people perhaps - that risk is perfectly acceptable and they'll stand in line to get a ride to space. Heck, even after this accident, if I could get a ride on a shuttle tomorrow - I'd jump at the chance...if I had to pay a couple of month's salary for the privilage - I'd do it in a heartbeat.
So long as the Astronauts are happy to do this - we shouldn't use loss of life as a reason for ending human spaceflight.
HOWEVER: I think the shuttle and the space station are largely a waste of resources. There are cheaper ways to get the science data they provide.
Send people to Mars - yes, plan colonies in space - yes - but not like this.
www.sjbaker.org
The story is about the space shuttle. It has nothing to do with international politics. There could have been an astronaut from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea or whatever onboard if they wanted to be friendly. It was not good for the advancement of the planet. It was just not good.
I think you are overlooking the strong link between the public's support of the manned space program and their support for space science. In my observation, most folks are really only interested in the arcana of plasma physics and planetary processes only insofar as in some person is actually going to visit the other planets some day.
I think the movie The Right Stuff captured this very well: "No Buck Rogers, no bucks!"
As a licenced pilot, I am forced to hear this poem again and again, as Mr. Magee wrote this, allegedly, while flying.
As far as poems go, hearing this poem makes me consider taking up poetry as to write something to replace this.
In summation, nobody deserves this poem to be read to them, much less astronauts in an accident.
I'm a pilot too, who owns my own little single engine airplane. I went out to the airport today, thinking that perhaps I just needed to be "up there" to fill an emotional hunger, but after opening up the hangar and pre-flighting my plane, just felt that I'm not in the proper frame of mind. My airplane has a little placard on the instrument panel that reads, "Don't do anything stupid in this aircraft". With tears in my eyes, I slid the hangar door shut, locked it up tight, got back in my car and drove home where I'm now sitting in front of my computer typing this.
In regards to the foam glass hitting Colombia's wing during the launch...engineers "theorizing" that there was minimal damage, and going by their opionion alone is simply unforgivable now especially since no EVA was made to evaluate the actual condition of the heat tiles. Whether the heat tiles were to blaim or not, the person who made the decision to go with what the engineers were saying should be fired, if that turns out to be the cause, he should be tried for negligent homicide. If they had made the EVA and conclude the damage was beyond minimal, they may have been able to utilize the Soyuz life boat on the ISS to return to Earth, leaving the shuttle docked, or remain on the ISS if repairs could not be made until a rescue mission could be put together....even though it would take DAYS because those NASA idiots don't have the foresight to keep a shuttle fueled up and ready in case of an orbital mishap.
In any case, I don't think this should or will stop the manned space program. All flight is dangerous. Space flight is no exception. Commercial aircraft are lost more frequently than spacecraft (it would be interesting to compare the relative statistics as a ratio of flights to crashes) and with a much higher death toll. Yet when an airliner goes down with 20, 80, or 200 people onboard, nobody is shouting for the FAA to stop all air travel. People make mistakes, and then we learn from them. This is the way it has always been, the way it always will be. To allow ourselves to be defeated, and our progress to be eroded because of our mistakes, would be the biggest tragedy of all. -JE
It's not about taking risks, but choosing what risks to take and what will be the payoff if the bet pays off.
With all due respect to the astronauts killed, there is very little benefit with both the space shuttle and the ISS that can justify the demonstrated 2% catastrophic failure associated with one its components (the shuttle) and the billions spent each year. The scientific and engineering widely acknowledges that we currently learn very little from the shuttle and space station that furthers the goal of a sustainable human presence in space.
The real courage here will be for the politicians to end the pork politics that have kept the shuttle and ISS alive for far too long, and instead invest the money the shuttle and the ISS have robbed from new propulsion and launch technologies into projects that facilitate space exploration and colonization.
My prediction? The shuttle will never fly again and the ISS will be mothballed. The people who should be the happiest about the silver lining in a very dark grey cloud are those who are most interested in seeing humans in with a permanent presence in space.
Here is the picture:
Shuttle breaking into pieces
You're right. I was wrong about the docking. I was responding to a mistaken report by the ABC news anchor this morning, who commented that the ISS crew and the Shuttle crew "had just spent time together." I guess he meant time in space, not in the same ship.
Just like Gary Condit is the man (American) who benifitted the most from Sept 11 diverting attention from his scandal, looks like Scott Peterson is going to bless this event too. If he's innocent, then I apologize, but if not, an guilty man may get off because there is no media pressure to get him convicted.
Should not you have said, "a book pertaining to grammar," instead of "a grammar book?"
Speaking on behalf of the Slashdot community.... .. we totally understand if you dupe this story tomorrow.
No humor intended. Let's all keep track of this one.
Nasa is accepting photos and other information that may be helpful.
nasamitimages@jsc.nasa.gov
(281)-483-3
Damn. Damn, damn, damn. This sucks.
But, human space travel is dangerous, no matter how commonplace the media makes it sound, and the men and women on the Columbia knew the risks.
And for the record, remember that this is the first time ever in the history of the U.S. space program that we've lost anyone on reentry. Pretty amazing, given the inherent dangers of blasting through the atmosphere at Mach 18.
For all the men and women who lost their lives pushing the limit for our greater understanding of space (and Earth): We will remember.
Virgil "Gus" Ivan Grissom
Edward Higgins White
Roger Bruce Chaffee
Francis R. "Dick" Scobee
Michael J. Smith
Ronald E. McNair
Ellison S. Onizuka
Judith A. Resnick
Gregory B. Jarvis
Christa McAuliffe
Rick D. Husband
William C. McCool
Michael P. Anderson
David M. Brown
Kalpana Chawla
Laurel Clark
Ilan Ramon
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split
clouds,--and done a hundred things you have not dreamed of
wheeled and soared and swung high in the sunlit silence.
Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless falls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, nor eer eagle flew--
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
-- John Gillespie Maggee
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
The certainly sound like grabbing an opportunity at a bad time, its really too early to think about the next flight, its time to ponder over the investigation and space flight in general.
To begin with, I would like to say that the crew that died this morning have made contributions to mankind that are great. They not only offered their lives to science and knowledge in general as they accepted the risks involved, they offered their lifetimes of education, training and experience.
However, their loss should not put a lid on a science that they gave so much to, to push forward. I believe nationalistic feelings, and the Russians' opportunistic behavior aside, it is worth looking at the Soyuz design. They lost the cold war race and lost in the competition over government systems, but they did make their mark over science in profound ways, and the robust low-maintenance Soyuz spacecraft design is a part of that. No matter how advanced the technology and the new materials, entering the atmosphere at 20.9 mach (holy faeces), takes a unique proven design to survive. The Soyuz has taken is fair share of crashes, which is why I'm not pushing it absolutely, I'm just saying nationalistic feelings shouldnt come in the way.
If only for security, the NASA should take a long serious look at an already designed and proven spacecraft before launching expensive contracts with Boeing and others, at a time when the presidency is unreasonable cuttin down taxes and scientific funding, and wasting money over an unreasonable war. Making sure the next spaceflight does not take the three years delay that the last crash took, should become a priority.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I would rather burn in hell than getting my ass pounded in heaven. Your call.
My condolences to the family and friends of the crew of Columbia.
Those of us working to open space to humanity will even harder, to honor your sacrifice.
While I'll agree with others that this is truely sad and that if there was something preventable we should be careful not to let it happen again. What really strikes me as sad though is that there will be many people who will use this to try to take away what little exploration we are still doing.
NASA has it's faults but who else does mankind have to lead our exploration? We've pretty much got this planet wrapped up. Our only places we can still explore is space and the ocean depths. If we don't explore we'll peak as a species and go straight down the crapper.
As you said exploration is dangerous but they are already to cautious IMO. If they were less cautious we may have had a mars colony by now. Sure people would die but progress would be made. I'm sure a lot of people died during the exploration of the Americas.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
If this was a terrorist act, then the terrorists only get any "benefit" out of it by it being known that it was a terrorist act.
Given that everyone is saying this was not a terrorist act, then the terrorists would have to proove that they were responsible. Oherwise they cause no terror. Once they proove responsibility they are likely to generate more anger than terror. Therefore, it is not likely a terrorist act, even if done by sabotage.
But I suppose in time, we will find out as this unfolds.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
Astonishing! Eighty percent, you say! Why, that's the most amazing thing I've heard today!
Which makes me think that you just pulled it out of your ass.
Prove otherwise, or be deemed a liar and a coward (again).
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Just because the technology is old doesnt make it unuseful. What does the shuttle ultimately land on? Wheels. Wheels have been around for thousands of years. They are one of the oldest technologies known to mankind. Why does the shuttle use wheels to land on and not some sort of new technology? Because wheels work, wheels are well understood, and wheels are cheap to make. Just because a technology wasnt discovered in the last 10 years doesnt make it bad. That being said, the point i think you were trying to make is that the shuttles themselves are old. Like an old car, except that columbia had tens of millions of miles on it instead of 300k that an old junker car would have. Metal fatigue begins to set in, and no amount of inspections can stop that. The fact that the technology is old does not nescisarily make it bad. The fact that the vehicles themselves were old does present a problem.
This isn't the end. The Challenger disaster took 2 years to work out, and that was only because they had a hard time figuring out what went wrong, and they had to do a major redesign of the booster rockets.
Also, at the time of the Challenger accident, there had been few enough flights that they were still fairly insecure about the effectiveness of their systems. After 100+ successful flights, I think it is safe to say that the shuttle isn't fundamentally flawed, and that if you dot the i's and cross the t's, the odds are way in your favor that you will have a safe flight.
With this disaster, I suspect they will figure out what went wrong fairly quickly (most likely that foam hitting the front side of the wing is my bet...those leading edge wing tiles are far more critical than any other tiles). The foam has only been a problem for the last 3 flights based on some changes they made. They will change back to the old foam system (that had the popcorn problem) and be back up and running in no time.
Another thing to note, funding and public support for NASA increased substantially after the Challenger disaster, I think we will see a similar effect here.
My prediction is the crew on the ISS will be retrieved by a space-shuttle before the end of June, mark my words.
God bless them all.
See: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/2121/used_news. htm
t nik.html
WORKING ON A TILE DAMAGE MYSTERY
By Greg Katnik
http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/shuttle/team/ka
December 23, l997
STS-87 rolled to a stop; the mission was complete! That statement is true for the flight of the Columbia, however, a new mission began when the wheels of the Columbia came to a stop: the post flight inspections. My division is responsible for the overall analysis of these inspections and we insure that all changes made, due to these inspections, do not affect other areas that may jeopardize the flight-worthiness of the shuttle. This division does not focus on one specific area, but analyzes all information and ensures that all aspects are kept in balance.
Immediately after the Columbia rolled to a stop, the inspection crews began the process of the post flight inspection. As soon as the orbiter was approached, light spots in the tiles were observed indicating that there had been significant damage to the tiles. The tiles do a fantastic job of repelling heat, however they are very fragile and susceptible to impact damage. Damage numbering up to forty tiles is considered normal on each mission due to ice dropping off of the external tank (ET) and plume re-circulation causing this debris to impact with the tiles. But the extent of damage at the conclusion of this mission was not "normal". The pattern of hits did not follow aerodynamic expectations and the number, size and severity of hits were abnormal. Three hundred and eight hits were counted during the inspection, one-hundred and thirty two (132) were greater than one inch. Some of the hits measured fifteen (15) inches long with depths measuring up to one and one-half (1 1/2) inches. Considering that the depth of the tile is two (2) inches, a 75% penetration depth had been reached.Over one hundred (100) tiles have been removed from the Columbia because they were irreparable. The inspection revealed the damage, now the "detective process" began.
During the STS-87 mission, there was a change made on the external tank. Because of NASA's goal to use environmentally friendly products, a new method of "foaming" the external tank had been used for this mission and the STS-86 mission. It is suspected that large amounts of foam separated from the external tank and impacted the orbiter. This caused significant damage to the protective tiles of the orbiter. Foam cause damage to a ceramic tile?! That seems unlikly, however, when that foam is combined with a flight velocity between speeds of MACH two to MACH four, it becomes a projectile with incredible damage potential. The big question? At what phase of the flight did it happen and what changes need to be made to correct this for future missions? I will explain the entire process.
Do I think that the US would let them use the emergency capsule? Yes. If it comes to it, they definitely will. Even if the Shuttle is grounded for more than six months, there is also the Russian Soyez rockets that can carry people up and down the gravity well. I believe they can also recieve supplies with the Russian rockets.
The cold war is over, and Russia spent alot of money learning about rockets, they are at least as good as the US, as long as they have the money. They definitely have the Science.
I don't know about anybody else, but if even one post about this gets modded Funny, I will walk away from SlashDot for good.
Well, that's *one* way to reduce band width.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Now this makes me wonder.. It is 2003 and we could not make the shuttle land successfully.
The whole moon landing thing (it was decades ago and much more difficult than this) now seems to be a mde up story....
I wish I had your bravery, kind sir. Posting such a insensitive, marvelous joke without the hooded cape that is ac. I hope people see beyond their political correctness and bless you with +1 Funny.
Yes, it would certainly take a NASA researcher to count it all.
Human kind will not forget these precious people who have lost their lives in their pursuit of scientific research. My feelings are with their families.
In respect of possible terrorist act in this incidence: The probability is nill.
Now we know that not all muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are muslims, we should assume that if this were a terrorist act, those responsible would be muslims. This is not likely at all because there is no way muslims can calculate projectiles for a missile to hit the shuttle. Muslims live in a two dimensional world. They are busy deciding whether it is a sin for a woman to wear her hair visible. They are busy deciding whether women are human beings too. Just like the christians were busy with extremely moronic discussions during the mediaveal ages. The muslim world is living their dark ages; actually they are entering their dark ages. This will take about 100 years. Eventually all religions will fade away and mankind will have peace.
Pity for people who have to endure muslims in their daily lives, like me for instance.
It is politics. Pork politics, more precisely.
Pork politics is what has kept two programs (the shuttle and the ISS) alive well past their scientific, engineering, and politically useful lives, and have needlessly risked human life and tens of billions of dollars.
Hopefully we will scrap the ISS and the shuttle after this and invest those monies into more relevant projects that will help us colonize space.
The Shuttle was moving at speeds varying from Mach 6 to Mach 20. Fighter pilots who punch out at Mach 1 or so come out of it seriously fscked up. And that's with a solid-fuel rocket propelling them away from the now out-of-control aircraft.
The astronauts, AFAIK, would have had to use a pole to open the hatch, extend a ten-foot slide, and parachute out that way. This, of course, assumes they weren't padlocked in.
The upshot of this? Well, after the Challenger disaster (which was 100% preventable, 100% unnecessary and for which, like any other government fsckup, nobody lost their jobs) Congress nearly killed the shuttle program. This time, they probably will. Truth be told, they probably should.
You're right. It would _theoretically_ be possible to sabotage the mission. In this case there is no evidence to say terrorism would have anything to do with this. The security controll was even tighter because of the first Isreali astronaut. I see no reason why to beleave this would be connected with terrorism.
It's foolish to blaim on the terrorist after every incident. I know it's much easier to blaim on someone, but no. You shouldn't do that. These things happen. It's probably just a serie of incidents. Bad luck. It's life, man. Try to accept it.
May God bless the families of the victims and all other affected by this incident.
I demand the Cone of Silence!
http://www.rap.ucar.edu/cgi-bin/neilley/NIDS_archi ve?Radar=SHV&Composite=NONE&Start_date=20030201&St art_time=13&Duration=240&Frequency=0&Parameter =1
Here is a 4 hour sequence of high-res Shreveport imagery. Whats amazing is how long the debris trail lingered in the sky, and the way it disappears so suddenly I almost think they may have adjusted the radar's gain to hide it.
I'd say this is totaly cool, but...
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Probably ditto ESA and the Russians.
Who are the non-governmental organizations involved in space flight? Are any of them donation-accepting not-for-profit groups?
I'm no pilot. My math classes ended with a very simplified stats class. I can't build the damn things and probably shouldn't be left near the controls, but there has to be some way that I can help keep space flight from dying.
In an interesting spin on the story, it turns out the US is trying to create a "death star" in space. I suppose it is another "real-life follows hollywood" thing.
Text of above link is as follows
Israeli, US astronauts die in shuttle blast over Palestine
By Barbara Ferguson, Arab News Staff
WASHINGTON, 2 February 2003
All seven crew of the American space shuttle Columbia, including the first ever Israeli astronaut, were killed yesterday when the craft disintegrated in flames just minutes before it was scheduled to land.
In a tragic irony, the Columbia exploded with its Israeli astronaut on board over a city named Palestine in the state of Texas.
The cause of the disaster was not immediately clear, but residents in north Texas heard a loud boom as Columbia passed overhead.
"I could see two bright objects flying off each side of it," said Gary Hunziker. "I just assumed they were chase jets."
Another, John Ferolito, heard a noise "like a sonic boom" as Columbia went over Dallas.
Television footage showed a bright light followed by smoke plumes streaking through the sky. Debris appeared to break off into balls of light as it continued downward. Residents of Nacogdoches, Texas, found bits of metal strewn across the city.
Officials in Washington said there was no indication of terrorism. The disaster, said the National Aeronautical and Space Administration, occurred when the craft was flying at 12,500mph, at a height of 203,000ft, far too high for any ground-to-air missile.
Investigations of technical malfunction may first center on the fact that a piece of insulating foam on the craft's external fuel tank came off shortly after lift-off on Jan. 16.
Whatever the cause, the accident dealt a powerful shock to American confidence and throws into doubt the entire manned space program.
But President George W. Bush vowed the space program would continue. "The cause in which they died will continue," he said. "Our journey into space will go on."
Bush raced back to the White House from the Camp David presidential retreat in response to the tragedy. Earlier, he spoke to the families of the astronauts.
On board Columbia were six Americans and Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, a former air force colonel. The commander of the shuttle was Rick Husband, 45, an Air Force colonel from Amarillo, Texas, who was selected as an astronaut in 1994 on his fourth try. Among his crew were William McCool, 41, a navy commander from Lubbock, Texas, and father of three sons; Kalpana Chawla, 41, one of the two women on the flight, who emigrated to the US from India in the 1980s and became an astronaut in 1994; and Laurel Clark, 41, the flight surgeon, who became an astronaut in 1996 and who has an eight-year-old son.
The mission was the 113th flight in the shuttle program's 22 years and the 28th flight for Columbia, NASA's oldest shuttle. The disaster came 17 years, almost exactly to the day, after the shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after lift-off, killing all seven of its crew. In 42 years of human space flight, NASA has never lost a space crew during landing or the ride back to orbit.
