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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.
As with the Challenger disaster, there are many smart people trying to determine the cause of the accident. In addition to the wreckage, there are memos, notes, films, and other media to review. Investigations take time, and regardless of the desire to find an immediate smoking gun,I anticipate NASA will release an official report no sooner than may. Right now we have several media "experts" offering their opinions.
I am me...I think
How so?
:(
I mean seriously...if the computing system is going to come under scrutiny, how is that trolling?
There comes a point where you have to step back and ask yourself what the best way to go about a problem is. Unix is old. I know, Linux is not Unix, but still...depending on who's calling the shots there, they could very well decide that a 20+ year old OS is too archain to be used on the shuttle.
Then again, the shuttle itself is pressing that age.
Who knows.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
"We continue to recover crew remains and we are handling that process with the utmost care, the utmost respect and dignity," said Ronald Dittemore, shuttle program manager.
They died advancing science so we could all live better lives. Let's keep this in mind...
I wonder if NASA will start making in orbit inspections of shuttles part of the flight plan. While things like this are obviously rare they are real and deadly.
I wonder how long it would take an astronaut to correctly inspect a shuttle in orbit.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
It's not really obvious why they're doing it. The article implies, but doesn't state, that it's because they now need to put cargo where the third, "passenger" seat would go on a Soyuz capsule.
Some people have suggested they're doing it because "space is now unsafe", which makes absolutely no sense.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
It's probably overdue that the shuttle was updated, shame it takes something like this to make it happen. Personally I hope that manned space flight can continue, and get safer.
It seems unlikely that computers were to blame for this, but the kit in the shuttle is pretty old - if we're going to ask people to risk their lives like this we must give them the best kit we can.
I know I was shocked at the loss of the shuttle, and it should remind us of how brave these people are.
The Columbia wasn't a Soyuz.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
According to a post on CNN yesterday, (can't find the link) it looked as if the drag was too much for the thrusters... It was causing the shuttle to roll over. The flight computers fired the thrusters to compensate, but it was a losing battle - if the shuttle hadn't broken up it would have rolled over and crashed.
The people that write the code for the Shuttle do great work, and the organization supports them. The result is software that's remarkably error-free. Like you, I admire them.
I hate it when clueless journalists say "the computers are old" So what? It's the software that's important and the software is top notch. They seem to imply that a pentium IV would have magically saved Columbia. That just isn't true. It's like saying improved metal detectors would have prevented 9/11.
Unless there is some added function that they could only implement only on newer hardware, I don't see why the shuttles need new computers. Naturally, these jouranlists will never ask "what additional functionality does the shuttle need that the current computers don't provide?" they aren't trying to get at the truth of an issue. they're trying to get people to watch - and the best way to do that is by stirring controversy. All it takes to do that is to say "Look! the comptuers are so old!"
It's interesting to read Richard's story of the investigation of the first shuttle disaster, and his realization that the process was political, not scientific.
He had a great deal of trouble, as an official investigator, just being *allowed* to investigate, and of course to release his findings he had to engage in what amounted to guerilla tactics.
The end fate of the Morton-Thiokol engineers who "blew the whistle" must stand as some sort of object lesson in this case as well.
One would hope that steps are being taken to prenvent another go 'round of this shabby and shameful incident in American space history.
KFG
New computers would have several advantages:
1) They would weigh less. That is probably the most important advantage.
2) They could do more calculations. When trying to compensate for failing parts without going off course, spinning out of control, or overstressing the failing part, additional computation power might be helpful. (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.)
It'd probably be an effort on the level of Apollo 13.
Except that with Apollo 13 they were never looking at sending another Saturn V up to rescue the crew. The things done to save Apollo 13 were done from inside Apollo 13 - this would not have been possible with Columbia if the damage was external as is being speculated since they had no way of getting outside the shuttle.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
I've heard the whole "we wouldn't be able to rescue them anyway" deal, but I don't understand why.
Nor do I (but for other reasons)
Look. I understand the "you will either succeed or die" attitude in the Mercury days, but there is no reason to operate under those conditions today.
I realize that there was no way for this crew to get to the ISS (Or for the folks at the ISS to come and get them) I also realize that "rushing" the next launch to rescue them would have been an even greater danger than risking reentry (at best) or impossible (at worst)
My question isn't why didn't we save them using duct tape and left over Apollo 13 gumption, but why we would send a manned mission up in this day and age without contigency plans in case reentry is determined to be too great a risk.
