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Russia is suspending its space tourist program, for fairly obvious reasons. An NYT story notes that the obsolete but reliable computers driving the shuttle are to be examined as part of the inquiry. But most interestingly, a story in Aviation Week claims that a tracking camera trained on the shuttle detected damage to the wing prior to the breakup.
From what I've read, the shuttle doesn't have a black box. Black boxes are used to store instrument and voice data on traditional aircraft, but NASA's Mission Control serves the same purpose for the Shuttle. It archives all telemetry and voice communication, and there's no worry about having to find it later.
Check out my eclectic infosec blog at InfoSecPotpou
There is no black box. This was a question at the first technical briefing on Saturday. While they do have various data recorders on board, they aren't hardened to survive a crash. For the most part, they aren't necessary, as all the relevant data is transmitted back to Mission Control in real time. Such information would only allow them to better reconstruct the last few seconds after communications were lost (some of which it turns out they did receive data from, only it was too low-power for them to process at the time). While that may be interesting, the useful information will be from earlier on in the flight when the problem first showed up.
That Aviation Week article was the best recounting I've seen yet. I get so tired of that period of time between a catastrophic event and the time real information can be disseminated. Looks like I'm not alone
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I'd heard mention of such a thing. There's two reasons why not:
1) The black box would have to have a much higher tolerance than airplanes (200k ft traveling at 18kmph).
2) (almost?) all the data that would be recorded by such a black box is already being transmitted to the ground. While the 30 seconds of garble (after voice comm. was lost) can tell more about what happened, it won't tell where the problem started. NASA has FAR more data about what happened than a black box can provide.
In addition, such a black box could only monitor a few systems. In the event of a micrometeorite hit (there is the suggestion this happened), it would not be known until it was too late unless the impact site was being montiored. If a monitored system was hit, then the ground would know about it as well as the pilots.
From the Shuttle Loss FAQ: While there is a flight recorder on board the Shuttles, it's not exactly a "Black Box" as you'd find on a commercial aircraft. Once the power is pulled, all data collection stops. This is not considered a problem as almost all of the valuable data is downlinked anyway. What little the onboard flight recorders may contain that wasn't downlinked may or may not be relevant to the mishap, and the only way to know for sure is to locate a surviving unit on the ground. However, one should probably not hold their breath for one to turn up. As noted by the shuttle program manager during the first press conference, there is no *hardened "Black Box" on board any of the Shuttles. At the same time, it's also worth noting that since commercial hardened "Black Boxes" have had difficulty surviving airplane crashes, surviving reentry without special protection is almost an impossibility.
This is a PPT, but hits the main points: Challenger Disaster. An ugly page that has an actual paragraph is this. But I finally found a real page here.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
Well, the reasons for Russia to cease launching space tourists may be obvious if you know one major factor - the Soyuz is not reusable. Since the shuttle fleet is currently grounded, the Soyuz is the only link between Earth and the space station. The Russians don't want to waste a single-use mission on a tourist if they're going to run out of equipment before the reusable shuttle fleet comes back online - they want to keep them for station resupplies, crew changes, etc.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
It takes months of preperation to get one of these shuttles up there. Thousands of people inspect the shuttle before launch looking for any possible reason not to go. This takes a LONG time and without these precautions you would probably end up with two dead shuttles in space.
I do not believe the shuttle can remain in orbit long enough to wait that long.
Because it takes anywhere from a week to a couple months to get a shuttle ready for flight.
As it happens, Atlantis was on the pad already, but it still would've taken nearly a week to launch with minimal crew (pilot and engineer). Columbia had enough food and water to last half a week... although with rationing they may have been able to extend that sufficiently.
Even so, what do you do then? There's no way to "dock" two shuttles and Columbia didn't have jetpack suits onboard, and I don't believe everyone was rated for EVA. You can make a "jump" from one ship to another, but that's trickier than it sounds... fortunately if you do it right and have the supplies on board then only one person has to do it - you can tether the ships together, as long as their orbits are precisely matched and close enough together. The precisely matched bit is the hard part really - it's going to take several hours to transport crew from one shuttle to the other.