As the Columbia's crew prepared for re-entry, astronaut David Brown joked with mission control: "Do we really have to come back?" As the rising sun burned off the early morning fog the controllers in Houston gave the seven astronauts clearance to begin the run for home. "I guess you've been wondering," they radioed Columbia, "but you are now to go for the de-orbit burn." Those words marked the beginning of the descent to doom.
"Once again we see that space technology can fail," Bruce Gagnon, international coordinator for the Global Network against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, told Arab News last night. "I'm troubled because the Bush Administration has recently announced a program called the 'Nuclear Systems Initiative', a $1 billion research and development program to expand the launching of nuclear power into space. The problem is that as you increase the numbers of launches carrying nuclear payloads into space, but you are also going to dramatically increase the chances of a catastrophic Chernobyl in the sky."
Asked why NASA was advising extreme precaution at the crash sites, Gagnon said: "We haven't heard that there was a nuclear payload on this shuttle, but one of the great hallmarks of the Bush administration is increased secrecy. I must admit that when NASA said no one should go near a site because of the toxic potential of the fuels and 'other reasons,' I couldn't help but wonder what those reasons are."
Due to cuts in NASA's budget in recent years, NASA has been forced to turn to the Pentagon for increased funding, said Gagnon. The result is that the space shuttles are now also NASA missions and carry both military and civilian technologies. "What you have now is the military takeover of the space program. NASA is not just about gazing at the stars, it now also has a political and military agenda." What is of concern, he said, is that the Pentagon in now working on a program called the "Space Based Laser." "Its nickname is the 'Death Star,' and its job is to destroy other country's satellites, and also hit targets on the Earth below. NASA hopes to have the first operational tests by 2016 or 2017," Gagnon explained.
"This would give the US full control and domination of space and the earth below, because whoever controls space will control the Earth." (Additional reporting by David Randall of The Independent in New York)
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Through Struggles to the Stars... At least they were doing what they have strived for all their lives. Now we must ensure that we contine to ensure their lives were not lost in vein.
There are risks associated with all human activities.
Risks that increase in severity the closer one gets to the limits of performance.
For millenia men and women have looked at the world and with a sense of wonder set out across distance into environments that tested the limits of technology and human endurance.
By their efforts we as a species have prospered.
Sometimes the adventurers reach too far and nature passes judgement.
That doesn't mean we should stop as that way lies stagnation and ultimately oblivion.
Shortly before 0900 EST something went very wrong on board the Shuttle Columbia and seven crew died. It will be some time before we know why although there are indications of the reason even now.
I will simply express the hope that we have the courage to fix the problem and continue.
IBM
This was the first mission with RedHat Linux being used as the communcation OS on both the shuttle and the IIS. Hopefully some bad coding by the part of the opensource movement did not have anything to do with this disaster.
R.I.P
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
Linux In Space: Red Hat Rides The Rocket
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
In today's press conference a NASA official dismissed the importance of the debri that hit the left wing on launch. After all it happened in two of the previous three shuttle missions, and nothing happened.
This brought back memories of a paragraph from the Feynman report after the challenger disaster which warns precisely about this:
We have also found that certification criteria used in Flight Readiness Reviews often develop a gradually decreasing strictness. The argument that the same risk was flown before without failure is often accepted as an argument for the safety of accepting it again. Because of this, obvious weaknesses are accepted again and again, sometimes without a sufficiently serious attempt to remedy them, or to delay a flight because of their continued presence.
I think she counts as one of the Americans. I mean, she lived here and worked for NASA.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Julia Ecklar - The Phoenix.mp3
The shareholder is always right.
Actualy, unlike what we know so far about this disaster, people did know that something might go wrong with the Challenger. One of the main reasons it was pushed for that day was because Regan wanted to have people up in space while he gave the state of the union address.
Kind of ironic, I guess.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
First off, I am not saying that this was a terrorist attack or act of sabotage. Landing is the most dangerous part of a flight, as the shuttle has the aerodynamic properties of a brick. Added to that, there is no fuel left for any auxiliary engines and the angle of reentry must be VERY precise. There are thousands of things that could go wrong without any help.
But I'm sure you all have heard that already on the news.
I am good friends with a NASA engineer (who is not too high up on the status rank, btw.) I was working on a research project having to do with NASA, and as a favor to me, he obtained permission for us to tour the Obiter Processing Facility (where they prepare the shuttle for the next launch) and the Vehicle Assembly Building (where they attach the External Fuel Tank and Solid Rocket Boosters.)
All this was *extremely* easy to do. I have been inside the orbiter, under relatively little supervision, with no vouchers except for my friend's word (and he is not powerful in the NASA hierarchy, either).
Security? I'll have to think about it.
I totally agree. This storing is going to have some serious legs, and you will be hearing about it for the next month.
At least the planned daily press briefings are going to be interesting for the next little bit.
I have a mirror up at http://ari.ods.org/columbia/
Todays date written in YY-MM-DD format is: 03-02-01 ...which is the countdown used when launching a shuttle.
I'm not saying that there is anything related to this, just an interesting fact.
The timing on this is unfortunate for the USA. A hell of a blow to lose some of the bravest and brightest of the country. Petty GB is the president and is the face we have to put on the condolences to their friends and families.
May they all rest in peace.
Lets just say the tiles caused it. That critical tiles where somehow displodged by the foam on take off.
There was nothing they could do about it. They could not repair any damage. They couldn't meet up with Station, They couldn't stay on orbit much longer, Certainly not long enough to mount a rescue. The only choice they had was attempting re-entry and landing. They couldn't launch the Soyuz on the pad for a rescue because soyuz is not capable of making shuttles normal orbit, not to mention that is a progres module and not one designed for re-entry and even if it were it could only hold 3 minus anyone needed for launch ( normally 2 )..Choices where
A) Stay in orbit and die when life support failed. B) Hope it held together on re-entry.
and thats if they discovered an issue before they went for de-orbit burn. If they found out after that there only choice was hoping it held together on re-entry.
The same applies to almost any problem which may have developed of a structural nature.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
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Maybe you forgot that Gary Condit turned out not to be the killer after whats-her-face's body was found in an area where a confessed serial rapist said he had left a body. Condit lost his seat because he had an affair and didn't come clean about it fast and completely enough, not because he murdered her. Scott Peterson has nothing to loose except his freedom if he is discovered to be the reason for his wife's disappearence.
In other words, you are full of shit. The police kept searching however ineptly in both cases regardless of the national news, except Peterson has nothing to loose from a ton of bad publicity like Condit did.
[ ... ]
Thank you.
Now, with the greatest respect to all the families who have suffered this terrible loss, has anyone speculated on the following possibilites:
- that the Ants thoroughly gummed up the system before they could blow them out the hatch?
- that someone forgot to pack the inanimate carbon rod to re-seal the door with?
All Simpsons references aside, I wonder how completely those experiments disentegrated with everything else. Could those ants have survived and somehow be floating down to Earth still due to their low mass and (possibly?) ultra-slow terminal velocity?
Of course the chances of ever finding one that did survive will most likely be nil, but makes for some interesting thoughts.
- A non-productive mind is with absolutely zero balance.
- AC
I'll be sending a copy of this off to the White House and my three congresscritters. I suggest that everybody else try to do something similar.
---
Consider this letter a preemptive strike. I feel that it is important to express my views and opinions on an important topic that is sure to be hotly debated in the coming weeks and months.
In July of 1994, a series of over twenty fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacted the surface of Jupiter, a planet 1400 times the size of our own. The average energy released by the impact of each fragment was equivalent to over 200 billion tons of TNT. This is several times more powerful than the entire planet's nuclear arsenal combined, and several million more times powerful than the two atomic bombs that brought an end to the Second World War. One fragment, the seventh to impact, released energy equal to 6 trillion tons of TNT. Any single one of those fragments would have been enough to cause the extinction of the dinosaurs. If all the pieces of Shoemaker-Levy 9 had hit our world, it is difficult to know if even our planet would survive intact. Needless to say, there wouldn't be anybody around to find out how things turn out afterwards.
This morning, the world awoke to the terrible news of the loss of the space shuttle Columbia with all hands on board. Mere hours after this tragic loss, there is already renewed debate on the cost of our manned space program and suggestions of canceling the program outright. Science pundits from around the world are already trying to remind us that robotic space probes can do scientific research faster, better and cheaper than an astronaut. Although this point is debatable, it is more important to realize that pure scientific research is not the end-goal of our nation's manned space program.
Sooner or later, something large will hit our planet. We don't know if it will be next week, next month, or next year, but we do know that it will happen, and it will kill all life as we know it on our world. This is an undeniable fact, and no amount of scoffing at bad made-for-TV movies will change that.
If every human being is still on this one planet when this happens, our entire species will be nothing more than a mere footnote in history, neither having nor deserving any more notoriety than the passing of the dinosaurs. Nothing that we have accomplished after thousands of years of human civilization will matter. The lives of the seven astronauts we lost today will not matter. The debate on space exploration will not matter, nor will anything else said in Congress. Our accomplishments, our knowledge, our nation, our history, our triumphs and tragedies, everything that any person has ever done will not matter because there will be nobody left for these things to matter to.
Of what good is sending robotic probes to explore Jupiter if there isn't anybody left to use the scientific knowledge gained? What could a war on terrorism possibly mean if there won't be anybody left to live in a world free of murderous zealots?
The tragedy that happened to the Columbia should be taken as a wake-up call to the nation. However, it should not be taken as a sign that we need to abandon the idea of sending people into space, but to the fact that a piece of US history like the Columbia should have been in the National Air air Space Museum, not orbit. Our country and our species needs to take spaceflight seriously again.
In the past decade, we have been swamped with proposals for replacements for the space shuttle that would be both safer and cheaper to operate, but funding to all of them was cut. We initially had grand ideas for the International Space Station, but even now it is operating with a crew half the size it should have been. Plans for missions to the moon and even Mars have been brought up, but these have vanished in the face of "pressing" problems that are more important only in the short term. In the long-term, not even national defense is as important as manned space exploration. Even the US military can't save us from a comet.
We need to focus more on sending people to other worlds in our solar system. We should do this not for pure scientific research, not for national pride, but because we are the only ones who can.
Please focus more on the urgent need to send people into space, and please help give Columbia the distinction of being both the first and last space shuttle launched.
I just don't buy the assertion that they wouldn't have had any options if they had discovered the damage. Once they knew of the problem, they could have worked out some sort of rescue plan, perhaps getting them out to the ISS, where they could have stayed until Endeavor could have been launched to go pick them up. Columbia could have been left at the ISS until a later mission could go out to repair it.
In the words of our fearless leader, I still think they "misunderestimated" the situation.
I was in an Electronics store when the news broke, and people seemed to just stop buying stuff
..then the terrorists have already won.
Statement by President Bush
Posted: February 1, 2003
My fellow Americans, this day has brought terrible news and great sadness to our country. At 9:00 a.m. this morning, Mission Control in Houston lost contact with our Space Shuttle Columbia. A short time later, debris was seen falling from the skies above Texas. The Columbia is lost; there are no survivors.
On board was a crew of seven: Colonel Rick Husband; Lt. Colonel Michael Anderson; Commander Laurel Clark; Captain David Brown; Commander William McCool; Dr. Kalpana Chawla; and Ilan Ramon, a Colonel in the Israeli Air Force. These men and women assumed great risk in the service to all humanity.
In an age when space flight has come to seem almost routine, it is easy to overlook the dangers of travel by rocket, and the difficulties of navigating the fierce outer atmosphere of the Earth. These astronauts knew the dangers, and they faced them willingly, knowing they had a high and noble purpose in life. Because of their courage and daring and idealism, we will miss them all the more.
All Americans today are thinking, as well, of the families of these men and women who have been given this sudden shock and grief. You're not alone. Our entire nation grieves with you. And those you loved will always have the respect and gratitude of this country.
The cause in which they died will continue. Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on.
In the skies today we saw destruction and tragedy. Yet farther than we can see there is comfort and hope. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, "Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of His great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing."
The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home.
May God bless the grieving families, and may God continue to bless America.
.nosig
Because resources in this planet are not infinite?
Because the politicians may render this planet unfit for life?
Because we are curious beings?
Because we can and want?
Eggs, basket, meteorite, dinosaurs?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I know a lot of you on Slashdot aren't old enough to remember when Challanger exploded at takeoff, and don't remember the uphoria and excitement that we all used to have when the Space Shuttle was new, or the excitement that a honest to God civilian was getting to go into space. In this era of any rich playboy with $20mil can get into space with enough effort, its hard to imagine what that was like for us, especially those of us who were young at the time.
Interesting that you bring this up...I was thinking this afternoon about the difference between my reaction this morning and my reaction as an 11 year-old in 1986. When Challenger exploded, my class was eating lunch in the cafeteria. We were sitting there when Mrs. Owens was approached by another teacher. When they told her, she started bawling. We all sat there, very much confused, and watched our teachers cry. A minute or two later, our principal Mr. Rhode made the announcement over the PA and we were sent home a short time later. I can remember, even at that young age, the heartache I felt. The disbelief lasted for several days.
This morning, I was lying in bed, recovering from an early-morning road march with some folks from my Army ROTC batallion, when I saw the news on CNN.com. Strangely, I didn't panic. I didn't cry. I just sighed and called my parents. I think 11 September 2001 changed me in more ways than I previously realized. After seeing the WTC collapse and personally seeing the smoke from the smoldering Pentagon, relatively small tragedies like this just don't affect me in the same way. Kind of sad, really.
Anybody else have the same reaction?
While it is possible that there was an airframe failure, it looks rather unlikely given these facts. Airframes are one of the things we know a lot about, and 17 landings, even as violent as Shuttle landings are, just aren't enough to fatigue an airframe in a way that would make the plane break up.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
doggone it, I munged my Subject: in an attempt to edit it and accidentally hit the submit. Your post was very much on-topic. Sorry for the confusion. I was intending to change my Subject: to "It felt different this time around..."
I've been at work all day. Retail, at a bike shop, helping people make bicycles work and maybe - if I'm lucky - letting them experience a bit of the wonder and thrill they first got as a child learning to ride. We got a customer in around quarter after ten who passed on word of the tragedy, and got our jury-rigged TV antenna to tune in to the local news station - it stayed there all day. It was constantly on in the background, while I was helping laughing kids and enthusiastic adults with whatever they were up to. The customers took my mind off of things, thankfully - and now that I have time to remember, and mourn, and weep, you've helped. Thank you.
The pain was excruciating and the scarring is likely permanent, but that just means it's working.
However, your rational behind just counting the number of shuttle is questionable. What if I have just one shuttle and it launched every year for the next 100 years and then it exploded on the 100th time. In your logic, you have one shuttle and it suffered a 100% failure after 100 years. Now say I have 100 shuttles and we launch a new shuttle every year for the next 100 year. Let say 10 of them exploded. So you have 90 shuttles left and had a 90% sucesss rate. But which scenario would you prefer? Both scenario launched 100 times, yet the first scenario has one failure but none left and the second scenario has 90 left but 10 failures.
Just counting how many shuttles does not give you the whole picture about reliability.
Still a sad day. Good wishes to the families of all involved and the space program.
Two years ago, I was a highly decorated NASA engineer. I was awarded their highest medal, for Exceptional Achievement -- something that is usually reserved for senior managers -- because of my expertise.
I was a safety engineer.
I was removed from my GS-13 position, as an internationally-recognized authority on hypergolic propellants and explosives, and forced off the Kennedy Space Center. At gunpoint.
Their excuse was that I had "abused government equipment." Because I sent a friend an e-mail joke.
The reality was that I wouldn't play their "political ball."
I F-ING WARNED THEM.
I told them that the technicians and engineers were overworked. I told them that there were too many managers and too many meetings and "dog-and-pony" shows. I told them that their senior "face time" play games, while they spent all their time plotting how to give each other pay raises, and left the guys on the floor to struggle day to day with obsolete and overpriced and unqualified equipment, was going to result in another Challenger.
I was there for Challenger.
I saw the same exact conditions happening again. Overpaid, lazy, irresponsible managers concerned solely with their climbing up their ladders.
I told them they were skimping on inspections. I told them that the ground crews were asleep on their feet from exhaustion. I made as much noise as I knew how to make about the top-heavy bureaucracy sitting around in their fancy panelled offices, giving whorish press interviews in their smugness, while they did not have a clue what was going on in the real world where I was working.
They fired me. They fired a GS-13 civil servant, with an Exceptional Service medal and ten dozen commendations. For sending an e-mail joke.
In reality, for objecting to political fat-cats sitting on their fat rear ends and failing to do their jobs.
Like Challenger, those who are most guilty are the ones who will attempt to make the most political capital out of it. But the blame for Columbia lies entirely and totally with the NASA administrators. They should all be investigated for their criminal negligence. They should all serve time in jail.
I warned them. They did their best to destroy me, because I warned them.
It's too bad that innocent astronauts paid with their lives for NASA managers greed and political ass-kissing.
But I am not surprised.
Two years ago, I warned them.
Dian Hardison
Cocoa, FL 32927
Note: Her NASA biography is still online at a NASA site.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
... we spent all afternoon telling jokes. Some of them about him. While he was been cremated. At the time I am sure we looked strange. Now I understand why we didi it.
That helped us to cope.
interestingly, the jews are a culture of victims. the whole country of israel is a string of one national tragedy after another.
my point: have you by chance peked into one of the israeli news tickers? This is like some kind of banner of strength apparently. "Rmember the Alamo" all over again. "Ramon: National Hero" is the word of the day.
Both Bush and Sharon are pledging to not back down in the pursuit of continued space travel.
If we want to do something useful, we should investigate a larger "disposable" rocket with an upsized version of the Apollo capsule. The Shuttle is far too complex and fragile to be reliable. Feinman's estimate of one catastrophe per 100 launches still stands.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
On a related note, directv in thier infinite wisdom are showing Cinemax on the 376 NASA channel. An incrediably dumb thing to do today imho.
I'm sure some better stuff is available or will be, on the web, but at the moment it appears that RCS (reaction jets) is used down to about down to 83Km (250000 feet). At this point flight surfaces are used.for manouvering. They then do some serious braking down to 67Km (200,000 feet) killing the vertical speed. This appears to be whe the disaster ocurred.
See my journal, I write things there
actually it can only hold two.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
I am not certain about that, but I do know that none of the experiments required EVA. -Joe
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
you bit the hook big time.... major trolling success!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Mods on crack. This thing deserves +5 funny.
