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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.
I've been hearing a lot about the 30 seconds of telemetry that was too weak for the computers to display during the shuttle break-up but that is now being analyzed from backups. Does anybody have any more information on what this data?
As I understand it, the last 'good readings' were full-scale low or high on a lot of the temperature sensors, which to me would indicate sensor failure. Several of these sensors reported such values before communication was lost. This kind of makes me wonder what benefit there would be in examining whatever else came back after those failures--I can't imagine the data would be particularly accurate, though there may be some valuable information. Can anybody elaborate?
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
So, how the hell do you get down if there's a fire? The "Space Stairs"*?.
* (c)2003 kir
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
"As for that retarded idea of space elevator, let's repeat for the zillionth time: It won't work. It's just an occupation of "acaedmics" to keep them occupied with such "ideas".
Yes, it is exactly the same as the other huge time-wasters some idiot academics spent time on in the past, such as:
- That improbable heavier-than-air flying machine
- The ludricous notion that one could reach India by sailing west around the world instead of east...
- That silly experiment of using steam to turn wheels and do useful work.
- Trying to figure out the course of planets by assuming they revolve around the sun, where any fool can see that everything revolves around the earth.
Seriously, with a mentality like that we'd still be hunting wooly mammoths with sticks.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
People wishing to express their sympathies can send notes to this address:
Johnson Space Center
NASA Road 1
Houston, TX, 77058
The astronauts are heroes who risk their lives to better our world. They are truly the best of the best and I think we have taken them for granted. Since Apollo, the missions they've been on haven't been attention-grabbing and shuttle launches became routine. But I think this event has awoken us to the fact that space exploration is one of the most important fields and we need to give NASA more funding. It's time to realize that space exploration is costly but to make it safe, it is even more costly. I'm also going to draft a few letters to my national representatives and let them know that NASA needs omre money. THe launch of a space shuttle is not mundane and we should still be in awe of it.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
There's a good story about the software team at NASA here.
From the story: "Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors."
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
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.
So what the engineers will do is pull the threads. For example, it may be possible to explain all the off-scale and zero readings by assuming a particular wire bundle was cut at a certain point. This can lead them to look at the surrounding structure in more detail. They'll also look carefully at the times at which sensors went bad to determine how the structural damage evolved.
Basically the effort is to look at all possible causes of the disaster and use the telemtry to eliminate them one-by-one. Zero readings in sensors will probably be inconsistent with some possible explanations, thus eliminating them.
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.