It'd probably be an effort on the level of Apollo 13.
Afterwards you have a shuttle in a slowly degrading orbit that's going to do an uncontrolled burn up in the atmosphere -- although perhaps you can set a navigation program to activate after the crew is saved to ensure splashdown in a safe area (like the Pacific ocean). Dunno. Of course, this would have been better than what did occur.
According to Fox News, the pictures were taken from a telescope located at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. I haven't located the images on their site yet, but I did see them on the cabletv broadcast this morning.
If your homeowner's insurance doesn't cover it, NASA is compensating for damages caused by the disaster: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/spacenews/releases/200 3/03-041.html
This
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
There are many telescopes in New Mexico which are capable of doing this, for example:
m l
http://www.de.afrl.af.mil/Factsheets/35meter.ht
These telescopes (or ones similar to them) are used by the scientific community for published research, so I doubt that their capabilities and locations are secret.
I find it hard to believe that stills from this video will not be included in the final report about the disaster.
Did you actually read the article? Or are you just making assumptions based on the synopsis, which on this site are known to be highly inaccurate?
Quote the article: Plans to send tourists into space have been frozen by Russia after the Columbia shuttle disaster left its Soyuz capsules as the only working link between Earth and the International Space Station.
The point is not that space is any more dangerous as a result of the Columbia disaster. Since NASA has put flights on hold, Russia needs to use more room on the Soyuz capsules to pick up the slack. That leaves less rooms for space tourists. As quoted in the article, a Russian space agency spokesman said, "Space tourism is not a priority. State interests must come first, then commercial interests."
I know that many people on Slashdot don't actually read the articles, but it sure helps to clear up a lot of confusion.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
If you can read this, thank an english teacher.
That would be Soyuz the launch rocket, as opposed to Soyuz the manned spacecraft. The booster is used to launch both manned and unmanned cargo. While there have been no fatalities with the capsule since the '70s, the booster crashed on launch sometime during the last year, and there were fatalities, IIRC.
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
Agreed, there are very good reasons why they use older hardware with "known" problems rather than newer hardware with "unknown" problems.
James Tomayko has written an excellent book entitled "Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience". It appears to be available online - Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience.
Of particular interest would be Chapter Four: Computers in the Space Shuttle Avionics System
. That and the brief usual blackout period of re-entry
That's no longer a problem. Since the TDRS were launched, they can send up to TDRS during the "blackout phase" and have it relayed to Houston. There's no longer any loss of contact.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I haven't seen anyone try and connect the "purple streak" picture and the break-up, so i'll post my theory references again and hope it gets considered.
New image evidence shows damage to the composite section of the wing. An increasing reliance on composite materials in aircraft construction creates the potential for additional problems because the composites can allow a connection between lightning and airplane electrical circuitsThe tiles were damaged heavily at launch, scratched deeply as in previous incidents.
The roughtiles heated and shed, leaving a trail of debris plasma.
The plasma trailacted as a conduit for an electrical arc from charged particles in the high upper atmosphere,similar to the Ben Franklin kite legend.
A huge bolt travelled along the plasma trail to the left wing where it caused severe damage, enough to cause a cascading failure over subsequent minutes. Blue jets, elves and sprites are large atmospheric electrical phenomena which occur at the altitude the space shuttle was passing thru and were being studied by Ramon in the MEIDEX dust experiment.
My,My, Hey, Hey
The US air traffic control system is still many years behind on replacing all the computers from the early 60s. They kept coming up with prototype systems with magnitudes more processing power - and magnitudes more bugs. It looks like they're finally installing stuff that mostly works; but it's around 15 years behind schedule.
On a similar note, I know of a Fortune 500 corporation that was still running its accounting system on early-60s RCA mainframes in the mid 80s. It wasn't worth it to recreate the software - which worked fine - until financial execs who were starting to put PCs on their desks got too frustrated about not being able to access the data directly.