A French balloonist plans to freefall from 130,000 feet later this year.
An important difference between a jump from a balloon and bailing out from an incoming spacecraft is that the balloonist's airspeed when they bail out would be pretty close to zero, not some multiple of the speed of sound.
This comes from a company that wants to sell a replacement for the Soyuz.
That is some funny shiat. The Slashdot goatse troll cannot be kept down.
I just want to say thank you to everyone at NASA for all that they have done, and given to us, including our lives. While current experiments are not doing the best, great things have come from NASA's work, i I hope our administration will let this continue to happen. I am deeply saddened by this recent event, and can only hope for the best in the future.
ok.
107 launches.
6 shuttles ever built.
1 retired due to it being not worthy of flight.
2 have blown up.
What is the saying about doing the same thing over and over expecting different results?
My thoughts are with the families of the austronauts.
-- Contradictions only exist in thought - not in reality.
this would've been a +5 insightful if i would've left out the "fuck slashdot..." part. stupid mods, blow me
There have been at least 2 fatal accidents that I can think of with Soyuz: one in April 1967 (shortly after the Apollo fire) and one in the 1970's.
My dad (who, as you may have guessed, lives in Texas) was home when the shuttle was destroyed. He said that the whole house shook for twenty to thirty seconds. The pictures on the walls were rattling. When he first heard the boom, he thought it could be a sonic boom, as he's heard those before. But then it kept going...
My thoughts and heart are with the astronauts families. Brave men and women, all of them. I give a special nod to the folks from Racine... I hate to lose someone from Wisconsin.
Best wishes to you all.
-- haaz.
Statistically speaking, it has 98% sucess rate on launches. I agree that it does not mean anything on future launches. What I disagree with your original post is you asked 'How many shuttles have there been?' and 'How many have exploded?'. But you did not take the number of launches into the equation. Is 98% success rate good enough? I don't know and I wish it could be better. But just counting the number of shuttles could not give you the complete picture.
And the likelihood that this was an act of terrorism? I mean the shuttle was 40 miles up, well out of range of any SAMs. Internal sabotage? There is pretty good security on the shuttle, launch site, etc.
More likely, something went wrong simply by chance. Reentry is the absolute most dangerous part of the flight anyway, and mechanical failures have happened before, due to both human error (Challenger) and flawed components (Apollo 13).
Besides, is it so wrong to take notice of tragedy simply because it might be an act of terrorism? I mean, if your brother were killed in a terrorist attack, would you not go to his funeral simply because "then the terrorists have already won?"
Challenger blew up because of human error. The engineers didn't realize that cold weather would cause the O-rings sealing the booster rockets to stop working. Last time I checked, more money doesn't make people smarter.
Last I checked, 8 out of the last ten years were under Clinton... And wasn't that fun!!
I would much rather have a president who knows how to zip up his pants, even if he might shift spending away from science and toward defense at a time when the country is preparing for war against a dictator who gasses his own people for fun.
They solved the Chandra levy case? Since when?
And how would the Columbia have gotten 100 miles higher with no propulsion beyond guidance rockets?
It is my understanding that this was not confirmed until reviewing the tapes far after any abort would have been possible.
We'll also go bankrupt in 2014.
That is really great. Do I violate any copyright laws by showing copies to friends, or placing on a website?
You really deserve a lot of credit for those words.
I don't know why God allowed this tragedy to occur, but I do pray that He watches over the families and friends of the victims and the NASA community, and give them His comfort in this time of trial. May He give him the strength to cope with this loss. Remember that our hope and our refuge is in the Lord.
I also urge Congress and NASA to develop a new, safer, more reliable orbiter. Columbia has been in service for 21 years. I was only 2 during the Challenger disaster, so this is the first time I have really been aware of how hazardous space travel is. As somebody who has long followed the space program, and who aspires to work in the aerospace industry, this has really hit me on a close, emotional level, perhaps even more so then the events of September 11.
I do not know why my first response to this disaster is a Slashdot post. Not to be heard, as I am posting on the 20ish page as an AC, but just for a chance to speak. Thank you for reading this.
SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA 2/1/2003
But those who hope in the LORD
Will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
They will run and not grow weary,
They will walk and not be faint.
-Isaiah 40:31
Yeah, It's not like its going to FUCKING hurt anybody, FUCK FUCKETY FUCK FUCK FUCK
FUCK!
Yay! First Post!
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds -- and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of -- wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew.
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
-- RCAF Flight-Lieutenant John Gillespie Magee Jr.
(1922-1941).
In the USA, we like stuff watered down, like beer, television, and freedom.
i would.
nt
They could have aborted had they noticed it at the time. As events occurred, NASA did not know of the falling insulation until the NEXT DAY, when they reviewed the launch films, and would have been far too late to do anything about it.
Man it sucks not to have mod points some days, but then again I've already posted in this thread.
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
More like 2836th post.
Retard.
Let him gas his own people! Who cares? Our economy is in the shitter, and right now we really have no business unseating a dictator in another country in a potentially hugely expensive 'war'. If the situation is so urgent, why aren't other countries and the UN so quick to fight it out with Saddam?
No, unfortunately kids, this war is gonna be about oil and oil prices. Once again American blood will spill for the fuel our hungry SUV's need to plow through the 30 minute commute to work. Remember Desert Storm? Same shit, different day. Oil prices sure did plummet after that! Ho ho ho, my Suburban is cheaper to fuel, hallelujah!
BTW the Clinton years shine like gold next to the dogshit we've been enduring since the second old Dubya slid into office. The economy was good, everyone made out ok, and everyone was pretty much happy. Now, the economy is fucked, more companies are outsourcing high paying jobs to other countries, and crime is up. Thanks Dubya, and thanks alot Republican politics.
"What happened? Why did it break?"
I think were all asking that tonight.
-twb
I haven't seen this mentioned much thus far, but yes, there is a possibility that orbital debris hit the orbiter, went undetected, and caused the catastrophe. What the odds of those three things add up to is anybody's guess.
There is a hell of a lot of junk in orbit, but most of it is above the typical orbiter (or ISS) altitude of 250 miles or so. The two densest debris bands occur around 600 miles and 900 miles up. The 200-250 mile band is sort of self-cleaning, because the fringes of the atmosphere brake debris and cause it to fall from orbit. Nonetheless, the orbiter is expected to hit something small as a matter of course, because lots of stuff is in decaying orbits and works its way down through the 250 mile area on its way to a fiery doom. At a relative 30,000kph even a paint chip is a deadly weapon (low orbit means high speed). This is the major reason why the shuttle orbits facing backwards and upside-down - doing so reduces the odds of something penetrating the crew module. But NASA still replaces one window on average after each flight because of damage from dust-sized particles (including some natural micrometeoroids).
No one actually knows the odds for the tiny particles that can't be tracked by radar - predicting them is at best a statistical exercise. Larger objects are tracked (there are around 10,000 of them), but those wouldn't have caused the sort of undetected damage that you're asking about. If a baseball or even a visible pellet hits you at that velocity, you know about it immediately. It's even possible that an undetectable dispersed swarm of tiny particles could wear away at a surface, for instance (this is another reason windows are replaced - they fog, as can the lenses on Hubble).
As for the tiles, an awful lot would have had to come loose to cause this. Someone would have noticed if this were the case.
98% is piss poor.
:) As in no solid rocket boosters and liquid tanks that fall back to earth as some of the most expensive pollution ever. Where is this great advance in science? 30 year old technology that is unreliable, expensive, and barely re-usable is not aceptable.
NASA is a professional organization that has spent trillions of dollars over the years. They still have problems converting meters to feet. That was only a year or 2 ago. That is truly pathetic.
As for the number of shuttles. 50% are not flight worthy. If Boeing made 737's where only 50% were good, would you fly on one? I would not.
And as far as reliability is concerned, how many of these things actually launch when scheduled? Not often (neither do airlines for that matter). We are supposed to be impressed by the thoroughness of NASA every time they find a problem before launch. I am not impressed. That shows a lack of good design.
If we are to continue wasting money on low earth orbit programs it should be done in a safer way. It should be good enough to be able to be done more than 4 or 5 times a year. Preferably a vehicle that can get it up by itself
It is a shame that it takes a 2nd mistake of this magnitude to wake the public up that this is not a good way of doing things.
Thats 2136.
Tardier Tard.
According to CNN's timeline, the astronauts were aware of a problem shortly before breakup. There was at least seven minutes during which sensors were not properly responding.
However, it's not like you'd ditch the shuttle (even if seven minutes was enough time) based on just a few sensors not properly responding. As a matter of fact, according to the timeline, the crew was just acknowledging the first alert that was given them when they lost contact. So there almost certainly wasn't anything anyone could have done, even if immediate action was taken.
May we never see th
ubi caritas et amor, deus ibi est.
NASA weighed retiring Columbia in 2001
By Richard Stenger
CNN
(CNN) -- The space shuttle Columbia, lost with its seven-person crew in a catastrophic re-entry accident on Saturday, was considered for retirement in 2001.
The oldest orbiter in the fleet, it had experienced engineering problems before during a long career that begin with the first shuttle mission more than 20 years ago.
Yet none of the previous glitches on Columbia, which underwent a $90 million, 17-month overhaul that began in September 1999, were thought to have contributed to the fatal mishap.
The 90-ton shuttle, heavier than other spacecraft in the fleet, was the only one not outfitted to dock with the international space station.
NASA had considered mothballing it in 2001 because of budget constraints, but decided to keep it in service, in part to ensure flying several scheduled missions.
They included the one known as STS-107, which, after years of delays, went into space in mid-January for a rare mission devoted solely to science.
The $2 billion craft has been part of numerous NASA milestones since becoming the first shuttle to go into orbit in 1981.
In 1999, it deployed the powerful Chandra X-ray space telescope, with the first female commander at the helm, Eileen Collins.
But that mission began with major problems. The shuttle had leaked thousands of pounds of fuel during liftoff, leaving it in a lopsided but functional orbit.
And seconds after launch, a short circuit knocked out computers that controlled two of three shuttle engines.
A backup computer system kicked in, narrowly avoiding the need for an emergency landing.
NASA grounded the fleet for months to inspect and repair exposed wiring on the four orbiters. Each has 100 miles of electrical wiring.
On the most recent, fatal flight, NASA technicians reviewing video noticed that a number of heat insulation tiles seemed to have fallen off from one of the wings during the shuttle's eight-minute race to orbit.
The tiles protect the shuttle from the intense friction heat of atmospheric re-entry. Similar instances have happened in the past but whether their loss this time played a role in the disaster remains unknown.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The following is a recap of President Bush's day, as recounted to CNN by a senior administration official:
8 a.m. EST
President Bush, at the Camp David retreat, receives his usual intelligence briefing.
9 a.m. EST
White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, also at Camp David, is channel surfing, flipping through TV stations, and begins watching NASA Television, awaiting the landing. He sees that NASA has lost contact with the space shuttle Columbia.
Card calls the Situation Room and then NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe but could not reach him. Card tells Bush that NASA has lost contact with the shuttle.
Bush's initial reaction is that he is deeply concerned for those on board, especially for the families. He tells Card to keep him updated as events unfold and to keep in close contact with O'Keefe.
9:15 a.m. EST
Card and O'Keefe speak. O'Keefe updates him on the situation.
Card notifies National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who is at Camp David, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers.
10:30 a.m. EST
Bush is briefed by O'Keefe by phone and decides to cut short his stay at Camp David.
12:15 p.m. EST
Bush returns to the White House via a speeding motorcade.
12:30 p.m. EST
The president has returned to the Oval Office. Soon after, he is briefed by O'Keefe by phone, who tells Bush that the families are "holding up exceptionally well ... they are a courageous group of people."
Bush tells O'Keefe that "this was a tough day for all."
12:40 p.m. EST
Bush holds a conference call with victims' families, who had assembled in a conference room at Kennedy Space Center. Bush is standing at his desk in the Oval Office.
In the conversation, which takes place over a speaker phone, Bush says, "I express my love and appreciation for all who died today. I want their loved ones to know there are millions of people praying for you.... I hope that brings some comfort to you. This was an incredibly tough day. May God Bless you all. I wish I was there to hug, cry and comfort you. God Bless you all. God Bless."
12:45 p.m. EST
Bush is briefed by advisers in the Roosevelt Room: Rice, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge, and his science adviser, regarding fallen shuttle debris.
1:25 p.m. EST
Bush calls Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to offer condolences.
1:25 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. EST
Bush returns condolence calls from Mexican President Vicente Fox, French President Jacques Chirac, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien.
Iraq is discussed in none of these calls. Between the calls, Bush prepares to address the nation.
2 p.m. EST
The president addresses the nation from the Cabinet Room at the White House. "Columbia is lost," he says, "there are no survivors."
Lawmakers vow to investigate shuttle disaster
Voice support for space program
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Top U.S. lawmakers, expressing grief following the space shuttle Columbia disaster, promised to take steps to prevent such a tragedy from happening again -- but not to curtail U.S. efforts to explore space.
"It is now a top priority to determine the causes behind this tragedy," said Sen. Sam Brownback, chairman of the Senate Space, Science and Technology Subcommittee.
"As NASA determines what went so terribly wrong, we will be diligent in doing everything we can in the Congress to give NASA all the support it needs to make sure we press forward with scientific advances, and that nothing like this happens again," the Kansas Republican said.
"Our prayers are with the family members, friends and colleagues of the seven astronauts. Those we lost today are heroes."
Sen. George Allen, R-Virginia, echoed those words. "Today is a sad day for the world," he said. "Our first concern is for comfort of the heartbroken, grieving families and dear friends of the seven astronauts who perished in this catastrophic failure. Second, like all of us who watched the horror of this tragedy, I believe to insure the safety of all future missions we must determine the cause."
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas called space flight "the most dangerous and daring endeavor human beings have ever attempted.
"For that reason, astronauts, on the strength of their daring and devotion, have always held a special place in our hearts and our dreams," he said. "As the most fitting tribute to their courageous service and sacrifice, let us recommit ourselves to the defining dream that dominated their lives: a bold vision for America in space."
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, said the astronauts' mission "was their parting gift to the world."
"We mourn the loss of these five brave men and two women, but we are forever grateful for their service and sacrifice," she said, adding that the address President Bush delivered to the nation following the tragedy will bring comfort to NASA employees "who are immediately and resiliently going about the difficult task of finding out what happened to their co-workers during this difficult time."
Lawmakers extended condolences to Israelis, who share in the tragedy. Among the seven onboard the shuttle was Colonel Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli to travel to space.
"America's collective heart goes out to the families of those lost in today's tragedy. From America to Israel, you are in our thoughts and prayers," Rep. Mark Foley, R-Florida, said. "As a member of Congress, I'll do everything possible to ensure NASA has whatever it needs to prevent this from happening again."
More than 150 House Democrats were meeting at an issues conference in Pennsylvania when they heard the news.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the seven astronauts," House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement. "Our nation and the world are devastated... I hope it is a comfort to the families who have lost their loved ones that the whole world mourns their loss and is praying for them at this sad time."
"These courageous astronauts were pioneers in a grand tradition of space exploration whose mission -- to improve our lives through unprecedented scientific breakthroughs, life-saving medical research, and building international cooperation -- is only accomplished through the heroic commitment of such brave men and women."
She added, "Our prayers are with President Bush at this time of sorrow for our country. We extend our deepest sympathy to Prime Minister Sharon for the loss of the first Israeli astronaut in space."
Comparison to Challenger disaster
House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland compared the disaster to the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, and said he shares in grieving those lost aboard the Columbia.
"These bright stars of our space program were aware of the risks that they took by going into space but that did not lessen their commitment to this program," he said.
"My thoughts and prayers are with them and with their families."
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Connecticut, cancelled his scheduled presidential campaign trip through Iowa on Sunday and Monday, a campaign spokesman said, adding that Lieberman felt it would be inappropriate "in this time of national tragedy."
Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, said, "This terrible loss is a reminder that we can never take for granted the sacrifice of heroes. We extend our condolences to the families of these American patriots and their decorated Israeli colleague at this time of profound sadness."
McCain said he had "the utmost confidence that NASA will conduct a thorough and complete investigation of this tragedy."
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, told CNN she thinks Congress will hold hearings on the disaster.
"I think clearly anytime we are pushing the envelope in science and technology, there are going to be tragedies," Hutchison said. "We need to appreciate these wonderful test pilots who are doing so much for our country."
Officials: No evidence of terrorism
(CNN) -- There was no sign that terrorism was involved in NASA's loss of contact with the space shuttle Columbia, Bush administration officials said Saturday.
"At this time we have no indication that the mishap was caused by anything or anyone on the ground," NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said in a news conference Saturday afternoon.
President George Bush immediately left for the White House to address the crisis, a spokesman said. He was spending the weekend at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland, where he was briefed on the disappearance by his chief of staff, Andrew Card.
"The president has been informed about the situation. We are awaiting more information from NASA at this point," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.
A senior law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press that the shuttle was flying at about 200,000 feet above earth when it disappeared -- well out of range of surface-to-air missiles.
"We have no information at this time that indicates that this was a terrorism incident," said Gordon Johndroe, press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security. "Obviously, the investigation is just beginning, but that is what we know now."
Security had been tightened for the January 16 launch because some officials were concerned that the presence of Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, would make the shuttle a terrorist target. Ramon was the first Israeli astronaut to fly into space.
Vice President Dick Cheney, who was spending the weekend hunting in Texas, was briefed on the disappearance Saturday morning and was watching television along with receiving official updates, a spokeswoman said.
Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge is expected to oversee and coordinate the investigation efforts into the shuttle loss, even though terrorism is not suspected. Ridge joined other officials Saturday in the White House, where they were gathering more information about the crisis.
"We're all watching TV and devastated and concerned," John Marburger, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told the AP.
hey, it's a risky business. there are always tradeoffs in engineering, and they do the best they can, but it's not 100% or even 99.99%. It's not a perfect world.
Get a bit of perspective. You complain about gas prices? How about the *far* greater number of lives that were lost there and in involved situations?
You're taking part in a totally irrational outburst. The guy didn't say that the astronauts that died didn't matter -- just that he was sad about the shuttle. You're *trying* to find a fight to pick, trying to transfer your frustration. Cool down.
May we never see th
from the Ants in Space /. story:
So... (Score:5, Funny)
by antaeogo on Sunday January 26, @01:07AM
If the shuttle crashes during re-entry, they can blame it on a bug in the system?