Maybe the ISS needs to have an orbit only vehicle that could go and meet the shuttle in an emergency. Maybe we need to put a second shuttle on the pad and ready to go before we send up any mission. (sort of like reserve divers who just sit around, ready to go, whenever high risk diving is attempted) Maybe we need to send every shuttle up with an ISS docking ring, whether it intends to dock or not, and don't send them so far from the ISS that they couldn't reach it in a pinch.
The point is, there are lots of solutions that probably would have saved this crew if they had been put in place before the launch, and NASA lost the "no point in looking for trouble we can't fix" attitude
Ok, I get really fed up with the people who are bothered that NASA still runs PDP boxes for navigation. These things are running code that HAS to be right --- a BSOD would really mean D and an OOPS from the kernel can leave you in a fire ball. Sure, with faster cpu you could do more calculations. But on the flip side, as you get faster the illusion that CPU's are digital devices becomes less opaque.
... they just work and keep on working. If the system you are interfacing with hasn't changed and the software in place spans the space of what you need it to do, why upgrade?
Moreover, the I/O bus interface to the various sensors in the shuttle critical. This is the kind of thing PDP's are good at. Hell there are PDP's still running parts of assembly lines around the world
There are comments after this and before this that really show a total lack of comprehension when it comes to writing (near) error free code. (The parent I'm replying gets it, but doesn't really expand too much on the SW side of it)
Just throwing in a "realtime version of Unix" because it is a "reliable and robust OS" will NOT mean the program running on it is reliable Or robust.
When I was doing my CompSci degree 12 years ago the SW Eng Prof was on sobatical to NASA to write some new code for the attitude jets so it could dock with Russian equipment. There were about 2 or 3 PAGES of code. It took them almost a YEAR to write it and verify that it was error free. And then, when he came back he said they estimated there was still one error for every 10,000 lines of code in the space shuttle program. Not only that, it was the MOST ERROR FREE CODE ON THE PLANET. Translation: More error free than any Unix/Linux OS or program.
And now people want to just throw in a newer chip with a newer OS?! WTF are they thinking? There isn't even any evidence that would make anyone think that the computers were to blame for the accident in the first place! Fix what isn't broken or even related to the accident... Briliant, only a clueless legislator could come up with something that stupid!
As the parent to this post said, the chips are working fine, they are not overloaded, and the program is tried, true and tested. Don't fix what ain't broke!
Soyuz is characterized in the popular media as an aging, broken-down spacecraft, but the fact is that it is one of the most reliable and efficient manned spacecraft that has ever been produced. The Soyuz has a launch escape system which has been used once, in 1983, to blast the crew away from their exploding rocket (in the words of one site, "The crew landed close to the launch site, badly bruised after surviving nearly 20g acceleration, but they were still alive.") This is unlike the shuttle, in which escape is impossible for the first two minutes of flight, while the solid boosters (which can't be turned off) are firing. Soyuz has not had a fatal accident since 1971, and has had no major safety issue since 1988. Personally, given the choice between flying on the Shuttle and flying on Soyuz, I would pick the latter.
Spaceflight tends to reward simple and time-tested designs over new and complex. I have read at least one account suggesting that NASA resurrect the Gemini spacecraft for crew transfer to and from the ISS, since it was one of the most reliable spacecraft the US has ever flown.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
The computers on board the shuttles are *not* obsolete. 1970's technology, yes. Old, yes. If you have a device which does what it is designed to do and there isn't a suitable replacement or even a reason to replace then it is not obsolete.
Even though there are faster processors available, the entire system must be considered. The software, hardware and system has been through extensive design, development and debug. Resistance to vibration and radiation and accelleration has been tested and was designed in.
Slapping in the latest gajillion Hz processor would not have provented the recent tragedy, it likely would have created more dangers. Certainly if designing a shuttle today, we'd use a processor with more horsepower, but by the time it got off the launch pad, it would look ancient by the standard of what's sitting on your desk.
For mission critical applications, I would take old slow reliable over new fast unproven any day.
