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Shuttle Columbia Flight Recorder Recovered In Texas
ctar writes "ABC News reports that the space shuttle Columbia's flight recorder has been found in Hemphill Texas. ABC says: "The finding today came after NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said investigators may never find a single definitive cause for the destruction of Columbia""
Hopefully this will solve the problem resolutely.
I dont like it when people think about what I think (say). Rather I try to make them think like I think.
Perhaps today is not in vain. *hopeful*
Informatus Technologicus
While this is interestng news, it's pretty untimely.
My guess is that the Slashdot editors are using this article to push the Iraq debate one topic lower, and hopefully reduce the traffic...
1 hour, 900 posts. Holy crap.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
It was a found a week or so ago and its identity confirmed today.
Here More information than the press blurb in the article
I hope you die painfully and alone.
The shuttle's recorder is pretty much redundant, since they send everything down in realtime anyway. It's unlikely that this will tell us anything new, IMHO.
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
I always find it interesting how many more comments appear on articles that have nothing to do with science, but still have some kind of generic American appeal. Considering the current time on the East coast (just after midnight), it will be interesting to see how many posts it has a couple of days from now.
Note to self: Check out what data recovery firm is doing work for NASA on the flight recorder. Keep in mind for any future problems. Anyone that can resurrect a recording device that's been blasted from an exploding spacecraft into the top of the atmosphere, subjected to incredible, rock-melting heat, and then slammed into the ground at terminal velocity can probably handle anything.
May we never see th
The recorder, sources told ABCNEWS, starts 10 minutes before Columbia's descent and measures the ship's temperature, aerodynamic pressure and other data. The information would not have been transmitted to NASA mission control during the flight.
Emphasis mine...
-- I'd say your post was about 3 monkeys, 18 minutes.
email it to yourself but never pop it.
let your ISP worry about that shit.
I fail to see why this was moderated troll.
Who was I supposed to be trolling? Are you saying that there are a large number of people reading /. that 1) are involved in the design of the space shuttle and 2) want to keep the system the way it is, so that more people will die, and that I'm therefore trolling them?
And can you give me an example of the "predictable responses" this is supposed to illicit?
Even if you meant it in the less common sense ("a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial") can you explain what is wrong with the idea of opening up the shuttle design process? If an institution is failing to do its job and people are dying as a consequence, one of the best ways to fix the problem is to enable a large number of people to see (in detail) what is going on, motivate them to care, and motivate the system to listen. Bridge design (to name just one example) improved dramatically when these three conditions were met (large number of people study the designs, they care because they and people they care about use the bridges, and companies that build bad bridges don't prosper). You may disagree but that doesn't mean I'm a troll!
I suppose getting moderated "troll" for suggesting a way to fix problems before someone dies (instead of forming a commitee to investigate each tragedy as it happens) is better than getting moderated "offtopic" for responding to the article instead of to the blather of all the people who didn't read it, but it's just as anoying.
-- MarkusQ
I was skimming sci.space.shuttle last night. There had been a general "no flight recorders" statement about the shuttle by the more authoritative contributors to the group ever since this discussion on the launch began. Then this news came up.
It turns out that these flight recorders were done for Columbia and Challenger, and dropped from subsequent shuttles, since telemetry was deemed sufficiently reliable. Then everyone forgot about these OXE recorders, until one was found.
There was some mention about some other recorders that could yield useful information, but how that fits into the "no flight recorders" statement, I don't understand. I can see the point on the OXE recorder. There was some discussion that a data vs bandwidth choice has to be made on telemetry, and that more complete data can be found on recorders. I'd think there'd be a similar data vs tape space decision on a recorder, too.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I am going to pretend you are serious too.
America used to have a conscription program, where young adult males were forced to serve in the Armed Forces. It wasn't very popular.
Babies and 103 year old grannies take medicines. Would you advocate drafting random people, including babies and 103 year old grannies in to drug trials.
Leo Szilard , Atomic pioneer, gave up Physics after participating in the development of the Atomic Bomb in World War 2, He had a suggestion for how to react to the preseence of Nuclear weapons.
His suggestion was an alternative to drafting 1 million young men, and wasting a year of productivity, putting them in the Armed Forces, and spending a huge fraction of the Nation's revenue building expensive weapons for them. He was still going to draft them, but rather than wasting their time in the Armed Forces, he suggested the USA and the USSR merely exchange hostages.
Each country would be responsible for feeding, housing, and putting said hostages to work, within agreed upon limits.
If one of the countries attacked the other, the attacked country was authorized to kill some of all of their hostages.
One of the long term advantages of Szilard's plan was, if Soviet hostages were billeted in American homes, and vice versa, hostages returning after their hitch would have a much better understanding of the other Nation's people and culture. They would have friends over there, maybe would have fallen in love. All of which would make it a lot harder to imagine launching a nuclear exchange.
Why did I bring up Szilard? His conscription program is unconventional, like MarkusQ's. But I think it held a lot more merit.
Why did I bring up Szilard? His conscription program is unconventional, like MarkusQ's. But I think it held a lot more merit.
I would agree. He was, after all, a genius, as opposed to me, some random guy repeating (and quite likely misquoting) the best idea he's heard. It wasn't even my idea, just something I overheard in a bull session between some engineers (note the title of my original post).
So how can the idea be improved? Instead of a draft, have a lottery maybe? So you have to pay a buck for a chance to go up? No one goes against their will, but knowing that your friends and family might play would involve even thouse who don't play. That would still create a lot of interested parties, though perhaps biasing the sample towards the more optimistic. It took me less than thirty seconds to come up with that patch; doubtlessly there are even better alternatves. Any suggestions?
-- MarkusQ
The engineering required to remove said tape and play it back on a different set of heads is much less complicated, touchy, and error-prone than that of say, a hard disk.
Attempts at falsifying / otherwise fudging the data would be more easily apparent, IMHO.
Because it's linear, concussion might be apparent in the recording, but it won't cause it go completely haywire.
The tape medium itself is not too rigid, but put inside a toughened metal box (I don't know what they're made of) and you're right, we shouldn't be too surprised so many people still use tape. Even if a small part of it is damaged, it probably won't have destroyed the whole recording, unlike many other all-or-nothing storage media.