They have slipped the surly bonds of earth and touched the face of God.
These people were pioneers. They would not be pioneers without risk, and they knew the risks. They were brilliant, dedicated, highly trained people who knew the risks.
The blow we felt wasn't just the loss of these people, it was also the loss of their spirit, which exceeded immeasurably their mortal selves. This spirit carries us aloft with them, and when it is suddenly gone, we fall.
May they rest in peace, and may their memories live on.
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. -A. Turing
I watched CNN almost 10 minutes today. Even though I wanted to find out what had happened, I decided to wait until I can read the info on NASAs website. What helped me make that decision? The scrolling text at the bottom of their screen was listing other space disasters. It wasn't the listing of the disasters that offended me, it was the listing saying that the only disaster before Challenger was the Apollo13 lauchpad fire!
I'm sure most of you know that the launchpad fire was infact Apollo1
The ignorence astounds me! These are the people we are expected to get our news from???
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
such is life, what comes next? Only bob knows..
Even if I say something insightfull or inteligent, it doens't matter cause I'm an ass.
"bad lucks"? Who the fuck let you on the internet?
It fucking grills my goat that the barrier of entry to the web is so low that slime like this can post here. FUCK OFF.
He was referring to the fact that they had stopped 'consuming' for a limited time.
get your facts straight. Do a google on zubrin and Mars
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
The Indian had immigrated to the US. Otherwise you'd have to say there were no Americans on board and quote everyone as being the nationality their families were from.
Idiot.
Do us all a favor and stop contemplating your own navel or practicing your daily onanism ritual.
Things wouldn't be so crappy if the money-grubbing, left-leaning Internet Business Scam-business-owners hadn't artificially pumped-up the economy with falsified financial reports and cooked accounting books. Things fell apart when these schysters tried to cash themselves out because they knew that a Republican Administration would investigate them and throw all of them in the slammer before they could catch the next plane to Jammaica or Sierra-Leone or Zurich. Thankfully, The Rigas's and other Morally-corrupt CEOs are being rounded-up and arrested for their financial shenanigans.
Crime *is* up because a good number of corrupt left-wing democrats are now out of work because "their boy" is no longer President and they have to survive. Why do you think that Clinton has is personal office in Harlem?
The Democratic Party is being run by all of the high-powered (and mostly corrupt) Lawyers in Washington, DC. They hide behind the edifices of their Lawfirms, orchestrating the breakdown of American Society. That's who to blame, you PUTZ!
ScottKin
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!
I think it's really lame that people are going off on each other about how to raise their kids... but it's amusing.
/. & was informed for the first time about the shite that was going on - tech related or not. When I read the comments to the posts I expect to find interesting, thought provoking, informative text & diverse opinions on things. Obviously wandering off on tangents like child rearing is to be expected---but what's w/ this prejudice CRAP?
Personally computers are a way for me to escape these bull-shite boundaries ignorant people, like those who say crap about wanting to drop bombs on Israel, are living by...
Cheesy as it may be the hacker's manifesto thing is something I "believe" in; the underlying & incredibly blatant moral & morale behind it are what I'd place emphasis on.
...guess that's what I get for looking at ALL the posts... moderation is good in moderation- huh?
I also think it's really lame that some people are spewing racial slurs - it's like I'm getting hit in the face w/ vomit & other excrement - it disgusts me......
When I come on Slashdot I come on Slashdot to read news. With this space shuttle incident as w/ events in the past (9/11'd be the most recent) I came online- to
What the hell happened to these people who are getting their bile all over me? And why hasn't someone taken their computers away from them?
On a note more unrelated than child rearing to the space shuttle - if any of you reading this - have not already heard music by ladytron give it a listen- good stuff.
[ò_x]
It was the upper management at Morton-Thiokol who made the decision to 'Go for launch'.
A rather interesting book on the subject is "What do you care what other people think" by Richard P. Feynman. He was one of the principle scientists on the Rogers commission that investigated the Challenger "accident".
The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
ALL HANDS! STAND BY! FREE FALLING!
And the lights below us fade.
Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps the race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet ---
We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
- Green Hills of Earth
--
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
-Fantastic Lad
this is not a sig.
Wow, I bet it took a lot of imagination to copy and paste that post from a September 11th thread.
/. post from a lowly AC with another /. cliche:
I guess I can only answer one cliche'd
Plan for AC to look like a retarded ass!
1. Wait for Americans to die
2. Wait for other Americans to become upset about it.
3. Post inane comment attacking Americans because they don't know about some obscure, insignifant tragedy in a backwards, thirdworld country.
4. ???
5. AC == retarded piece of shit!
(PS - My apologies in advance to the mentally challenged community for insulting any of you by implying that this worthless AC worm is anywhere near your level of humanity).
look at the differences in driving cars, flying planes and launching space shuttles. Perhaps the lesson here is also to work to make the space shuttles more robust and more durable. As it is now, they are expensive pieces of crap that it seems that one speck of gnat shit can cause either a cancled mission or a blown up craft.
Mourning, recovery effort follow disaster
... You can do great things for humanity if you just set some small goals and always go for the next thing and set your sights higher." (CNN Access)
NASA: 'We're going to find out what caused this'
JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Texas (CNN) --Family members and friends mourned the crew of the space shuttle Columbia on Sunday as NASA's chief vowed the agency would "make sure this never happens again."
Thousands of fragments of the shuttle awaited discovery in a 200-mile swath of eastern Texas and western Louisiana a day after the craft disintegrated upon reentry, more than 1,000 miles short of its destination. All seven astronauts aboard were killed.
"We owe it to them every single second of the day to be sure we dedicate ourselves to finding out what went wrong," NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said Sunday. "We're going to find out what caused this, we're going to make sure we correct it, and we're going to make sure this never happens again."
NASA officials said the shuttle's left wing lost hydraulic sensors, lost tire pressure and then experienced intense heat before the shuttle broke apart. Officials also said they would take another look at an incident during Columbia's January 16 launch in which a piece of insulation struck the wing and might have knocked off some heat resistant tiles.
Investigators went Sunday to a Lockheed Martin facility in New Orleans, Louisiana, where the shuttle's external fuel tank was built. (Investigation)
The investigation also will include a review by an independent board led by retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman, who headed the probe of the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. (More on Gehman)
The shuttle crew was remembered during Sunday church services. In Amarillo, Texas, at shuttle commander Rick D. Husband's church, family friend Patty Ragan remembered Husband as "a man of God" who "put himself into everything he did with a full heart." (More on memorials)
In Racine, Wisconsin, friends and family members mourned mission specialist Laurel Clark at Olympia Brown Unitarian Universalist Church.
"Laurel was a very intense person who would set goals and would go for them," Clark's brother, Daniel Salton, said Sunday. "And I think that's a great role model for kids today.
Those killed on the ill-fated shuttle flight were Husband, Clark, pilot William C. McCool, payload commander Michael P. Anderson, mission specialists David M. Brown and Kalpana Chawla, and Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon.
"Columbia's lost. There are no survivors," a grim-faced President Bush said in an address to the American people Saturday. "These astronauts knew the dangers and they faced them willingly, knowing they had a high and noble purpose in life." (Full story)
Human remains were found in the eastern Texas county of Sabine and in Hemphill, the county seat. Two charred helmets and an intact mission patch bearing the names of the seven crew members also were discovered. (Full story)
A NASA official said the shuttle's altitude made it "highly unlikely" that it was a victim of a terrorist act. FBI officials quickly discounted the possibility of foul play or terrorism. (Full story)
Space shuttle flights have been put on hold until NASA can learn what caused the disaster. NASA said the international space station, where two astronauts and a cosmonaut remain, has enough supplies to last the crew until June.
The next shuttle flight had been scheduled for March 1.
Search for debris 'painstakingly slow'
Parts of the shuttle -- large and small -- were found alongside highways, in parking lots, on sidewalks and front lawns. There were reports of debris at more than 1,000 sites in Nacogdoches County, Texas alone, but not all were confirmed.
In Hemphill, about 180 miles southeast of Dallas, emergency operations official Bill Ted Smith said the search for debris was "painstakingly slow."
"We have approximately a 250 square-mile path that we're having to search. We got around 40 square miles yesterday identified, and due to the rugged forest terrain that is around here, it's making the search difficult," he said.
No injuries were reported from falling debris, which Nacogdoches Mayor Roy Blake called "a miracle."
People were urged not to go near the debris because it could contain toxic substances from the shuttle fuel. In Nacogdoches County, at least 70 people concerned that they may have touched debris had gone to area hospitals by Sunday morning, but none showed any injuries, said county emergency management director Sue Kennedy. (Debris dangers)
Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Columbia left a debris field stretching from the Dallas area northward to the Arkansas border and eastward to Alexandria, Louisiana. Perry said most of the debris seemed to be about 2- to 5-inch pieces. (More on debris found)
Witnesses in Texas reported debris falling from the sky accompanied by a cascade of thunder. Heat-detecting weather radar showed a bright red streak moving across the wide Texas sky. (Disaster timeline)
Officials asked anyone who finds debris to call (281) 483-3388.
Columbia was lost less than a week after the anniversaries of two other deadly space program disasters -- the 17th anniversary on January 28 of the explosion of the shuttle Challenger in 1986 and the 36th anniversary on January 27 of a launch pad fire that killed three Apollo astronauts in 1967. (Challenger disaster)
NASA looks to fuel tank in investigation
Shuttle wing lost sensors, maybe heat tiles
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) --Investigators looking for the cause of the space shuttle Columbia disaster were expected to arrive Sunday at Lockheed Martin's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, where the external fuel tanks for the shuttles are built.
The facility has already impounded records pertaining to the production of Columbia's 154-foot long tank, said company spokeswoman Marion Lansa.
A piece of foam fell off the tank during launch January 16, striking heat-resistant tiles on the shuttle's left wing, NASA officials said.
After extensive analysis, NASA officials determined the mishap did not present a safety concern for the shuttle.
But in light of Columbia's disintegration at 200,000 feet -- which followed the failure of some of the sensors on the left wing -- chief flight director Milt Heflin said investigators would take a closer look at the launch incident.
NASA has suspended all shuttle flights pending the outcome of the investigation, which will include a review by an independent board led by retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman, who headed the probe of the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. (More on Gehman)
"We're going to provide all the information in our internal investigation and let the facts speak to what happened," NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said Sunday.
"And we're going to correct it and move on and be sure that we fly safely, as is our commitment, each and every time we launch and each and every time there's a landing."
NASA officials said the left wing lost hydraulic sensors, lost tire pressure and then experienced intense heat before the shuttle broke up Saturday morning.
The tiles protect the shuttle from the intense heat generated during atmospheric re-entry.
A few have fallen off during other launches and Mission Control determined during this mission there was no reason for concern.
Besides the tile issue, speculation on the cause included extreme aerodynamic stresses on the 90-ton shuttle, which has been likened to a flying brick with wings as it plunges from orbit into the atmosphere, controlled not by engines but aerial flaps.
Should a shuttle steer in the wrong direction as it re-enters the atmosphere, going at many times the speed of sound, it could fly out of control and break apart due to the extreme stress, according to space experts.
Federal officials ruled out the possibility of terrorism, given that the shuttle was some 200,000 feet high when it broke apart
The last communication Johnson Space Center had with the Columbia crew before the spacecraft disintegrated referred to tire pressure.
Mission Control: "And Columbia, Houston, we see your tire pressure messages, and we did not copy your last."
Crew member: "Roger." [indiscernible]
After the shuttle Challenger exploded 17 years ago, the shuttle fleet was grounded for two years as it looked into the cause of the mishap and how to prevent it.
CNN.com's Richard Stenger contributed to this report.
Human remains found amid debris
... is preserved in such a way that NASA can come in afterward and find out what caused this tragedy," Brown said.
SAN AUGUSTINE, Texas (CNN) --Hundreds of pieces of debris from the space shuttle Columbia and human remains believed to be those of the crew have been found in Louisiana and Texas, officials said Sunday.
"Some human remains were found and our search efforts will be concentrated around those areas," said Sheriff Tommy Maddox of Sabine County, Texas.
Maddox did not give details, but the mother of a young boy in Hemphill, the county seat, said her son found a scorched leg. Hemphill is about 180 miles southeast of Dallas.
At one site, firefighters and police paused to say a prayer before wrapping an object in a body bag and taking it away in a black hearse.
The FBI continued to investigate reports of human remains being found, which by midday Sunday totaled four in the county.
In other areas, two charred helmets were found, as was a mission patch bearing the names of the crew members.
Recovery effort scours region
Shuttle fragments ranging from tiny pieces to one the size of a compact car were found strewn across what federal officials call "a huge debris field." (List of debris)
"I've heard estimates of 500 square miles, up to 1,500 square miles," said Michael Brown, deputy director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is leading the search.
"We don't have the manpower ourselves to go out and do the search, finding and securing alone. We have to partner with the Environmental Protection Agency, and local law enforcement, local community officials, county commissioners."
Officials at all levels, Brown said, would "make certain that we have all the resources available."
Investigators are worried some pieces may never be found, a concern because the shuttle fragments may be toxic and because NASA investigators need as many recovered pieces as possible to determine what caused the disaster.
"We want to make sure that this evidence
People report to hospitals for screening
Across the swath of the shuttle crash parts were discovered alongside a highway, in a parking lot, on sidewalks and on residential front lawns.
One piece, a 4-foot-wide cylinder, emitted a vapor.
At least six chunks, including one about 5 feet long, landed on Ronnie Joe Evett's Texas farm. One piece looked like tubing, he said. Another, with screws and bolts, was partly charred and punctured
Despite all the debris that fell, no injuries were reported. Mayor Roy Blake of Nacogdoches, Texas, called it "a miracle."
Authorities warned people not to touch debris, noting the potential hazards and the upcoming investigation. (Why debris may be toxic)
"The FBI has informed us that if you take that, that is federal property. They will pursue legal action and prosecute if necessary to get that back," Kennedy said.
By 7:30 a.m. Sunday, at least 70 people had gone to emergency rooms in area hospitals concerned they may have touched debris, said Sue Kennedy, Nacogdoches County emergency management chief. None of the people showed any injuries, Kennedy said.
Eight people -- all civilians and not part of the salvage effort -- have been treated for burns and respiratory problems at San Augustine area hospitals, Billy Smith, emergency management coordinator for three East Texas cities, told a Sunday news briefing. He had no other details.
Air space restricted over search area
Nacogdoches County authorities said some buildings and vehicles were damaged by falling debris.
The county had reports of possible debris at more than 1,000 different sites, but not all were confirmed, Sheriff Thomas Kerss said.
An estimated 100 sites were being closely guarded Sunday because they were deemed to have "significant pieces of wreckage" or possible hazardous material, he said.
Most of the findings so far were in Nacogdoches city, the most heavily populated part of the county, he said.
"We have a mass amount of forest and timberland. Some of this area may not receive coverage for weeks or months," Kerss said.
Top priorities, Kerss said, were finding pieces that may be particularly hazardous as well as pieces that may contain data critical to the investigation.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry said most of the debris seemed to be about 2 to 5 inches in size.
In Louisiana, officials found shuttle parts scattered near the Texas border.
"We have three confirmed pieces in Vernon Parish," State Police spokesman Sgt. Howard McKee said.
Witnesses reported seeing lots of material fall into the Toledo Bend Reservoir, which forms the border in that area between Texas and Louisiana.
Sheriff Maddox of Sabine County said officials were waiting for sonar equipment to arrive so they can search for the pieces underwater.
Experts estimated Columbia broke up nearly 40 miles above the Earth, which could extend the debris field into Arizona and New Mexico.
The Federal Aviation Administration restricted air space from Cedar Creek, Texas, just south of Dallas, to Fort Polk, Louisiana -- a zone 160 miles long and 40 miles wide -- saying it would make it easier for officials to collect debris. Flights in the restricted zone were barred from flying below 3,000 feet.
John Glenn: Loss of contact a terrible omen
(AP) --Former astronaut John Glenn and his wife had just turned on their television to watch the space shuttle Columbia return home Saturday when communications with the craft were lost as it soared across Texas.
"We were going to be watching the landing and then it got into trouble," Glenn said.
"Anytime you lose contact like that, there's some big problem. Of course, once you went for several minutes without any contact, you knew something was terribly wrong."
Glenn, also a former senator from Ohio, said he had met Columbia's commander, astronaut Rick Husband, while training for his 1998 flight but did not know him well. Glenn said he didn't know any of the other astronauts on board.
Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth on February 20, 1962. In 1998, at age 77, he became the oldest space traveler when he returned on the shuttle Discovery. Later that year, he retired from the Senate after representing Ohio for 24 years.
The only other fatal accident involving the shuttle fleet was the explosion of Challenger in 1986, which killed all seven astronauts on board.
"I think NASA's safety record has been an amazing safety record over the years," Glenn said.
House Democratic leaders were meeting Saturday at a mountain resort in western Pennsylvania.
"We thought that matters we were dealing with were of the greatest seriousness. But it isn't of the greatest urgency for us to discuss them right now," House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said at Farmington, Pennsylvania. "What is urgent is that we retire to the room with our colleagues to lead them in prayer."
"Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of those on board," Pelosi said. "Our thoughts and prayers are with the American people who place so much hope and who associate themselves with the courage and the bravery of those who venture into space."
Family and friends recall astronauts with admiration, pride
HOUSTON, Texas (CNN) --Family and friends of the astronauts who died Saturday when their speeding spacecraft disintegrated 200,000 feet above Texas recalled them with admiration and pride.
The remembrances came as Americans filled churches, temples and synagogues across the nation to express their sorrow over the loss of the seven astronauts.
On Sunday, David Jones was still describing his friend Rick Husband in the present tense. "Rick is a strong Christian man, and his family shares that faith," Jones said.
He watched the shuttle streak overhead from Lubbock, Texas, and didn't sense anything was amiss.
Jones said he then went inside to watch the touchdown on television.
His friend, the 45-year-old commander of the shuttle, had appeared confident in their last meeting in October in Lubbock, Jones said.
Patty Ragan said her friend Rick, lived life to the fullest. "He put himself into everything he did with a full heart and whatever was necessary to achieve his goals, he was willing to do that," she said.
Remembrances span the globe
In San Diego, California, a day after her 41-year-old son Willie died, Audrey McCool was passionate about her son.
"He did not die in vain," Audrey said. "This will go on -- space program go on."