But then, whether you call it cynicism or realism, we accept a level of failure in all transport systems which is capable of killing people. We allow people to ride bicycles in motorised traffic. We allow manufacturers to build cars that are capable of traveling fast enough that a brake or steering failure can kill not only the occupants but anyone who gets in the way. We allow the construction of ships that break up in heavy seas, of railways where trains can pass red lights and crash. There is no public contract about this: we never actually get a chance to vote on the level of risk we want in our transport systems. What we do is react to disasters, and politicians have to decide based on that reaction whether to take some kind of action.
Sometimes they do, and as a result we have anti-lock brakes, double-hulled ships, crash barriers on freeways and autoroutes, airbags, automatic train protection systems, and a host of other technologies.
The Shuttle crews are unusual, superior human beings. But they should not need to be heroes, any more than someone who gets on a plane in LA to fly to a meeting in Tokyo is a hero.
Because if the exploration of space is ever to become commonplace, we have to get rid of the idea that this is a dangerous enterprise for heroes. We need to follow the same rules that apply to everything else. We need to ask nasty questions like "Why can't tiles be replaced in orbit, since we have had 18 years to think about things like this?" .
A WW1 biplane could keep flying after it had been shot full of holes, yet the Shuttle seems to have a number of extremely fragile technologies failure of any one of which could destroy it on re-entry. If that's so, why haven't we developed a better technology? Is it the mindset that needs to change as much as the design?
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Fatalities were on earth surface,
service people were affected by the blast.
No passengers of Souz died.
It's not Cargo room, and Soyuz flights aren't resupply flights.
Unmanned Progress Tugs fly resupply missions to ISS, they can carry 2.5 tons of supplies (food, clothes, fuel, water, oxygen, etc).
Soyuz flights were "Taxi Flights" Soyuz capsules have an on-orbit rating of six months. So that means that the Russians need to rotate the Soyuz "Life Boat" at the ISS every six months.
What they do is fly a fresh Soyuz capsule up. Two cosmonauts are necessary for the Taxi Flight, and then that Taxi Crew comes back down on the old Soyuz capsule. They used to fill that third seat through agreements they had with other nations space agencies, and have only recently begun selling them to space tourists.
They're going to kill the Taxi Flights while the Space Shuttle is grounded, and devote them to ISS Crew Rotation.
That means that the next Long-Term ISS Crew will fly up to the station on a Soyuz, and the current crew will return to earth aboard the Soyuz currently docked to the station, and due to be rotated out.
They will continue that pattern until the Shuttle's start flying again, at which point they will resume Crew Rotation duties, and the Soyuz flights will go back to being simple Taxi Flights again, at which point the russians will start selling the third seat again.
Ummmm. The Russian economy has been growing between 4.3-9.0% for the past 4 now almost five years. So the Russians are no where near as desperate for cash as they were 5 year ago. That said NASA largest single expense is labor. In Russia that isnt the case because a senior engineer makes at most maybe $1000 dollars a month. Money also buys a hell of a lot more over there. 14 cents a kilo (not a shitty pound) for fruit when I was in Moscow! So the Russian space program is not totally starved by any means. They build 3-6 ships every year which is approx what was being done in the early 70's. They arent desperate for tourists, but it would be a nice way to fund some research which hasnt happened in Russia for 12 years now and make some repairs and upgrades to their facilities. The Russian space program still takes tourists up in Mig-31 trainer aircraft for 50k a pop so they arent completely leaving the tourist biz. May I also say that only a idiot believes that Russia isnt helping china develop its space program for $$$$. As for joint U.S/Russian militarty/space cooperation that out of the question because as long as Russia continues to sell arms to Iran our laws forbid congress, Nasa, or the president from financial helping with any part of the Russian military industrial complex www.themosowtimes.com find the Pavel Felgenhaur piece for more info. Russian makes close to a billion dollars a year off of arm and oil trading with Iran. and probably more under the table. Lucky for us the Russians only sell last generation platforms to the Iranians.
Sure, Atlantis may have been ready to go up last Monday. However, I guarantee it wasn't ready last Monday to perform a rescue mission. Entire flight plans, equipment, etc would have been changed. It's not as simple as going to pick up your friends on the highway who ran out of gas.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
>Accidents are going to happen, expect it, and
>move on.
That approach works for the layman. It does not work for the engineers and the physicists who need to do the moving on -- they still need to design and fly spaceships. Don't expect the space program to simply "move on" and accept that one launch out of 50 is going to be a catastrophe.