You can build an airframe requiring extraordinary processing power just to keep it stable in flight - our newest fighters are of the sort. But the shuttle's not. And maybe it shouldn't be - since if it was there'd be no possibility of a human pilot subbing for a down computer. In combat, if the computer's down, the craft's toast anyway.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Columbia was sent on a science mission. It's robotic arm was removed, there was no air lock, there were no EVA rated crew members. She didn't have the fuel for an orbit change to the ISS, and even if she did, with no air lock, she couldn't have docked.
If the Russian capsule was modified to reach the space shuttle orbit, there would still be no way for the crew to go out and get the food/water/air without an air lock.
If Atlantis was to be used for a rescue mission they would first have to unload all the payload for her ISS mission, then reload it for a rescue. By then Columbia would have run out of supplies. Even if they Columbia crew had enough food/water/air to wait that long the would still have to find a way to get the Columbia crew out without depresuization. Without that air lock there aren't many options.
At least two Soyuz flights failed in the mid
70s. In both cases the rocked blowed up and
safety system worked, ejecting cosmonauts,
who experienced 20g forces on arrival.
In one situation cosmonauts were pulled to
a mountain slope.
No casualties, fortunately and because of
a good safety system.
Let's compare: with wings, the Shuttle gets relatively high L/D (lift to drag ratio) of about 3.5 if I remember correctly. Ablative reentry systems (Apollo/Soyuz/Gemini/Mercury) get L/D of about 1.
Why this matters:1. More L/D means you can control descent rate better. You can control it somewhat by steering the Soyuz using the attitude control jets, but only to a limited degree. So the Soyuz generates about 8-9 G of acceleration during descent. The Shuttle only generates a comfortable 3-4 G.
2. Equally important: lateral control gives the Shuttle and other lifting bodies significant crosstrack steering capability. This means that precision landing is possible, and also offers far more flexibility for contingency landings. With Soyuz/Apollo style entry, you get a large landing footprint, which is why the Russians land in the relatively empty steppes and the Apollos landed in the ocean.
Those are the options that are available today for hypersonic reentry. Parachutes are only used for the latter portions of the descent (typically subsonic).
The recently mothballed X-38 uses both. For the high-speed reentry, the lifting body is used to control the descent rate and to provide cross-track steering. At landing speeds, the lifting body doesn't have much lift, so a parachute is used.
They would weigh less. That is probably the most important advantage
... additional computation power might be helpful
But not the most important requirment. Amongst the most important requirements is that the system should be able to perform all the tasks it needs to, faultlessly and reliably.
The shuttle avionics exist and survive in one of the harshest environments available. The suffer heavy vibration and heavy radiation compared to other avionics such as used in military jets. More modern avionics are less suited to survive either.
Having a lighter faster computer that needs more radiation shielding to ensure reliable operation does not gain you much.
The flight system in the shuttle was fully capable of flying the craft when it was first launched, and until proved otherwise it remains fully capable of doing the job.
Why replace an avionics system that has returned the craft without fault over a hundred times, with one that never has? Do you have any idea the cost and development time of developing 5 multiple redundant intrinsically safe mission computers is likely to be - and is replacing a functioning avionics system at such a cost a good use of budget that could be better spent on science?
They could do more calculations. When trying to compensate
The limiting factor of any avionics system is the response rate of the air frame itself and then the response rate of the mechanical systems themselves - in the shuttle's case the aero surfaces and the thrusters.
The important point of an avionics system is to keep the airframe in the zone of expected operation, you should never allow the airframe to get near the edge of the envelope where you might not be able to command it back in time.
The most important thing here is not the raw commputational power, but rather very accurate sensors so you can detect anomolies as soon as possible, and fast control reactions so you can correct them as quickly as possible. This is true of any closed circuit negative feedback control system that tries to minimise the error between the actual state of the system and the desired state of the system. These are all around us in the traction control systems of cars, the ABS, autopilots on planes. They don't need a lot of computing power, but they do need absolute reliability.
I'm guessing that the software may have failed to consider that a part that is not performing upto specifications is likely to have reduced structural integrity
Software is NOT intelligent, it doesn't make considerations. Engineers and software programmers make considerations. The software will be designed to cope with all the predicted conditions. If the engineers never considered the possibility of a damaged flight surface to be likely, then they wouldn't have required the software to cope with it.