She said her son was married, deeply religious and loved teaching children about science -- the focus of the 16-day mission. "They felt it would have benefits for humanity. It would be a travesty if they didn't continue, because it helps not just us but all of humanity," she added.
She said she was trying to keep busy to avoid focusing on her son's death. "The worst is when you have to see his picture on television," she said. "When you're busy, it's not so bad."
In Jerusalem, Aby Har-even recalled Israel's first astronaut as a "hero."
When others were nervous, Ilan Ramon tended to be calm, his co-worker at Israel's space agency said.
In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Daniel Salton was watching the final moments of his sister Laurel Clark's re-entry in the Columbia on television when communication was lost with the spacecraft.
"I did not realize when they lost communication, that wasn't normal. When it went on for a long time, I just thought that they were in some kind of blackout zone. And it took me a good 10 minutes to finally realize what had happened and it was a shock."
He recalled the last e-mail his sister sent to him and other family members from space. "She just talked about how thrilled she was to be up there, the view from up there, how great it was seeing different sights, being able to see on her very first day Wind Point, in Wisconsin, which is where we're from."
Clark, a 41-year-old Navy surgeon who was married with one child, also talked about the pride she felt to be an astronaut. "How blessed she felt to be serving her country and getting to do the medical experiments, working with scientists around the world and how thrilling it was," Salton said.
Sanjay Chawla said his astronaut sister Kalpana helped Indians get excited about learning about space.
Once the 41-year-old native of India became its first woman astronaut, "then people started to learn a little bit about space," he said.
"Before that, we were just available to be flying in area planes and stuff, but not about the space shuttle and the flights outside of Earth's atmosphere."
Crew touched 'the face of God,' pastor says
At Titusville, Florida, where many Kennedy Space Center workers live, the Rev. David Waller of the First United Methodist Church called the trail of smoke from the disintegrating shuttle a "glistening tear across the face of the heavens."
The Rev. Mike Weaver of the All Saints Evangelical Lutheran Church in Columbus, Ohio, said the crew had touched "the face of God."
At St. Bartholomew's Church in New York City, the names of crew members were recited during the customary prayers for departed loved ones
The mourning went on as debris from Columbia continued to be collected from far-flung areas of Texas and Louisiana.
The recovered material is being trucked to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana for analysis. A team of 20 engineering experts from the United Space Alliance, a key contractor for NASA's shuttle program, is being sent to examine the debris.
An immediate focus of the investigation was possible damage to the protective thermal tiles on Columbia's left wing from a flying piece of debris during liftoff January 16.
The space agency said the first indication of trouble Saturday was the loss of temperature sensors in the left wing's hydraulic system.
"The same creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today," President Bush said hours after Saturday's breakup of the shuttle during re-entry.
USS Cole bombing veteran to head Columbia probe
WASHINGTON (Reuters) --The retired Navy admiral tapped to head an independent investigation of the space shuttle Columbia loss, Harold Gehman, is a veteran of painstaking probes with national security implications.
He co-headed a special Defense Department panel that reviewed "lessons learned" from the October 12, 2000, suicide bombing of the destroyer USS Cole. The bombing killed 17 U.S. sailors and wounded 39 during a refueling stop in the harbor of Aden, Yemen.
Gehman and his co-chair, retired Army Gen. William Crouch, avoided assigning blame for the Cole. But they found major shortcomings in U.S. security throughout the region and recommended improvements in training and intelligence designed to thwart guerrilla attacks.
In the unclassified version of their report released January 9, 2001, Gehman and Crouch made 30 findings and 53 recommendations. These recommendations were being put into force "aggressively," Army Gen. Henry Shelton, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later told Congress.
NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said Gehman would lead an outside review of the loss of Columbia, which broke up Saturday on re-entry into Earth's atmosphere, killing seven astronauts. The independent panel includes experts from the Air Force, Navy, Transportation Department and Federal Aviation Administration.
O'Keefe said terrorism appeared to be "off the table" in the Columbia disaster, which fell amid terror fears heightened by possible war in Iraq, a nuclear crisis in North Korea and the presence of the first Israeli in space.
But Gehman's experience with the Cole and other mishaps he reviewed during his more than 35 years of active duty in the Navy "is going to guarantee that we leave absolutely no theory unturned in this particular case," O'Keefe said on the "Fox News Sunday" program.
Mishap board
The so-called Space Shuttle Mishap Interagency Investigation Board, made up of at least eight civilians and military personnel, was to hold its first meeting Monday at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
Gehman retired from the Navy in October 2000. His last assignment was as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander for the Atlantic and commander of the U.S. Joint Forces Command, one of the United States' five geographic unified commands.
In addition to his geographic responsibilities within the Atlantic region, he was responsible for supplying other U.S. joint combatant commands with combat-ready forces, for developing joint military doctrine and for supporting U.S. civilian agencies in case of an attack on U.S. soil involving chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
Promoted to four-star admiral in 1996, he became the 29th vice chief of naval operations in September 1996 and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Other Columbia investigative board members from the military include Rear Adm. Stephen Turcotte, commander of the U.S. Naval Safety Center in Norfolk, Virginia; Maj. Gen. John Barry of the Air Force Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio; Maj. Gen. Kenneth Hess, commander, U.S. Air Force chief of safety, Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, and Brig. Gen. Duane Deal, commander, 21st Space Wing, Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado.
Officials warn public away from shuttle debris
DALLAS, Texas (AP) --From corrosive fuels to ammonia-like liquids, insulation and plastics, space shuttle Columbia carried a witch's brew of toxic and caustic materials designed to work in the hostile environment of space. Authorities warned the public to stay away from shuttle debris because it could be harmful.
"There's nothing on the shuttle beneficial to humans. The fuel, the propellant, all can be very abrasive," said Gene Perry, an engineer who worked on early space station plans put together at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Perry said either liquid oxygen from the shuttle's fuel system or liquid nitrogen used to inflate the tires could be dangerous.
The trouble is twofold: Liquid nitrogen could combine with oxygen in the atmosphere to form nitrous oxide, a gas that can be fatal if inhaled. The second possibility is that either liquid oxygen or liquid nitrogen can severely burn anything or anyone it touches, Perry said.
Texas Department of Health spokesman Doug McBride said they were awaiting word from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NASA as to what hazards the debris may contain.
"We don't know what kind of chemicals are on the spacecraft," he said.
Much of the debris scattered across Nacogdoches, where authorities ordered people to stay 100 yards away from the debris because of contamination fears. Those who had touched the wreckage were urged to get medical attention.
"What we fly in space is operated in many cases with toxic propellant and some of the debris may be contaminated, so we need to be careful," shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore said.
Shuttles have long used a chemical called hydrazine to run their auxiliary power units. Hydrazine, a colorless liquid with an ammonia-like odor, is a toxic chemical and can cause harm to anyone who contacts it.
A water plant was closed in the Louisiana town of Many because of fears that toxic debris fell into the Toledo Bend reservoir along the Texas-Louisiana line.
"To be safe rather than sorry we closed the water plant until further notice," Many Mayor Ken Freeman said.
List of shuttle debris found
(AP) Highlights of the hundreds of reports of debris from the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia.
Texas
Remains that a hospital employee identified as charred torso, thigh bone and skull on a rural road near other unspecified debris in Hemphill, east of Nacogdoches.
Remains identified as a charred human leg on a farm in Sabine County, about 50 miles east of Nacogdoches.
Intact, charred helmet and astronaut's patch in San Augustine County.
A rounded piece of what appeared to be metal, about 4 feet by 5 feet, found on a rural highway in Neches.
Foot-long metal bracket that smashed through roof of dentist's office in Nacogdoches.
Half-moon-shaped metal piece, about 5 feet long, in front yard in Nacogdoches, described as jagged with severe burn marks.
V-shaped chunk of metal in the median of U.S. 79 just northeast of Palestine, in Anderson County. More unspecified debris found at nearby Pert.
2-foot square pieces of metal, small pieces of tile in Cherokee County, just west of Nacogdoches, and in Rusk County, just to the north.
Unspecified debris falling near Jacksonville, Palestine, Rusk and Athens.
A brick-size piece of debris in the back yard of a home off FM 23 near Rusk. Other pieces in a nearby hay field.
5-inch square item that appeared to be a charred piece of tile in front of Rice High School in Rice, in Navarro County.
Unspecified debris several inches in diameter in Henderson County, including foot-long piece on land being developed by family of former Texas Gov. Bill Clements.
Tank, about 3 feet in diameter, on a runway at the A.L. Mangham Jr. Regional Airport in Nacogdoches.
Steel rod with silver bolts in a Nacogdoches yard.
3-foot square piece of metal in a bank parking lot in Nacogdoches.
Piece of gray metal 1-foot in diameter in front of the county courthouse in Nacogdoches.
2-inch-by-9-inch piece of metal in a yard, ash on a car in Nacogdoches.
Chunk of unspecified debris with stenciled letters and numbers on it in Kerens near Highway 309 in Navarro County.
Curved piece of metal, about 5 feet in diameter, in the median of state Highway 55 in Anderson County, west of Nacogdoches.
Five pieces that look like tiles in the Neches First Baptist Church parking lot. Another piece that appears to be insulation on the roof.
7-foot to 8-foot door-like fragment and a piece of debris resembling part of a windshield found in Cherokee County.
Small piece of black tile, about 6 inches square, on a roof in Waxahachie, south of Dallas.
A metal object resembling an exercise ball in the front yard of a home in Bronson, southeast of Nacogdoches near the Louisiana line. The object is dented and has bolts and nodules coming out of it.
3-foot-by-3-foot cylindrical object at National Guard Armory No. 2 in Nacogdoches.
Louisiana
Smoldering bundle of wires in a front yard in Shreveport.
Compact-car sized piece reported splashing into Toledo Bend Reservoir on Texas-Louisiana state line.
Debris in Ouachita Parish thought by authorities "to be possibly a parachute."
Four unspecified pieces of wreckage fell west of Leesville in Vernon Parish.
CBS shines amid the scramble for news, video, answers
Tim Goodman
Sunday, February 2, 2003
This time, it was different. Another space shuttle accident unfolding on television, but not a shocking explosion after lift-off like the Challenger in 1986. Instead, Columbia looked like a daylight shooting star, mysteriously coming to pieces as it flashed over the country, 15 minutes from landing.
That vision, of a bright light streaking to no end, was played out repeatedly as networks and cable channels hunted for video -- most of it from amateurs -- to document the latest NASA tragedy.
As those involved in and around NASA would say repeatedly during the day, Americans had begun to take space travel and the space shuttle in particular for granted, assuming that structural problems from the Challenger era had been overcome and everything was safe as houses.
That certainly added to the sense of shock as the news unfolded. Limited early footage also left the networks scrambling to make sense of what they were seeing, while showing the same shot over and over again. From there, it was a race to find civilians who were filming the shuttle re-entry, so different perspectives could be shown.
Credit CBS News for getting the best angles and footage early on, with at least one clear video that allowed Col. Mark Brown, a former Columbia astronaut, to make educated guesses as to what went wrong. It was Brown who said the pieces were coming from the top, not the bottom tiles as others were speculating.
Guessing is the key word, of course, as it always is during unfolding tragedies. Networks scrambled to get experts in place and, as usual, that reflected on which networks were journalistically strong and which ones were thin and reliant on uninformed talking heads.
Both CBS and ABC did well in moving the story along, with CNN trying admirably to recapture that sense of being the go-to network it was when the Challenger exploded. Unfortunately, CNN's main anchor, Aaron Brown, was nowhere to be found and, instead, Miles O'Brien found himself in over his head,
often fumbling for direction and looking disturbingly lost.
Dan Rather at CBS and Peter Jennings at ABC were in their anchor chairs quickly, with Russ Mitchell acting as a kind of co-anchor along with Rather, something not seen often in major breaking stories. Tom Brokaw was also missing at NBC, but Brian Williams was in place. However, NBC seemed a step or two behind developing situations.
The network did redeem itself partly by being the clearest at explaining the shuttle's re-entry and detailing that, in the earliest pictures, what we were seeing wasn't just a piece of metal hurtling by, but a fully intact Columbia, followed closely by its disintegration. That relatively simple explanation was hard to find elsewhere as the video played over and over again.
CNN was quick to get the mood at Mission Control and also replay the last known contact with Columbia, which was broken up and followed by an eerie silence on both ends. But again, O'Brien and the technical aspects of CNN both seemed disjointed.
The need for real news often exposes networks that don't have solid reporters, like Fox News. CBS stood strong here by relying on space reporter Bill Harwood, who was the first to report that several inside NASA sources believed the weakness came from the left-wing side. That news was later confirmed for everyone else at the NASA news conference. NBC, with Jay Barbree covering the space beat for 45 years, also was in good position to advance the story, but it was Harwood who seemed to own it.
With local Texas stations filing footage of debris strung along highways and in remote fields, the ever-present streaking-star footage of Columbia was replaced with yellow tape and National Guardsmen watching over unidentified hunks of metal. Most people seemed to be heeding government warnings that the debris was dangerous, but at least one predictable posting of a sale on EBay wasn't too far behind.
When there were lulls in the story, a scramble to profile the seven crew members began, with specific interest on Ilan Ramon, who was Israeli, and how his death impacted that country. But it was CBS's Harwood who best set the stage for the ramifications not only of future flights to, say, the international space station, but who would be on them. He talked about another teacher-astronaut following Christa McAuliffe's lead and how her trip, coming as soon as 2004, would likely be derailed. CBS, however, was the first to leave the story, going over to its golf coverage when it deemed news at an end.
Other advancements in the story came from a NASA statement, then a brief speech from President Bush whose heavy reliance on religious symbolism recalled then-President Ronald Reagan's statement after the Challenger explosion, then finally a last NASA news conference where some failure analysis took place.
The bottom line to the story, however, was evident to anyone who snapped on the TV in the morning. Another shuttle had blown up, and there wasn't anything that could be done about it but watch and mourn.
Space Agency and Congress Start Individual Investigations
February 2, 2003
By JAMES BARRON
Investigators began working toward an explanation of the fiery breakup of the space shuttle Columbia today, even as officials in a 900-square-mile swath of Texas and Louisiana were still struggling to cordon off and protect pieces of wreckage that had slammed into farmers' fields, parking lots and backyards.
NASA today named Harold W. Gehman Jr., a retired Navy admiral who helped investigate the terrorist attack against the USS Cole three years ago, to lead an independent investigation into Saturday's shuttle disaster. Officials of the space agency said that no theory would be ruled out without being explored.
"We're securing all the debris and assuring that we look at every possible angle of what could have caused this horrible accident," said Sean O'Keefe, the NASA administrator.
"We're going to find out what led to this, retrace all the events," he said, "and leave absolutely no stone unturned in that process."
In addition to the commission led by Admiral Gerhman, NASA announced that it will conduct its own investigation. And the House Science Committee also plans an investigation. Representative Sherwood Boehlert, a New York Republican, is the chairman of the committee, which oversees NASA.
Columbia, streaking across a bright blue sky at about 3.5 miles a second on Saturday morning, came apart as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, barely 15 minutes before it was to have landed at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Columbia's crew of six Americans and one Israeli -- Col. Ilan Ramon, a former fighter pilot who had become a hero in his homeland in the 16 days that Columbia was in space -- were killed.
It was the second time in 17 years that the nation and the world mourned the loss of a space shuttle.
President Bush, who invoked religious imagery more than once in a brief speech from the Cabinet Room on Saturday, paid tribute to the crew's "courage and daring and idealism."
"The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth," he said, "yet we can pray that all are safely home." Of the five men and two women aboard Columbia, four had never flown in space before.
In addition to Colonel Ramon, Israel's first astronaut, Columbia's crew included Col. Rick D. Husband of the Air Force, its commander; the mission pilot, Cmdr. William C. McCool of the Navy; Lt. Col. Michael P. Anderson of the Air Force, the payload commander in charge of the science equipment; Dr. Kalpana Chawla, an aerospace engineer; and two Navy doctors, Capt. David M. Brown and Cmdr. Laurel Salton Clark. They completed more than 80 scientific experiments during their time in orbit.
The astronauts were mourned at church services across the country and around the world today as ministers struggled to help worshipers come to terms with the disaster. Pope John Paul II prayed for the seven victims during a Mass in Rome, saying "the new pain of the tragic explosion" had "provoked strong emotions in all of us." He also urged worshipers to pray for the astronauts' families.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia sent a message of sympathy to President Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. Mr. Putin told Mr. Bush that Russia was "all the more sensitive to this tragedy" because of the close cooperation in space exploration between the United States and Russia.
Prime Minister José María Aznar of Spain telephoned Mr. Bush, and President Thomas Kleistl of Austria and Prime Minister Leszek Miller of Poland sent condolence messages.
Officials had no immediate explanation for why Columbia, a stalwart performer on more than two dozen missions over 22 years, disintegrated about 38 miles above Earth as it raced toward the scheduled conclusion of a mission that NASA said had gone well.
One focus for the investigators was possible damage to heat-resistant tiles on the left wing, which NASA officials said had been struck by insulation that broke loose during liftoff on Jan. 16. NASA said the first indication of trouble on Saturday was the loss of temperature sensor readings in that wing. The insulation apparently hit the bottom of the wing, which the astronauts could not see. Nor could they lower a camera there to send images back to Earth -- Columbia carried no robotic arm.
The Columbia was the oldest orbiter in the shuttle fleet, and, as in plane crashes, one question is likely to be whether metal fatigue contributed to the disaster.
In the areas where debris from Columbia rained down, officers used four-wheel-drive vehicles and satellite tracking devices and even horses as they tried to track down every piece of potential evidence. Then they had to find ways to safeguard what they found until it could be collected for the investigators to study. There were reports of looting in Nacogdoches County in Texas, where the debris was thickest. But there were no immediate arrests.
Nor were injuries reported from debris that smashed through a roof and splashed into a reservoir there. But Sue Kennedy, the county's emergency management coordinator, told The Associated Press that 70 people had gone to two hospitals because they had touched items on the ground. NASA has repeatedly warned the public not to do so because the debris may be covered with toxic residue.
It was difficult to assess how large a setback the loss of Columbia would pose for the shuttle program. NASA officials said that future shuttle flights -- including the next one, scheduled for March -- would have to wait.
Russia went ahead with the launching of an unmanned supply capsule bound for the International Space Station today. But Russia's space agency indicated that it might cancel some manned missions in the future, or send orbiters without crews. A Spanish astronaut had been scheduled to leave for the space station on April 23.