If we must accept that, it's the end of the program.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
They did plan for it.
From Nasa's Human Space Flight pages:
The nominal maximum crew size is seven. The middeck can be reconfigured by adding three rescue seats in place of the modular stowage and sleeping provisions. The seating capacity will then accommodate the rescue flight crew of three and a maximum rescued crew of seven.
Make sure one other shuttle is always ready to go within a week like Atlantis was
Atlantis wasn't ready to go. It could be pressed into service, but only by eliminating all pre-launch testing. You know, the testing that routinely finds problems in the months prior to launch that have to be fixed and occasionally cause launch delays?
You want a shuttle ready to go everytime? Ok. You just doubled the cost for every launch. Because keeping a shuttle ready is a huge expense. The environment, even inside a building, is not friendly to the components and continual inspection is necessary for some areas... like the tiles.
It seems like a simple thing to rig up some camera or whatever to look around the corners.
It's not a simple thing. They've been trying to design one for ISS and it's problematic. And that's a vehicle that's not designed for reentry.
As long as you have water, and you can recirculate that pretty low tech, if they don't do that already.
Oddly enough, Columbia would have been in good shape here... They were actually testing systems to recycle water from waste. See here.
I expect something like this to be in place before the shuttles are taken in use again
I don't. Doing so at this stage would kill manned space flight. It's akin to eliminating seafaring exploring from Europe in the 1400s - 1600s because too many people died in the process, and so we won't do any more exploration until the infrastructure is in place to keep them safe. Except that until the exploration has been done it's impossible to put the infrastructure in place.
I'm not saying that a rescue couldn't have occurred - in fact I posited ways it could have been done (based off statements from NASA no less), but also stated the issues that would have been encountered. Nor am I saying that a rescue shouldn't be attempted in a future case.
But, realistically, we don't have the infrastructure yet. If we want to be able to prevent this kind of disaster in the future, then we have to do more missions, build more flight systems (hopefully more cost effective to run than the shuttle fleet), and put more permanent installations into space. But all of this is decades down the road... and trying to fix it the other way around is a nearly certain way to kill manned spaceflight all together.
The logic behind NASA's statements that any damage to the wing was not followed up with land-based or ISS-based visual inspections because they could not have done anything about it is deeply troublesome to me.
One should not limit the aquisition of important safety data based on this type of thinking. You don't try to phone someone who lives in a burning building just because you are, at that time, unable to come up with a response to that situation.
As somone who went through a life-threatening situation (a fire), I can affirm that the mind can get pretty creative when it has to.
For example, the Progress vehicle could have been sent to Columbia while a rescue shuttle was prepared.
With only two EVA-certified individuals on board, and no docking clamps, moving supplies from the Progress vehicle to Columbia would not have been a trivial endeavor. And transferring untrained (for EVA) people between shuttles would have been difficult, at best.
Yet no one would have argued before a rescue attempt that the seven astronauts would have been better off if we had not known that the left wing was damaged.
This site in Finland has some pretty interesting information on the initial designs that were proposed for the Space Shuttle. In some of the concepts it's interesting to see shuttles docked with a space station of some sort and astronauts outside buzzing around.
Over on the sci.space.shuttle newsgroup there's been a flood of posts from space newbies asking what are considered "ridiculous" questions like "why didn't they take a spacewalk to survey the damage" and "why didn't they go to the space station for repairs?" At first glance, these questions are uninformed, but in the larger sense if you consider the vision that was presented to us (I was around then, albeit as a child) the reality we finally got didn't even come close to the grand scope of it all. Basically there were some mighty big plans afoot after Apollo, but they got squashed pretty fast when Nixon taught NASA a significant lesson: Just because one president wants to do something doesn't mean the next president has to sign up for it. Sad, really, but that's the way it goes.
Let's consider some other aircraft:
The SR-71 could do mach3.3 (2200mph), and it's titanium skin temp routinely got up to 1000F, well above the melting point of the shuttles aluminum skin. (melting point aluminum 600F, titanium 3000F).
The exhaust outlet temp of the SR71 engines is around 3400F, so we know there are materials available for aircraft manufacture that can take some pretty high heat even when they are taking a pounding.
The SR71 was designed long before the shuttle and flew routinely up until the 1990s without incident.
