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Columbia Coverage
ke4roh writes "Space.com offers a list of questions and answers about the events and hardware surrounding Columbia's destruction Saturday. They address suspected causes, foam, tile, and some of the alternatives had NASA known the ship would not be able to re-enter the atmosphere." viewstyle writes "PC Magazine has a pack of stuff put together on the space shuttle accident, as they recognized the fact that the space program inspired a lot of tech people in general. What's pretty cool is the section written by a guy there who worked on the computer components in the shuttle." And naturally, the idea of a space elevator is back in vogue again.
The so-called "journalism" media have already determined the accident was caused by foam from the external tank. They will never let it go. Any other theories, regardless of scientfic validity, will be dismissed as a NASA cover-up. The news meadia already have their slings out and they're just looking for asses to put in them.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
So let's assume that you had a temperature sensor behind every protective tile on the shuttle.
...but unfortunately you're already going about Mach 18 in what is basically a high-tech meteor. You have only a few minutes before the heat buildup destroys the shuttle. What are you going to do, pull over?
One of the tiles becomes damaged during takeoff, but perhaps not so bad that there is any concern. The tiles are designed to take some amount of damage from space debris after all.
You begin re-entry with a damaged tile. Maybe the damage was a little more than you could have suspected, and it comes off! Now your temperature sensor is screaming and you kow you've got a real problem...
No matter what you do, no matter how careful you are, no matter how much redundancy or how large a safety factor you have, there will always be something that can go wrong in a very bad way.
All things considered, the shuttle is an extremely well built and carefully looked after machine with an exceptional safety and performance record. I don't feel anyone is at fault for what happened... it was just the luck of the draw.
=Smidge=
I've started to wonder if the insulation hit isn't a red herring. NASA themselves have said it doesn't explain the breakup - that there's a "missing link" (their exact words) that they've yet to find. The temperature on the left wing only rose by about 40 degrees despite 3,000 degree temperatures outside the shuttle - which doesn't sound to me like there was much tile missing. The Atlantis, I believe, was hit in much the same way as the Columbia was on an earlier launch and showed no ill effects. And the Columbia itself lost more than 100 tiles from its nose area on one flight and still made it home fine.
I could very well be wrong, but I would almost bet at this moment that the foam hit on launch is mostly a coincidence - or at most the beginning of a long chain of implausible events that preyed on some other, pre-existing fault. This is the case with most airplane disasters, where it's rarely one single problem but rather an entire series of highly implausible but still possible events that coincide in an extremely unlucky chain. The shuttle is not as fragile as some people are making it out to be right now; it was built to withstand the repeated abuse of the shock of liftoff and the heat of re-entry over many, many years and many, many cycles. The Columbia in particular was also just recently refurbished and had its heat shielding inspected and, where appropriate, upgraded to the latest materials available. It does not sound to me like a piece of foam hitting it at launch alone could bring it down - there has to be something more, and NASA seems to agree with their "missing link" statement.
I think the point that a lot of people forget about this is that the Space Shuttle is something that we launch into space strapped to a pair of 15-story solid propellant rockets and a fuel tank larger than you can even think of.
Then we let it sit around in an environment that has all sorts of tiny little rocks and pieces of metal and neutrons and such flying around at bullet speeds for a week or two.
Then we drop it back into the atmosphere and try to land it on the earth. During this process it accelerates to speeds faster than just about any manmade object as ever moved before and heats up to thousands of degrees.
As you can imagine, there is quite a lot of danger involved here. Rather than criticizin NASA for the accident, let's recognize how amazing it is that their safety record is as good as it is, and see what we can do to learn from this catastrophe.