The accident turned a weekend that had begun in giddy anticipation into one of shock in the United States and in Israel. Relatives and friends of the crew had been standing beside the space center's runway in Central Florida, waiting to welcome the astronauts. Colonel Ramon's father was in a television studio in Israel when cameras caught sight of what appeared to be a normal re-entry.
"Everything from a flight control perspective was perfect" as Columbia began descending from orbit more than 100 miles above the Earth, until shortly before 9 a.m. Eastern time, Mr. Dittemore said.
That was when NASA controllers noticed a problem with temperature sensors in Columbia's left wing, which had been struck by insulating foam shortly after liftoff. In Columbia's final minutes on Saturday, readings from the sensors simply stopped coming in. "It's as if someone just cut the wire," Mr. Dittemore said.
Tire pressure readings for the shuttle's landing gear disappeared next, followed by indications of "excessive structural heating." The chief flight director, Milt Heflin, said that one of eight sensors sent a reading that the astronauts saw on their cockpit displays. The astronauts, apparently following their usual procedure in acknowledging a reading of some concern, Mr. Heflin said.
Then a controller in Houston said, "We did not copy your last."
"Roger," came the reply, followed by a syllable that sounded like "uh." Then there was silence, as if the radio transmission had been cut off in midsentence.
That was the last that NASA heard from the shuttle. The controllers could not tell from their computers and their radar screens, but the truth was evident to anyone looking skyward: Columbia had broken up, and pieces were falling away from the body of the orbiter as it hurtled toward Earth. A 3-foot-by-4-foot piece that landed in a parking lot behind a bank and another chunk that slammed into a cemetery in Nacogdoches. An astronaut's flight patch landed in one field, an astronaut's helmet in another. Chunks of metal poked through the roof of a barn.
Television networks broadcast videotape from Texas stations that showed Columbia's single vapor trail dividing into several white streaks in the sky. But there were indications that Columbia's problems may have begun hundreds of miles away, as Columbia descended over the Pacific Ocean and California.
Gene Blevins, a freelance photographer in Van Nuys, Calif., had driven 250 miles north to what he believed would be the best vantage point. He set up two cameras with wide-angle lenses and watched as Columbia whizzed by, a bright light about 40 miles in the sky.
"Underneath it was something reddish and little pieces, like a meteor breaking up as it comes in -- red molten rock, like what comes out of a volcano," Mr. Blevins said in an interview. "Then I saw this big red flare drop from underneath it. It stayed red for a second, disappeared. I thought, `Oh, that didn't look right.' "
Officials said that it could take months to find the debris, which was spread in an arc from the flatlands near Dallas to the hilly pine woods of Louisiana. Much of it turned up in tiny towns that survive on farming and timber. One piece of tile fell within 75 miles of Mr. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Tex. Farther east, in Hemphill and in Sabine County, there were reports that bones had been found. And in Louisiana, officials said that a piece the size of a compact car had sunk into a reservoir.
As the search for potential evidence from the accident continued, grieving friends and relatives of Colonel Ramon arrived in Houston, NASA's Mission Control. "We are wrapped up in our grief now," said Hudit Keren, a family friend.
Daniel Ayalon, the Israeli ambassador to United States, landed there today and planned to meet with NASA officials. He said Israel would find a way to memorialize Colonel Ramon.
Asked if the accident had made him doubt the American space program, he said: "No, not at all. This event has galvanized the two countries together. We have full trust in NASA."
Very true.
50% is pretty bad. Not a passing grade in any school even...
Plus this is a program with 20+ years of "experience" at this. With no signs of improvement.
Unmanned Russian cargo ship heads for space station
MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) --An unmanned Russian supply ship blasted off Sunday from Kazakhstan, bound for an international space station with an uncertain future after the loss of the space shuttle Columbia and the resulting suspension of shuttle flights.
The Progress M-47 lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome about 7 p.m. (8 a.m. ET) carrying supplies for the station's three-man crew.
Americans Ken Bowersox and Donald Pettit and Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin had been due to return to Earth on March 1, when the shuttle Atlantis was scheduled to deliver a replacement crew.
But that mission -- and all future shuttle flights -- are on hold until investigators learn what caused Columbia to disintegrate 40 miles above Earth Saturday, killing all seven astronauts aboard.
"I hope that we get this situation resolved in the coming weeks, so that it isn't an extended period of time, but that remains to be seen," said shuttle program director Ron Dittemore. "In the near term, we know we have months of adequate supply on board the international space station, and we also know that we can help resupply them from our international partners' resources."
Dittemore said supplies aboard the station were sufficient to last through the end of June. NASA's space station managers reviewed the cargo list for Sunday's Progress launch, and pronounced the supplies "appropriate, given the fact that we may not be there for a while," he said.
Russian space agency spokesman Sergey Gorbunov said the station could face at least a temporary abandonment if the shuttle program suspension lasts too long.
Russia's Progress shuttles, Gorbunov said, cannot match the U.S. shuttles' capacities for cargo. The Progress carries about 2 tons of supplies, compared with the 30 tons a space shuttle can lift.
Additionally, he said, a U.S. shuttle with its three engines can make the trip in less time and at less cost than the single-engine Progress.
Transferring the bulk of resupplying missions to Russian spacecraft, Gorbunov said, would require construction of more Progress ships, at up to two years each -- and more money from Russia's international partners, including the United States.
Still, Gorbunov said its three scheduled supply flights would be sufficient to keep the station operable for the rest of the year. And, he said, Russia has scheduled two flights of its Soyuz spacecraft to take crews of three people each to the station in April and October.
Bowersox, Pettit and Budarin -- Expedition 6 to the space station -- arrived at their orbital home November 25, 2002. Their mission was to have been the shortest stint to date. Expedition 4 stayed aboard for 195 days, the longest mission to the station.
Gorbunov said the Russian Space agency and NASA will have to reconsider the working plans for the station as well as the manned flights schedule in the wake of the Columbia disaster. He said the re-evaluation could lead to a decision to bring the crew back to Earth and leave the station unmanned to work automatically in order to save resources until the situation is resolved.
incoming ballistic missiles travel much slower than mach 17.
Nope, any attempt to counter an insane hypothesis will just be seen by conspiracy theorists as an attempt to cover up the truth. And not trying to counter it of course means it's true and you don't have a way to prove otherwise. That's the problem with conspiracy nuts.
Yes I do. Belive it or not.
I was in a way relieved that no more people died in those fires, I hoped it wouldn't turn into another "Ash Wednesday". I'm neither Australian, nor American, so this wasn't nationalism from my side, although it may have been "wrong" of me in another way.
I expected a lot of bad jokes to come up about the Shuttle, and a lot of "HAHAHA! You deserve it!". May have been wrong of me to single out Australians for this though, since the bad jokes came from all the world, even from the US. Sorry about that, Australia. I just remembered the debate about Stromolo/bush fires jokes, and all this "f#*@% Americans, you are so insensitive".
I haven't heard all the jokes about the bush fires, and I haven't heard all the jokes about the shuttle, but I guess a lot of all those were pretty bad. I wanted to say that one should take a moment to think it over before making a "joke" about something that people care about.
People who have had their feelings hurt by a bad joke, should perhaps think it over before "taking back" with another bad joke and starting a flame war.
At least try to make it a bad joke against the joker; not a bad joke against the people who died, were hurt, or lost their property.
In a bit of an ironic way, I was the one who should have taken my own "advice", and taken a moment to think it over before posting what I did. Next time I won't hurry just because my post might be the first one. From the response you gave me, I could just as well have said "I vomit on toddlers!", or something like that.
I have to try to put myself in the situation of those people who have been affected by a disaster in some way, and try to understand how they feel. I know I can't accomplish this 100%, since the accidents that have affected people I know, haven't had enough magnitude to be on CNN.
The entire population of the Canberra area were affected by the fires in different ways, and communities around NASA sites are affected also. They may have lost someone themselves, or they may know somebody who have. Would people like these Australians, Americans and Israelis think that this or that joke was funny? Many of the jokes I read, I think they wouldn't approve of. The strange thing is that sometimes, jokes which I find utterly appalling, the victims of the tragedy laugh at, for some strange reason. But if we didn't know who they were, we would scald them for laughing.
P.S. I just said sorry to Australia. This apology does not apply to Australians who made sick jokes about the bush fires or the shuttle.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
So NASA Needs ANOTHER Seven Astronauts?
The outcomes of something like this runs a direct correlation to the outcomes of september 11, firemen are now extraordinarily respected (among many other changes this disaster had to our country). I know many science oriented people respect astronauts, but someone said the majority of people have put them in the backs of their minds, not really thinking that going up in space is dangerous. This will change. There is good from something this horrible, hopefully our astronauts will get the respect they deserve now.
this is not a sig.
Easy for you to say that now. FYI, they didn't notice the event until review of camera footage the following day, far too late for launch abort.
Poorly bonded insulation allows air to infiltrate between the insulation and the tank. Water ice is deposited. If liquid water condenses as well, an insulation-prying process develops: freezing water expands, widening the gap and thus increasing the volume of airspace for additional liquid and ice to form. Eventually the heavy load of ice, vibations, g-force, and severely weakened area of bonding cause the tank to shed the chunk of insulation with its heavy load of ice. The ice would be denser than the foam insulation. Ignoring its buildup could cause serious under-estimation of the chunk's mass and mechanical strength.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Are there any sites with a letter to the (U.S.) government supporting the Space programs and also a letter of support to NASA? The last thing they need is thousands upon thousands of emails to sort through.
yah dude, im sure u care. next time try not to fall of the main dealio
The Challenger O-Ring disaster happened on the 28th of January. Saturday was supposed to be the successful completion of the 28th mission for the Columbia orbiter.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
I wouldn't know, exactly what to tell your kids about the whys and wherefores. Actually, the way I explained it to my five-year-old-cousin-who-appears-to-live-with-me was like this: I sat him down in a kitchen chair (so he couldn't get away and whatnot) and gave him a light indian rub. Then I asked him "if I did that hard enough, do you think your arm might fall off?" After receiving the affirmative response, I started to explain to him as simply as I possibly could what happens when an object enters the atmosphere, proper angle of reentry, so on. Come to think of it, he's a smart little bastard . . . At any rate (though it's a couple of days later now), perhaps something such as would be helpful in explaining the issue to your kids. xScruffx
Lit up with anticipation
We arrive at the launching site
The sky is still dark, nearing dawn
On the Florida coastline
Circling choppers slash the night
With roving searchlight beams
This magic day when super-science
Mingles with the bright stuff of dreams
Floodlit in the hazy distance
The star of this unearthly show
Venting vapours, like the breath
Of a sleeping white dragon
Crackling speakers, voices tense
Resume the final count
All systems check, T minus nine
As the sun and the drama start to mount
The air is charged
A humid, motionless mass
The crowds and the cameras,
The cars full of spectators pass
Excitement so thick you could cut it with a knife
Technology...high, on the leading edge of life
The earth beneath us starts to tremble
With the spreading of a low black cloud
A thunderous roar shakes the air
Like the whole world exploding
Scorching blast of golden fire
As it slowly leaves the ground
Tears away with a mighty force
The air is shattered by the awesome sound
Like a pillar of cloud
The smoke lingers high in the air
In fascination
With the eyes of the world
We stare...
'Countdown' by Rush, on the occasion of Columbia's first flight.
No one got beat up more often than the mimes of the old west!
I agree, a space elevator would be very safe, and much cheaper to transport stuff per pound once built (a description of one is one the nasa.gov site). The shuttle should basically stay in space and move things from between the elevators, space stations, etc.
If an elevator can't be built with current materials, then a skyhook should be used to get things started. The way it works is basically that a geostationary satellite shoots down a cable loop, unrolling from a spindle. Then, a plane flying at high altitude hooks up with it and exchanges stuff coming up or going down. At first, this could be only fuel cell packs or supplies, but even just this by itself would save a lot of weight on spacecraft going up.
Found this interesting on Nasa's website:t ref/orbiter/tps/lrsitiles.html
"Because of evidence of plasma flow on the lower wing trailing edge and elevon leading edge tiles (wing/elevon cove) at the outboard elevon tip and inboard elevon, the LRSI tiles are replaced FRCI-12 and HRSI 22 tiles along with gap fillers on Discovery (OV-103) and Atlantis (OV-104). On Columbia (OV-102), only gap fillers are being installed in this area."
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/shu
Columbia was the only shuttle to keep the "old technology" tiles in this critical area.
This is the area where the first bad sensor readings came from. "At 7:53 a.m. Central Standard Time -- and all times will be Central Standard Time -- as we were over California, four left-hand elevon hydraulic return line temperature measurements dropped off scale, "
hmmmm...
CNN has a link to a Johnson Space Center web page listed where you can submit info/pics/video that may be useful to the investigation.
There was an ANT COLONY on the shuttle:
...There was an amazing variety of work being done aboard Columbia. Spiders, flowers, cancer cells, ants, carpenter bees, fish embryos, silkworms and rats were all onboard.
Students from Fowler High School in Syracuse, New York, had worked for three years on an experiment to find out whether ants tunnel at a slower rate in space gravity.
As for the number of shuttles. 50% are not flight worthy. If Boeing made 737's where only 50% were good, would you fly on one? I would not.
Uh - I'd be the first to argue about the lack of safety in manned spaceflight, but I think your comparision is a little weak. Why don't you compare the manufacture of space shuttles to matchbox cars - those have a pretty good safety rating (probably better than 737's, unless you count choking accidents). By your logic we should use 737s for manned spaceflight...
737s don't have to handle flight at Mach 20 for re-entry, and they don't have to sustain 3G accellerations for several minutes during launch. Either stress would probably rip its wings right off. Considering that it took thousands of deaths to develop the safety features that now exist in cars and planes, the very few fatalities in the space program are quite low.
This topic is certainly more important than slashdot subscriptions.
Since the space shuttle tech is the best we have, and since it is obviously inadequate, we should be looking to create a new STS.
Your lack of ability to spell the word 'ignorance' astounds me!
...on what did the eye witness saw breaking up into pieces. Is it the Columbia? Or is it something else? If it isn't the Columbia, where's the Columbia? And why did the news said that it was the Columbia. Remember. Just because the news says that it was the Columbia, that doesn't mean that it's the Columbia. Of course it also doesn't meant that it isn't the Columbia. As for what to tell kids about this recent event. Maybe the best way is to tell them the truth. Just say, "I don't know. There are a lot of inputs, some of them are quite confusing and contradictary. We need to examine these inputs first if we want to know what happened." Anyway. What I like about kids are that, they're quite open minded, willing to accept and believe any other alternative possibility. While for "adults", they're usually already programmed into believing certain things, and usually discounted stuff that they consider "impossible".
Incase people forgotten. Mir was supplied, resupplied, build, populated, repopulated, and so on without any space shuttle at all. Though the Soviet did planned to build Mir-2 using their own Space Shuttle.
Just remember on how it ended. Same M.O., same result.
"Meanwhile countless 727, DC-9 and other jets make multiple flights a day in airframes built in the 60's and 70's. Like the manufacturers of those craft, NASA had the best materials, even the best of the best." Quite true. We still need to ask a lot of questions. While there's always chance that the Space Shuttle disintegrates during re-entry, that doesn't the Space Shuttle is not a fine build spacecraft. And we also need to ask, was it the Columbia that those people saw, or something else? "Bush and his administration have made the '00's the decade of fear. Rather than "we have nothing to fear, but fear itself", we have the fear of terrorists hiding under every rock, behind every tree, lurking in every shadow. Now this disaster and the fear is already being considered on national TV, where it should be completely absurd and beyond any scrutiny, the fear brings it up." A little bit correction here. The President of the U.S.A. doesn't have any power at all these days. Note: If it was up to the President. The U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. would already have a joint moon program, since that's what the Kennedy want, even the Soviet want it too. Anyway, I think that these days the President of the U.S.A. is nothing more than a spokeman who delivers speech or so on. So... I don't think that George W. Bush wanted any Space Shuttle to be destroyed. And from my point of view, he doesn't seem to be a bad person at all. I even think that he doesn't even want a war toward Iraq. However, that doesn't mean that there isn't any people in the goverment of the U.S.A. (and also other goverments, try the whole "official" goverments in the world) that want to do harm. And these "people" regulary pressure the Presidents (whether it's the U.S.A. or othe countries) to make them said what they don't want to say.
It could be hot, it could be radioactive, it could be anything.
Anyway. Like the usual advice would say, "becareful, you don't where it came from."
Just don't be affraid to investigate those objects further. After all, you too also want to know what it is. Just use a wise discretion when touching and examining the objects.
STS-113 was launched last year by the way.
Of course, we also need to find out if Challenger's accident is also "natural".
http://mission51l.com/challenger.htm
It's quite likely that neither the U.S.A. or the U.S.S.R. designed the Space Shuttle.
If you notice it, both NASA and Molniya engineers rejected the Space Shuttle design, they prefer a two stages take off or a horizontal launch system. But they're only given fund if they build the Space Shuttle design, if they decided to use other design, the fund is cut or even withdraw.
So... It's more likely correct to say that, "both" U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. "copied" the Space Shuttle design. The question is, from where?
As for the Soviet shuttle.
They did plan to build Mir-2 using the shuttle. But the shuttle is only used for specific mission, while some missions used other spacecrafts. They're quite wise in their selection of craft.
Though they do plan to shuttle the people using the shuttle. The Soyuz is reliable, but its landing is rough!
"the Russian vehicles don't carry large payloads" How quick are we to forget that the ISS was supposed to build not entirely using the Space Shuttle. The former Soviet space agencies have big rockets that will do the job quite fine indeed.
Perharps the whole international manned space program is planned to be close down for an "undefined" amount of time. As for Mir. Actually, Mir outlived its planned age. They planned to replace it with Mir-2, but no fund was given. Then there's the event of burning the Mir itself. Well... We can ask the question, why did it was burned? Lack of fund? No. It's because that "they" wanted that the ISS to be the ONLY space station in orbit. Salyut 7 when it was decommisioned, they don't burn it, they move it into a higher orbit. Why didn't the same happen to Mir? Why do I get the feeling that the ISS will share the same fate as the Mir?
There's plenty of way to build a space station. Mir wasn't build using the space shuttle you know. Though they did planned to use the space shuttle build Mir-2.
It can only be done using inside job.
The question is, was it really the Columbia that exploded?
Then go to the Moon, go to the Mars, etc. It's already established.
Don't know on how to get there?
Have you already try to apply for a Visa to your destination? I think that they will provide you with a free trip there along with a Visa. Though hopefully it's a round trip. LOL!