How about the MIG-25. It can do Mach 3.3 or so also, and its airframe can withstand 25G! I don't know what the design specs were on the shuttle, but I know it never experienced more than 3 G, and I would guess that 10G would rip it apart.
If I were going to slap a spacecraft together, I'd give it the airframe specs of a MIG-25, make it out of titanium, and instead of tiles just bolt on a piece of disposable titanium covered with teflon for a heat shield. It could probably be used a bunch of times too before it had to have a new coating put on it if the teflon coating were thick enough. Heck, there's so many new frying pan materials out there that would probably do 10 times better than teflon too.
Such a spaceship would have weathered what destroyed the shuttle with little more than a tiny dent.
You mean to tell me that with $500 million per FLIGHT (!) that piece of junk was all they could come up with? It was half disintegrated before it ever left the ground. Tiles so delicate you could not touch them? WTF? That's like some kind of sick joke. It's almost like they're making it up. They designed a winged aircraft that is supposed to use aerobraking for reentry and made it out of aluminum instead of titanium?
Hell, I have a whole set of frying pans that are more advanced.
Lots of folks are getting screwed here people: Astronauts and taxpayers to name a few.
With only the launch video for information the analysis was 90% WAG (wild ass guess). At best the analysis would have consisted of: "We think the foam is this big, and since we assume the foam is this big we assume it weighs this much, and since it weighed this much, and it looks like it hit around here, so it shouldn't have caused any serious damage. And plus, it was okay the last few times this happened." If I were in charge of a no fail safe system (the exterior hull of the Shuttle) and I hear that kind of bullshit, the first words out of my mouth would be, "Clean out your desk, you're fired for incompetence." What about possible ice? Why did the foam fall off? Could it have been wet? Did they analyze the retrieved tank's foam? Did they measure the missing foam? What was the weather before launch? There were too many unknowns and more information was needed before a proper analysis could have been done. And ANY pictures would have added a whole dimension to the data available for analysis.
Face it, they bet the shuttle on that WAG. And they lost big. This is an exact repeat of the complacency and lack of paranoia that led to the Challenger disaster. People in charge of spacecraft should be paranoid assholes who insist on things being done as perfectly as humanly possible. And "It was okay the last few times" is not a statement that people like that make.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
The original design that NASA were gunning for was for a vehicle that would come in steeper and then glide over a limited range to its target with two real wings. The advantage being that the vehicle would only be exposed for a short period of time to the heating effect. The shuttle would also land a lot slower with this design.
The USAF needed a longer glide range to operate from Vandenburg, so they could always get back to land, even after a single orbit. They pressed for a delta wing which allowed them to glive for about 2,500 miles. This disadvantge is that the shuttle must fly through reentry (rather than a controlled stall, that NASA wanted). This meant that reentry took a lot longer, with much greater exposure to heat.
See my journal, I write things there
We say, "skip the safety checks", but the reality is more like, skip fixing all the problems the shuttle develops prior to launch. Given how many holds for problems there are in a normal countdown. Trying a fast launch is pretty close to certainty for disaster.
It takes a great many people, including the astronauts, to launch a shuttle. I know I personally would not want to work launch crew, mission control etc etc if I thought there was a 99% chance that the people in the ship would be incinerated on the launch pad.
Just as you would hold someone in street clothes back from running into a burnng building so you would not launch a shuttle on a moments notice.
I mean, did the guy forget his medication or does stuff like that exist?
Probably both.
According to several sources I consider fairly reliable, humans currently have technology capable of shattering the Earth. I'm not 100% about that; our technology, while enormously more advanced than the current public perception would allow, we're nowhere nearly as advanced as some previous incarntions of humanity, (Atlatian, Lemurian, etc.), and frankly, even to me, shattering the Earth seems like a fairly inconceivable affair.
Mind you, early work by Tesla demonstrated that knowing the correct frequency of an object gave one the power to make it vibrate using sympathetic resonance from a distance, (the basics of radio), and that if you continually pumped energy into that object in a certain way, you could literally shake the object apart. And as one great mind once said. . , "With a lever big enough. .
Though, screwing up in such a way is supposedly what destroyed the planet which we now know of as the Asteroid belt. And that's not from Lee & Kirby.
This stuff only seems far-out to people because everybody has been led to believe in an excruciatingly simple description of reality. When you start to think and look and overcome your programming. .
-Fantastic Lad --None Rival DOOM!