At best you use your knowledge as an engineer and programmer to do your best that should the software experience conditions it was never desing for it does the best it can, but what "best it can" means is a decision of the humans that wrote the software.
Personally if I'm at Mach 20 balanced on a knife edge with plasma at 2300 Celsius a few feet away in a craft that needs reactions and senses far sharper and faster than a humans can every be to keep up this delicate dance on the edge of survivablity - then I don't want that system to go all 'fuzzy logic' on me and make guesses. I want a system that is utterly reliable and predictable, and for my guys on the ground to ask it to fly an utterly predicatble route.
What ever did happen to Columbia to the best of our knowledge the flight control system was within the range of its capability. The system would have been seeing the same readings as mission control could see in the telemetry. It was unusual in that in the final moments it was working harder than it had need to on any other flight, but according to NASA it was well within limits. It was in fact responding to the situation that the aero srufaces may not be giving it the response it needed and started to use the thrusters - an event that had been predicted, accounted for and planned for 30 years earlier when the avionics system was defined.
The avionics on the shuttle are just as capable today as they were when it was launched, if they were not up to the job then Columbia would have not made it back the first time.
So, probably not.
He was a truly unique individual, and will be missed.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
"Anyone has more info on it?"
Yes. It's not the wing and it's not a crack.
"Breaker" Morant was scapegoated. He did as he was ordered. When what he did became a political embaressment he was executed for having done it, those having issued him the orders having denyied them.
That is a scapegoat.
The Thiokol engineers were "whistle blowers." They pissed of their employer. Their employer fired them.
A scapegoat is one who is unjustly sacrificed to prevent or ausage public embaressment. The firing of the Thiokol engineers actually *added* to the embaressment because the cat was already out of the bag.
They weren't sacrificed. They were executed.
KFG
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
One of the links from a previous /. story pointed out that the Columbia was in a lower orbit than the ISS and did not have enough fuel to reach it.
the shuttle does have a black box - but not anything like what you'd find in a commercial aircraft, for obvious kinetics reasons. what it does have is a pretty state-of-the-art radio signal encryption device used for air-to-ground communication. IIRC, it has yet to be recovered, and a large group of searchers are walking 50 or 100 people abreast across stretches of texas cornfields looking for the thing.
filter: +3. Hey, look! all the trolls went away!
A Progress could not dock with Columbia; no matching docking ring. Which means EVA.
I also doubt one could make Columbia's orbit: the Russian launch complex is much higher in latitude than KSC, and so their orbits have much steeper angles. It would need a lot of fuel to match orbits, and may not carry enough.
You'd need 3 Soyuz to rescue the crew: Soyuz only carry 3 passengers, and there were 7 aboard. You'd probably also have to have pilots in each Soyuz, since you wouldn't have months to write the encounter software.
Anyway, it would take a VERY long time to get 3 Soyuz prepped for launch. And then there's the same pesky orbit thing.
NASA's afternoon press conference today produced the Air Force photo and a helpful series of slides mapping the sensor failures over time.
I hate call waitin`~+~~~
NO CARRIER
Firstly, my sympathy to all involved.
Next. Has anyone seen the SPIE Proceedings Vol. 2455 (b=abstracts) particularly Paper #: 2455-23 Shearographic nondestructive evaluation of Space Shuttle thermal protection systems
The abstract says
TPS - Thermal Protection SystemSOFI - spray-on foam insulation
This paper is in the proceedings of the SPIE meeting in 1995 on "Nondestructive Evaluation of Aging Aircraft, Airports, Aerospace Hardware, and Materials"
A polite letter to the NSAS legal department of: "Our place suffered $X damage, Will you please send us a check to cover the damages?" would be the proper thing to do.
Its only practical to sue if NSAS doesn't come up with the compensation. Federal laws require any group that luanches spacecraft to have insurance which implys NASA has a liability. NSAS's attept will be to only pay once per claim and make sure there aren't any fraudlent claims ('cause we all know there will be)