"flying 2 jumbo jets into the Twin Towers"
Actually, the odds of successfuly crashing not just ONE, but TWO 767 to TWO towers is very very very VERY slim.
And I don't believe they were any real people aboard those jets piloting into those two towers. Veteran jetliner pilots probably couldn't it, what is the hope of an amateur/semi-amateur pilot of doing it. The odds of it happening is approaching zero.
True! Payload is better serve with unmanned rockets. While the astronauts is better serve with much comfortable way of travelling.
I agree. There should be two type of crafts. - Cargo craft - Manned craft
In traditional airplanes, the pilot moves the stick, and his other controls, and there is a mechanical connection between his movement and the planes rudder, throttle and aelerons. Not so with the airbus. A computer system interprets the pilots commands, and controls the flight surfaces itself.
As of the time of this discussion (about 12 or more years ago) the airbus was programmed to over-ride any pilot who requested a maneuver that would cause the plane to pull more than 2.5 Gs.
Someone had cited an incident when an airliner, out of Hawaii, had experienced a problem that put it into a steep dive. The pilot and co-pilot recovered control and pulled back on the stick, just in time to save it from going into the drink. The plane returned to Hawaii. An examination of the airframe determined that this plane should never fly again. Analysis of the warped beams and stretched rivet holes determined that the plane had experienced over 4.5 Gs.
I believe the plane in question was a 747.
My point? This story makes me doubt 3 Gs would rip the wings off of a modern airliner.
Lit up with anticipation We arrive at the launching site The sky is still dark, nearing dawn On the Florida coastline Circling choppers slash the night With roving searchlight beams This magic day when super-science Mingles with the bright stuff of dreams Floodlit in the hazy distance The star of this unearthly show Venting vapours, like the breath Of a sleeping white dragon Crackling speakers, voices tense Resume the final count All systems check, T minus nine As the sun and the drama start to mount The air is charged A humid, motionless mass The crowds and the cameras, The cars full of spectators pass Excitement so thick you could cut it with a knife Technology...high, on the leading edge of life The earth beneath us starts to tremble With the spreading of a low black cloud A thunderous roar shakes the air Like the whole world exploding Scorching blast of golden fire As it slowly leaves the ground Tears away with a mighty force The air is shattered by the awesome sound Like a pillar of cloud The smoke lingers high in the air In fascination With the eyes of the world We stare...
'Countdown' by Rush, on the occasion of Columbia's first flight. OMFG OMFG OMFG@@@@@!!!
Yes, I'm just crapflooding to push this up in the HOF. Whoopee! Who here likes trashing the system? w00t!
Moderators: (-1, Troll) for this message. Thx.
Apparently (according to today's Metro, a UK national newspaper) shortly after the explosion the NASA/JPL webserver was cracked and the web pages plastered with anti-US and Pro-Iraqi material. Coincidence?
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
Ummm, no.
Negative
yes very very bad ju ju
hmmmm. I wonder if anyone knows ju ju.
Die
Spaceflight Now | STS-107 | Mission Status Report
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2003
Amid congressional concern about NASA's objectivity in the wake of the Columbia disaster Saturday, the quasi-independent Accident Investigation Board, beefed up with non-NASA staff and board members, will assume the mantle of sole authority in determining what caused the crash that claimed the lives of seven astronauts. Read our full story.
1900 GMT (2:00 p.m. EST)
International space station planners are debating the possibility of launching a two- or three-man caretaker crew in late April or early May aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to replace the lab's current crew and to keep the outpost occupied until space shuttle flights resume. Read our full story.
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2003
Shuttle program manager Ronald Dittemore told reporters Wednesday they were, in effect, mistaken if they assumed from previous briefings the Columbia disaster investigation was focused primarily on the possibility foam debris from the ship's external tank triggered the orbiter's destruction during entry Saturday. Read our full story.
2222 GMT (5:22 p.m. EST)
Dittemore says the theory of the foam chunk that hit Columbia contained ice is highly unlikely. The ice inspection team that surveyed the shuttle in the hours before launch found no evidence of ice in that area of the tank. Also, January 16 wasn't a day with icing conditions, he said.
"It is something else. It is something else," Dittemore repeated, saying this foam isn't believed to be the cause of Columbia's disaster.
2206 GMT (5:06 p.m. EST)
Engineers remain confident in their understanding of the size and weight of the debris seen hitting Columbia's wing. Analysis determined the impact wouldn't significantly damage the shuttle or pose a safety issue.
"We believe there is something else," Dittemore said. "It just does not make sense to us that a piece of debris is the root cause for the loss of Columbia and crew."
He repeated the message from Monday that the "missing link" remains to be found.
2156 GMT (4:56 p.m. EST)
NASA has released new images showing before-and-after views of Columbia's wing from the foam impact during launch. Although the views are not high-resolution, there does not appear to be any "gross" change in the tile area, Dittemore said.
2155 GMT (4:55 p.m. EST)
In his technical news conference, shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore says the efforts to recover the 32 seconds of additional data from Columbia -- which was received on the ground but not displayed in Mission Control -- have been "relatively unsuccessful" thus far. Although hope remains that knowledge ultimately will be gained from the data, engineers are currently not satisfied with validity of the data examined.
In other developments, teams are taking the known data about the unusual increased heating on certain parts of Columbia before breakup and trying to determine where the heat source would have to be on the vehicle. Tests are also being performed to learn more about external tank foam impact and orbiter tile strength.
2045 GMT (3:45 p.m. EST)
The recovered remains of Columbia's crew were flown in flag-draped caskets from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware today aboard a C-141 Starlifter. Deputy NASA Administrator Frederick Gregory was expected to render honors to the crew.
NASA said the Charles C. Carson Center for Mortuary Affairs at Dover will prepare the remains for return to the families. Israeli payload specialist Ilan Ramon's remains will be flown to his home in Israel for burial. Final funeral arrangements for the crew are still to be announced.
1700 GMT (12:00 p.m. EST)
Mike Kostelnik, NASA's deputy associate administrator for the office of spaceflight, is giving his morning update from Headquarters. He reports there is still no confirmation from the teams sent to California and Arizona that the items found are indeed from Columbia. Amateur video from Saturday's reentry showed signs of pieces coming off the shuttle as it streaked overhead. Space agency officials said the reports of debris found out west were credible enough to deploy the teams to investigate.
In the main debris fields in Texas and Louisiana, workers are putting red tags on items that are deemed of great interest to investigators for quicker inspection.
Kostelnik also said the efforts to recover the 32 seconds of lost data from Columbia continues.
1600 GMT (11:00 a.m. EST)
A pair of NASA briefings are scheduled today -- 11:30 a.m. EST from NASA Headquarters and 4:30 p.m. EST from Johnson Space Center.
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2003
2137 GMT (4:37 p.m. EST)
NASA's deputy associate administrator for the office of spaceflight, Mike Kostelnik, is telling reporters at a news conference underway right now at NASA Headquarters that the agency has dispatched experts to California and Arizona where reports of shuttle debris have been received. If the items turn out to be pieces of Columbia, that information could be a crucial to understanding what happened to the orbiter Saturday morning.
2115 GMT (4:15 p.m. EST)
NASA officials say more assistance has been added in the effort to collect and transport the Columbia debris.
"NASA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Environmental Protection Agency are working expeditiously to recover Space Shuttle Columbia debris. The agencies are working as rapidly as possible to protect public safety, honor the needs of astronaut families, and support the mishap investigation.
"NASA is adding additional expertise and staff to support clean-up efforts in affected communities. NASA has provided guidance to EPA to enable clean-up teams to assess and recover debris when agency personnel are not available. Additional personnel trained in handling hazardous material have been added to these teams. The public is reminded not to attempt to handle Shuttle debris, but to inform local authorities when debris is found.
"All agencies participating in the Columbia mishap investigation deeply appreciate the caring, patience, efforts and dedication local communities have demonstrated during this difficult time," NASA said in a statement.
2030 GMT (3:30 p.m. EST)
President Bush capped an emotional tribute to the lost Columbia astronauts at Johnson Space Center today. "Their mission was almost complete and we lost them so close to home," Bush said. "All mankind is in their debt." Read the Bush's speech.
1755 GMT (12:55 p.m. EST)
Retired Admiral Harold W. Gehman, Jr., who chairs the independent Space Shuttle Accident Investigation Board, toured the recovery area in Texas today with other members of the panel.
"The purpose of our visit here today is to get out and look at some of the debris recovery area. This makes the accident more personal to us and prevents it from becoming an abstract event.
"We're not going to solve this today. We're here to see what the debris looks like and to get a sense of it personally.
"There are over 20 investigatory teams working on the various aspects of the Columbia accident. The board will take supervisory authority over all these activities.
"I'd like to compliment the many agencies involved in this effort. As you know, FEMA is in charge of the recovery effort, and our hats are off to the wonderful work they are doing.
"We have no timetable, but we have two main responsibilities here. One is to future astronauts, who need to know we've done everything possible to make it safe for them to fly. The other is to the three people currently in orbit on the International Space Station, who need to have the Shuttle program fly as soon as possible."
1730 GMT (12:30 p.m. EST)
President and Mrs. Bush have arrived near Houston for today's Columbia memorial service. The event begins at 1 p.m. EST at Johnson Space Center for the astronauts' families, NASA employees, contractor workers, government leaders and other invited guests.
1449 GMT (9:49 a.m. EST)
A fresh load of supplies has arrived at the International Space Station, enabling the three-man Expedition 6 crew to remain aboard the complex through late-June or early-July, if necessary. See our coverage of the docking here.
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2003
Engineers studying data from the shuttle Columbia before it broke apart Saturday say temperature readings in the ship's left-side landing gear wheel well may be indicating a catastrophic "burn through" in a different part of the wing, not the wheel well itself. Read our full story.
2330 GMT (6:30 p.m. EST)
NASA says the piece of foam insulation that fell off Columbia's external fuel tank about 80 seconds into launch, hitting the left wing of the shuttle, appears to measure about 20 inches by 16 inches by 6 inches and weighed about 2.67 pounds.
Dittemore said analysis conducted during Columbia's flight concluded that although the foam might have caused some structural damage to the wing area, it would not have been sufficient to cause a catastrophic event.
2310 GMT (6:10 p.m. EST)
The start time for Thursday's memorial service at the Washington National Cathedral has been moved up to 10 a.m. EST.
2229 GMT (5:29 p.m. EST)
NASA wants to know if there is any debris -- tiles or other pieces of the orbiter -- in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico or northwest Texas, which would give investigators a key piece of information.
2212 GMT (5:12 p.m. EST)
In new information, Dittemore says that 8:52 a.m. EST was the first occurrence of temperature rise in the left wheel well area. That is earlier than NASA had previously said. The temperature increase was associated with the left main gear brake system.
Engineers have also determined that two yaw jet thrusters on Columbia were fired for 1.5-seconds to assist the aerosurfaces adjust the shuttle's attitude shortly before the breakup. Dittemore had previously said the aerosurfaces were moving to counteract what is believed to be increased aerodynamic drag, possibly due to missing or rough tiles.
2206 GMT (5:06 p.m. EST)
"Tomorrow, we are going to pause and reflect on the crew of Columbia," Dittemore says of the memorial service to be held at Johnson Space Center. He will not hold a technical press conference out of respect.
2202 GMT (5:02 p.m. EST)
"Our recovery efforts are really beginning to pick up steam," NASA shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore is telling reporters at news conference currently underway from Houston. The work to collect and transport the debris to staging areas will become more frequent of the next few days, he said.
Pieces of Columbia have been located in hundreds and hundreds of locations in Texas and Louisiana.
2050 GMT (3:50 p.m. EST)
Earlier today at the White House, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer fielded some questions concerning NASA's budget, a meeting between President Bush and NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe, building a replacement shuttle and more. Read the full transcript.
2020 GMT (3:20 p.m. EST)
President Bush today spoke at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Before his speech about the Bioshield Initiative, his opening comments reflected on Columbia.
"Two days ago, America was yet reminded again of the sacrifices made in the name of scientific discovery. The seven brave men and women from the Columbia will be remembered for their achievements, their heroism and their sense of wonder. Our prayers are with their families and their loved ones.
"Their 16-day mission held the promise of answering scientific problems that allude us here on earth. Columbia carried in its payroll [sic] classroom experiments from some our students in America. I hope these children, our future scientists, will continue to ask questions, continue to explore, continue to discover.
"And while we grieve the loss of these astronauts, the cause of which they died will continue, America's journey into space will go on."
1750 GMT (12:50 p.m. EST)
A statement from the families of the Columbia astronauts has been released by NASA. Read the full statement.
1650 GMT (11:50 a.m. EST)
A NASA analysis of potential tile damage resulting from the impact of external tank foam insulation during the shuttle Columbia's launch concluded no significant damage would have resulted during re-entry even if multiple tiles were missing. Read our full story.
1600 GMT (11:00 a.m. EST)
Here's a look at some of the activities upcoming: NASA is planning two news conferences today -- 11:30 a.m. EST and 4:30 p.m. EST.
There are two memorial services being planned. The one at Johnson Space Center in Houston is scheduled for 1 p.m. EST Tuesday; and one at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, DC, at 1 p.m. EST Thursday.
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2003
NASA engineers are studying telemetry from the shuttle that indicates a sudden increase in temperature inside the left wing's main landing gear wheel well in the moments before the shuttle's destruction. What might have caused the temperature spikes, along with sensor malfunctions in the same area, is not yet known. But these could be indicators that whatever destroyed the shuttle started in this area. Read our full story.
2303 GMT (6:03 p.m. EST)
Dittemore confirms that the Columbia crew was informed during the mission of the tile hit that happened at launch. He said that the analysis performed a few days after launch indicated that the velocity and angle of the external tank foam insulation impacting the shuttle would not comprise Columbia's safety during reentry. Efforts to look at the shuttle from orbiting reconnaissance satellites or powerful observatories were not made. The astronauts had no way of viewing that area of the shuttle.
2230 GMT (5:30 p.m. EST)
In the NASA news briefing underway at this hour in Houston, space shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore says the review of telemetry from Columbia is revealing the unusual rise in temperatures on the left-side of the shuttle in the minutes leading to the breakup.
In addition, increased aerodynamic drag was noted on the left-side that could be caused by "rough tile" or missing tiles, Dittermore said.
But he stresses that investigators are not concentrating entirely on the tiles as the reason for Columbia's loss. Other potential root causes could be a structural failure or a flight control issue.
We'll have a full report on the NASA briefing a little later today.
2155 GMT (4:55 p.m. EST)
The President and Mrs. George W. Bush will join NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe Tuesday afternoon in paying tribute to the brave heroes of the Space Shuttle Columbia crew during a special memorial service at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. Read the full details.
2120 GMT (4:20 p.m. EST)
NASA sources say a sizeable section of what may be the shuttle Columbia's forward fuselage has been found near the Lufkin-Nocogdoches area southeast of Dallas near the Louisiana border. Recovery teams continue to search for remains of Columbia's astronauts and while sources say remains have, in fact, been found, no details about the astronauts have been released out of deference to family members. Read our full story.
2115 GMT (4:15 p.m. EST)
Officials are saying a memorial service, with President Bush in attendance, is being planned for Tuesday at Johnson Space Center.
1900 GMT (2:00 p.m. EST)
NASA has announced that it is planning two-per-day press briefings starting Monday. There will be a daily press briefing from NASA Headquarters in Washington at 11:30 a.m. EST and one from Houston's Johnson Space Center at 4:30 p.m. EST. Senior NASA officials will participate in the press briefings, the agency said.
1700 GMT (12:00 p.m. EST)
Today's NASA news conference from Johnson Space Center has been delayed until 4:30 p.m. EST.
1420 GMT (9:20 a.m. EST)
NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe has announced the members of the Space Shuttle Mishap Interagency Investigation Board. Retired U.S. Navy Admiral Harold W. Gehman, Jr., will head the group. Read our full story.
1345 GMT (8:45 a.m. EST)
A day after the Columbia disaster, a freighter carrying cargo for the International Space Station was successfully launched from Central Asia aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket today, NASA has confirmed. Officials said the routine resupply mission would go forward as planned despite the shuttle accident. Read our full story.
0230 GMT (9:30 p.m. EST Sat.)
In the final minutes of shuttle Columbia's doomed reentry, flight controllers began to see indications of a major problem in the area of the shuttle's left wing, NASA officials said on Saturday in their first detailed news briefing since the tragedy. Read our full story.
0150 GMT (8:50 p.m. EST Sat.)
NASA is planning another news briefing on Sunday, prehaps around 1 p.m. EST. Watch this page for updates.
0130 GMT (8:30 p.m. EST Sat.)
The U.S. military is providing several assests in response of the Columbia accident.
* Air Force: A C-141 aircraft from McGuire Air Force Base, N.J., will be used to transport NASA's rapid response team from Kennedy Space Center, Fla.
* Air Force Reserve: Six F-16 Fighting Falcons from Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base, Fort Worth, Texas, will be part of search operations and security.
* Coast Guard: 110-foot cutter from Naval Air Station New Orleans; buoy tender and station boat from District 7, based in St. Petersburg, Fla.; patrols in the Gulf of Mexico to check out reports of fallen debris.
* Army: Four UH-60 helicopters from Fort Hood, Texas, to assist in search operations.
* Navy: Dauphine helicopter from Naval Air Station New Orleans to assist in search operations.
* Texas Air National Guard: A C-130 Hercules from NASJRB, Fort Worth, to assist with search operations.
An Air Force Reserve Command HC-130 is on alert at Patrick Air Force Base, Fla., ready to respond if needed. The Coast Guard also has two UH-1 helicopters standing by in Corpus Christi, Texas, and a C-130 standing by in St. Petersburg, Fla.
The DOD Manned Space Flight Support Office at Patrick AFB is the single point of contact for coordinating initial DOD contingency support for the United States' manned space flight programs.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2003
2330 GMT (6:30 p.m. EST)
NASA is asking for the public's help:
NASA has established a telephone hotline and electronic mail address for the public to use for reporting information that may help investigators studying today's Space Shuttle mishap.
Anyone who discovers debris from the accident or who has film or video evidence that may be of value to the investigation team is urged to use these contacts. Please avoid contact with any debris, because it may be hazardous as a result of toxic propellants aboard the Shuttle.
Telephone reports should be directed to the following number: 281/483-3388
Text reports and images should be e-mailed to: nasamitimages@jsc.nasa.gov
The e-mail address is: columbiaimages@nasa.gov
All debris is U.S. Government property and is critical to the investigation of the mishap. All debris from the accident is to be left alone and reported to Government authorities. Unauthorized persons found in possession of accident debris will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
2150 GMT (4:50 p.m. EST)
Dittemore says foam was also lost from the same area of the external tank on STS-112 -- two flights ago in October -- as was noted January 16 during Columbia's launch. The last flight in November didn't appear to shed any chunks of foam. He said even prior to today, a review was being conducted to understand why two of the last three missions has suffered foam loss. That review would have determine what was causing the problem before clear the next shuttle for launch in March.
2141 GMT (4:41 p.m. EST)
Loss of communications between Columbia and ground controllers occurred at 8:59:22 a.m. EST at a mission elapsed time of 15 days, 22 hours, 20 minutes, 22 seconds. The shuttle was at an altitude of 207,000 feet and traveling at Mach 18.3.
2108 GMT (4:08 p.m. EST)
Dittemore confirms there is no way to do a spacewalk and repair tiles on the shuttle's belly in orbit. "We know we have no capability."
2103 GMT (4:03 p.m. EST)
Dittemore says of the external tank foam insulation striking Columbia's left wing during launch: "It was judged that event did not represent a safety concern."
The foam was seen breaking free from the bi-pod area of the tank where the orbiter nose attaches to the tank.
"As we now look at that in hindsight, that impact was with the left wing" and the signs of problems today are all on that wing. Dittemore says NASA "cannot discount there might be a connection" but there shouldn't be a "rush to judgement."
2050 GMT (3:50 p.m. EST)
Tomorrow's launch of a Russian Progress cargo freighter to the International Space Station will go forward as planned, Dittemore says. The station will have enough supplies for its resident crew through late-June without a shuttle mission to the outpost.
Dittemore says it certainly too soon to know when the next shuttle flight will occur.
2046 GMT (3:46 p.m. EST)
A central location has not been picked to house all the debris as it is recovered. Response teams are activating to be dispatched to the recovery areas, Dittemore said.
2039 GMT (3:39 p.m. EST)
Dittemore says the first sign of trouble occurred shortly before 9 a.m. EST with the loss of data from temperature sensors in the hydraulic systems on left wing aerosurfaces. That was followed by loss of tire pressure measurements from the left main landing gear and structural sensors.
2037 GMT (3:37 p.m. EST)
Shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore, speaking from Johnson Space Center right now, says a number of special teams have been established for the investigation. Data is being impounded to preserve all records -- pre-flight and in-flight information -- for the investigators.
2015 GMT (3:15 p.m. EST)
Click here to see an animated image from Columbia's launch that appears to show the incident with the shuttle's left wing. Engineers believe some foam insulation from the external tank broke off and impacted the wing about 80 seconds into flight.
2005 GMT (3:05 p.m. EST)
The NASA technical news conference from Johnson Space Center has been delayed a few minutes.
1940 GMT (2:40 p.m. EST)
You can read the full text of President Bush's speech here.
1930 GMT (2:30 p.m. EST)
As we grieve for the lost crew of Columbia, here are the biographies of the seven astronauts.
1910 GMT (2:10 p.m. EST)
"Our journey into space will go on," Bush says.
1905 GMT (2:05 p.m. EST)
In an address to the nation, President Bush says, "The Columbia is lost. There are no survivors."
1840 GMT (1:40 p.m. EST)
Another NASA news conference, this one from Johnson Space Center, is being planned for 3 p.m. EST.
1833 GMT (1:33 p.m. EST)
NASA's Associate Administrator for Spaceflight Bill Readdy says anyone with video or still pictures of the shuttle this morning are asked to contact the space agency. Officials want all possible information for the inquiry into this tragedy.
Readdy added, "It is too early to speculate" about the cause of the shuttle's break up.
1826 GMT (1:26 p.m. EST)
O'Keefe says internal and independent external groups will be set up to investigate today's accident.
1824 GMT (1:24 p.m. EST)
"This is indeed a tragic day," NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe is telling reporters at Kennedy Space Center. He says that all data and information is being gathered and protected for the investigation.
President Bush and O'Keefe have spoken with the astronauts' families.
1800 GMT (1:00 p.m. EST)
Here are some stats about this mission. This was the 113th for the space shuttle program since flights began on April 12, 1981. It was the 88th mission since the 1986 explosion of Challenger. For Columbia, the oldest orbiter in NASA's fleet, this was its 28th flight.
1725 GMT (12:25 p.m. EST)
A weather radar shows the debris swath as the shuttle broke apart. Click here
1715 GMT (12:15 p.m. EST)
Debris is scattered across a wide area of Texas. NASA is asking that any persons finding debris should stay clear given the hazardous nature of the materials and alert local authorities.
1710 GMT (12:10 p.m. EST)
Here is the NASA statement:
A Space Shuttle contingency has been declared in Mission Control, Houston, as a result of the loss of communication with the Space Shuttle Columbia at approximately 9 a.m. EST Saturday as it descended toward a landing at the Kennedy Space Center, Fla. It was scheduled to touchdown at 9:16 a.m. EST.
Communication and tracking of the shuttle was lost at 9 a.m. EST at an altitude of about 203,000 feet in the area above north central Texas. At the time communications were lost. The shuttle was traveling approximately 12,500 miles per hour (Mach 18). No communication and tracking information were received in Mission Control after that time.
Search and rescue teams in the Dallas-Fort Worth and in portions of East Texas have been alerted. Any debris that is located in the area that may be related to the Space Shuttle contingency should be avoided and may be hazardous as a result of toxic propellants used aboard the shuttle. The location of any possible debris should immediately be reported to local authorities.
Flight controllers in Mission Control have secured all information, notes and data pertinent to today's entry and landing by Space Shuttle Columbia and continue to methodically proceed through contingency plans.
More information will be released as it becomes available.
1700 GMT (12:00 p.m. EST)
The NASA news conference by Administrator Sean O'Keefe is planned for 1 p.m. EST.
1645 GMT (11:45 a.m. EST)
Kennedy Space Center workers have been told that all work has been cancelled for this weekend. Only essential personnel should report for their duties.
1630 GMT (11:30 a.m. EST)
The NASA news conference has been delayed until later today. A new time has not been announced.
1620 GMT (11:20 a.m. EST)
We are getting reports from Central California from photographers are telling us that they saw a couple small objects flying free of the shuttle's streak across the sky.
1618 GMT (11:18 a.m. EST)
The space shuttle Columbia has broken up in the skies over Texas. Its crew of seven astronauts had no chance of survival. Mission control lost contact with the shuttle around 9 a.m. EST (1400 GMT), about 16 minutes before its planned touchdown in Florida. Read full story.
1535 GMT (10:35 a.m. EST)
A news conference from Kennedy Space Center in Florida is being scheduled for 11:30 a.m. EST, just under an hour from now.
1530 GMT (10:30 a.m. EST)
Spaceflight Now correspondent Stephen Clark was watching from Larue, Texas as the shuttle flew overhead this morning.
"We were outside and my Dad said "there it is!" in one piece. Then a tiny, tiny piece came off and I was somewhat perplexed. That wasn't supposed to happen. Then bigger pieces rained away from the main piece. It looked very similar to the video we saw of the Russian space station Mir reentering. Later, there was one loud boom and accompanied by smaller booms. Normally we hear two distinct sonic booms when shuttles pass over during entries."
1526 GMT (10:26 a.m. EST)
There are reports of debris in areas of Texas. However, it cannot be confirmed if the items are from Columbia.
1502 GMT (10:02 a.m. EST)
News reports say President Bush is being briefed. It is expected he could soon make a statement to the nation.
1500 GMT (10:00 a.m. EST)
There have been no further announcements from Mission Control.
1440 GMT (9:40 a.m. EST)
During a mission status news conference yesterday, Entry Flight Director Leroy Cain was asked about any possible damage to the shuttle's thermal tiles during launch. The tiles are what protect the shuttle during the fiery reentry into Earth's atmosphere.
Tracking video of launch shows what appears to be a piece of foam insulation from the shuttle's external tank falling away during ascent and hitting the shuttle's left wing near its leading edge.
But Cain said engineers "took a very thorough look at the situation with the tile on the left wing and we have no concerns whatsoever. We haven't changed anything with respect to our trajectory design. It will be a nominal, standard trajectory."
1436 GMT (9:36 a.m. EST)
NASA is asking that any persons finding debris should stay clear given the hazardous nature of the materials and alert local authorities.
1435 GMT (9:35 a.m. EST)
The last voice communications from the crew involved a tire pressure message. Communications were then garbled and static. Contact with the shuttle was lost at about 9 a.m. EST.
1429 GMT (9:29 a.m. EST)
Search and rescue forces are now being deployed, NASA says.
1427 GMT (9:27 a.m. EST)
NASA says the shuttle was about 200,000 feet up and traveling at 12,500 miles per hour when contact was lost.
From all the reports we're receiving, it is becoming clear that the shuttle broke apart over Texas.
1419 GMT (9:19 a.m. EST)
Contingency plans are in effect in Mission Control.
1416 GMT (9:16 a.m. EST)
This was the time of Columbia's landing. What we know is contact was lost with the shuttle at about 9 a.m. EST and a sighting by residents in Texas reported a debris cloud following the plasma trail as Columbia streaked overhead.
1415 GMT (9:15 a.m. EST)
The flight dynamics officer reports there is no tracking of the shuttle.
1414 GMT (9:14 a.m. EST)
Entry Flight Director Leroy Cain has instructed flight controllers to get out their contingency plan.
1410 GMT (9:10 a.m. EST)
NASA is still seeking tracking data. Communications with the shuttle were lost about 10 minutes ago.
1409 GMT (9:09 a.m. EST)
Still no contact with Columbia or crew.
1406 GMT (9:06 a.m. EST)
Mission Control is waiting for C-band tracking data and UHF communications with Columbia through MILA, located near Kennedy Space Center. Houston lost communications with the shuttle a few minutes ago over Texas. We have gotten reports of debris in the sky.
1405 GMT (9:05 a.m. EST)
THERE HAS BEEN NO COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE SHUTTLE. Mission Controllers waiting for tracking data from the Merritt Island station.
1404 GMT (9:04 a.m. EST)
We're getting reports from Texas of debris behind the shuttle's plasma trail during reentry.
1401 GMT (9:01 a.m. EST)
Columbia is out of communications with flight controllers in Houston. Now 15 minutes from landing time.
1359 GMT (8:59 a.m. EST)
At an altitude of 40 miles, shuttle Columbia has entered Texas.
1357 GMT (8:57 a.m. EST)
The shuttle is now 43 miles over New Mexico. Columbia is now reversing its bank to the left to further reduce speed.
1356 GMT (8:56 a.m. EST)
Columbia's speed is now about 15,000 miles per hour as it streaks over northern Arizona.
1355 GMT (8:55 a.m. EST)
The shuttle is now soaring over the southern portion of Nevada. Columbia set for touchdown at Kennedy Space Center in Florida in about 20 minutes.
1353 GMT (8:53 a.m. EST)
Columbia is now crossing the California coastline.
1351 GMT (8:51 a.m. EST)
Altitude 47 miles. Speed 16,400 miles per hour.
1349 GMT (8:49 a.m. EST)
Columbia is beginning the first in a series of banks to scrub off speed as it plunges into the atmosphere. These turns basically remove the energy Columbia built up during launch. This first bank is to the right.
1346 GMT (8:46 a.m. EST)
Thirty minutes to touchdown. Altitude 64 miles. Columbia will be making landfall over California shortly, flying north of San Francisco. The shuttle's course will take it over Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and then along the Gulf Coast and into the Florida Panhandle.
1344 GMT (8:44 a.m. EST)
ENTRY INTERFACE. The protective tiles on the belly of Columbia are now feeling heat beginning to build as the orbiter enters the top fringes of the atmosphere -- a period known as Entry Interface.
The shuttle is flying with its nose elevated 40 degrees, wings level, at an altitude of 400,000 feet, passing over the southern Pacific Ocean, about 4,400 nautical miles from the landing site, at a velocity of Mach 25.
Touchdown is set for 9:16 a.m. EST at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
1342 GMT (8:42 a.m. EST)
Columbia is currently above the Pacific Ocean at an altitude of 90 miles.
1336 GMT (8:36 a.m. EST)
Now 40 minutes to touchdown. Today's landing will be the 62nd to occur at Kennedy Space Center in the history of space shuttle program. Dating back to May 1996, this will mark the 40th of the last 45 shuttle missions to land in Florida. KSC is the most used landing site for the shuttle. Edwards Air Force Base in California has seen 49 landings and White Sands in New Mexico supported one.
1332 GMT (8:32 a.m. EST)
The remaining two Auxiliary Power Units are being activated to supply pressure to the shuttle's hydraulic systems, which in turn move Columbia's aerosurfaces and deploy the landing gear. One unit was started prior to the deorbit burn; the others just a few moments ago. The units are only activated during the launch and landing phases of the shuttle mission.
Also, a dump of excess propellant through the shuttle's Forward Reaction Control System has been completed.
1331 GMT (8:31 a.m. EST)
Columbia's current altitude is 146 miles. Time to touchdown: 45 minutes.
1323 GMT (8:23 a.m. EST)
Onboard guidance is maneuvering Columbia from its heads-down, tail-forward position needed for the deorbit burn to the reentry configuration of heads-up and nose-forward. The nose also will be pitched upward 40 degrees. In this new position, the black tiles on the shuttle's belly will shield the spacecraft during the fiery plunge through the Earth's atmosphere with temperatures reaching 3,000 degrees F. Columbia will begin interacting with the upper fringes of the atmosphere above the Pacific in about 20 minutes.
1318 GMT (8:18 a.m. EST)
DEORBIT BURN COMPLETE. Columbia has successfully completed the deorbit burn, committing the shuttle for its journey back to Earth. Landing is scheduled for 9:16 a.m. EST at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to cap Columbia's 16-day microgravity science flight.
1315 GMT (8:15 a.m. EST)
DEORBIT BURN IGNITION. Flying upside down and backwards about 176 miles above the Indian Ocean to the west of Australia, Columbia has begun the deorbit burn. The firing of the two Orbital Maneuvering System engines on the tail of the shuttle will last nearly three minutes, slowing the craft by over 250 feet per second to slip from orbit.
The retro-burn will send Columbia to a touchdown at 9:16 a.m. EST on a runway just a few miles from the Kennedy Space Center launch pad where the shuttle lifted off 16 days ago.
1311 GMT (8:11 a.m. EST)
Pilot Willie McCool is activating one of three Auxiliary Power Units in advance of the deorbit burn, now four minutes away. The other two APUs will be started later in the descent to provide pressure needed to power shuttle's hydraulic systems that move the wing flaps, rudder/speed brake, drop the landing gear and steer the nose wheel. NASA ensures that at least one APU is working before committing to the deorbit burn since the shuttle only needs a single unit to make a safe landing.
1309 GMT (8:09 a.m. EST)
GO FOR THE DEORBIT BURN! With the fog burning off and high-altitude winds deemed acceptable, entry flight director Leroy Cain has given space shuttle Columbia's astronauts the "go" to perform the deorbit burn at 8:15:30 a.m. EST for return to Earth.
The upcoming two-minute, 38-second retrograde burn using the twin orbital maneuvering system engines on the tail of Columbia will slow the shuttle's velocity just enough to slip the craft out of orbit and begin the plunge back into the atmosphere.
Columbia is headed for a landing at 9:16 a.m. EST at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
1303 GMT (8:03 a.m. EST)
Columbia is now in the proper orientation for the deorbit burn. The shuttle is flying upside-down and backwards with its tail pointed in the direction of travel. The shuttle's vent doors have been closed and final configuring of the onboard computers has been completed.
1259 GMT (7:59 a.m. EST)
A weather briefing is being given to flight controllers. The fog is burning off. But the question is whether the situation is clearing fast enough to permit an on-time landing of Columbia today.
1255 GMT (7:55 a.m. EST)
A report on the conditions at the Shuttle Landing Facility indicates sky conditions scattered at 5,000 feet, scattered 29,000 feet and visibility of 4 miles.
1249 GMT (7:49 a.m. EST)
Mission Control has told the crew to maneuver the shuttle and press on with the final preparations for the deorbit burn. However, the weather is still being evaluated and a final "go" to perform the braking rocket firing to drop from orbit has not been made. The deorbit burn is scheduled for 8:15 a.m. EST to send the shuttle on the course for landing at Kennedy Space Center at 9:16 a.m. EST.
If this deorbit and landing opportunity is waved off, Columbia would make another orbit of Earth and target a deorbit burn at 9:49 a.m. and touchdown at 10:50 a.m. EST.
1245 GMT (7:45 a.m. EST)
The crew has deactivated the shuttle's kitchen area. And pilot Willie McCool has completed the Auxiliary Power Unit prestart, which positions switches in the cockpit in the ready-to-start configuration. One of the three APUs will be started prior to the deorbit burn.
Coming up on a "go/no go" decision for the deorbit burn in the next few minutes.
1232 GMT (7:32 a.m. EST)
The latest check on upper level winds shows conditions are trending more favorable, NASA says. It remains quite foggy, however, at the runway. But visibility is expected to improve as the morning continues.
1212 GMT (7:12 a.m. EST)
The crew has been given the approval to begin their "fluid loading" protocol to drink large amounts of liquids to help in readapting to Earth's gravity, a precursor to today's landing.
Although there is still optimism for favorable conditions at Kennedy Space Center for touchdown at 9:16 a.m. EST, visibility is currently restricted by fog at the runway. But it is expected that as the sun continues to rise the fog will burn off this morning. In addition, strong winds aloft are being monitored.
1200 GMT (7:00 a.m. EST)
The astronauts are finshing up the chore of checking the hundreds of switches in the crew module, verifying that they are in the right position for entry. In Mission Control, officials are continuing to monitor and discuss the winds aloft at Kennedy Space Center. Weather balloons have revealed that the winds are strong and shift directions are various altitudes. Based on the conditions, NASA will have to determine if Columbia can safely fly through the winds. And, if so, which end of the runway to use.
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Just sad.
This is a torlling message (trollin'!) for the hall of fame....which this sotry is bout to move up on.
Oh screw it typing to hard
Ths Palm pilot is silver and gree,m and pictures of it can be found all over the Internet. It's an amazing grtogirt
Just wanted to bump this story above the diamonds story on the hof page
2389th post!
They're DEAD! Dead as bbq.
Please.
No respect.
Die.