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NASA May Fly Before Changes Are Implemented

Posted by michael on from the wing-and-a-prayer dept.

kmak writes "According to CBS News, NASA might fly again early next year before changes are made to the management. The changes were requested due to the Columbia accident.. what will happen this time?"

23 comments

  1. Challenger Accident? by TheRedHorse · · Score: 1

    Um, I think we already know what was destined to happen after the Challenger accident.....Way to go /. editors!

    1. Re:Challenger Accident? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Or maybe NASA is just that slow.

  2. Most likely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Nothing... just as nothing happened in most previous flights.

  3. Challenger? by rumpledstiltskin · · Score: 1

    Um....the challenger was a long time ago...I remember because I was in elementary school at the time (hint, I've already graduated college). Are you sure it's not Columbia?

  4. Game saving edit.... by rumpledstiltskin · · Score: 2

    good job editors. The post originally asserted "Challenger" accident.

    1. Re:Game saving edit.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The editor can change a post once it's already up? Who knew? I thought after the whole Lone Gunmen thing it was impossible. What a bunch of retards.

    2. Re:Game saving edit.... by Sebby · · Score: 1

      The post originally asserted "Challenger" accident.

      To bad, then we could've said that they already had flown before they had made the changes....

      Oh well, what's a few weeks more? :)

      --

      AC comments get piped to /dev/null
  5. History by aridhol · · Score: 4, Insightful
    History has shown that, even with the current management, space flight is safe. It has a fairly low accident rate compared with other industries. However, when the do have an accident, it is large and spectacular; everybody sees it, so everybody wants change.

    That said, they have identified procedural problems that caused risks. Learn from your mistakes, and move on. You don't need a huge overhaul in management before you can listen to your engineers say "Hey, I think something's wrong here". You listen to your people, and act on their advice.

    --
    I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
    1. Re:History by Dark+Nexus · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What? Spaceflight isn't safe. NASA and it's astronauts KNOW it isn't safe. They SAY it isn't safe. 1/200 odds? I don't consider that safe. Worth the risk? Sure, they know what they're getting into. But it's NOT safe.

      And on a per-job basis, I doubt many industries have as many major accidents. And believe that they probably have a lot of accidents that you DON'T hear about, they're just minor accidents that are dealt with before they cause any serious issues. Do you hear about every time some warehouse employee drops a box on his foot? I doubt it.

      --
      Dark Nexus
      "Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
    2. Re:History by WolfWithoutAClause · · Score: 1

      Actually, it's pretty lousy. You have a 2% death rate per flight. That's worse than base jumping (jumping off mountains/cliffs/fixed structures with parachutes, base jumping is often illegal.) About the only thing I know with an equivalent death rate is climbing everest.

      --

      -WolfWithoutAClause

      "Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"
  6. The letter "C" by Euphonious+Coward · · Score: 1

    It's clear that only shuttles whose names start with the letter "C" blow up. Have we run through them all yet? If so, it's clear sailing!

  7. Aargh... by secolactico · · Score: 2, Funny
    NASA May Fly

    You mean, it will only have a life span of two days??

    *ducks*
    --
    No sig
  8. It's all about the $$$ by MacEnvy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Until we give NASA more money, they can't do a hell of a lot. They tried "faster, better, cheaper", and realized what NetAdmins have known all along - you can only have two out of three.

    Bottom line - give 1% of the current defense spending to NASA instead, and we'd have a hell of a space program.

    /rant

    --


    ***
  9. Unless by Dachannien · · Score: 1

    Unless it was an upper-level manager who fell and struck the wing of the Columbia during takeoff, I think they'll be fine.

    1. Re:Unless by Tackhead · · Score: 1
      > Unless it was an upper-level manager who fell and struck the wing of the Columbia during takeoff, I think they'll be fine.

      If it was an upper-level manager that struck the leading edge of the wing, they'd have launched a rescue shuttle the next morning.

      10-pound hunk of ice hitting delicate TPS panel at 500 mph? After all, upper-level managers all agreed, on the basis of old tests with 3" cubes of foam, that it presented no risk despite the report saying that what happened was "significantly outside the test envelope".

      Given the density that implies for NASA upper-level managers, I'd think that even a toenail clipping from a NASA upper-level manager dropped from a height of two inches, would be enough to raise alarm bells. It's kinda hard not to notice the entire wing being sheared off and the toenail clipping plunging through to the center of the earth.

      Having observed the entire wing being sheared off during launch, a team of Russkian engineers, fueled by nothing more than adrenaline, caffeine, and Vodka, would have spent a weekend cobbling together a Buran wing out of scrap parts, strapped it to the back of something on loan from Dick Rutan's garage, along with a generous supply of duct tape and spare oxygen tanks, crammed the Rutan bird with the last of John Romero's peroxide fuel, and lobbed the resulting contraption into orbit for a rendezvous with the Shuttle, where they'd attach the substitute wing and successfully pilot the Shuttle to a safe landing.

      It would have been all over by the time NASA management even decided on which room to hold the working group meeting for beating up the engineers with questions like "well, are we sure the big triangular thing with the white tiles on the top and the black tiles on the bottom that washed up on the Florida beach was really the Shuttle wing that some people with negative attitudes think might have been somewhat affected by a wing-strike of neutronium-dense NASA Management?". And "Need Another Seven Astronauts" would still be (-1, Ancient Tasteless Joke), not (+1, Informative).

    2. Re:Unless by Matrix2110 · · Score: 1

      Tack, I am being stupid as usual. However, I feel I am being dissed for no reason. I am willing to accept your judgement due to your excellent record. And I will agree to whatever you decide.

      Look for yourself.

      Matrix2110

      The offending thread:

      http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=74111&cid=66 53 433

  10. Shuttle: wrong tool for the wrong era by vudufixit · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The shuttle is far too expensive, complex and yes, dangerous. The "change" NASA needs to make would be to scrap the shuttle, and investigate a cheaper, safer and more reliable "people mover" for getting humans spaceborne, and a different, perhaps expendable vehicle for the automated lofting of space station components, satellites and deep space probes. A mission featuring one of each would diminish the chance of a single point of failure destroying both at once, as happens when a shuttle goes. We also have a golden opportunity to work with the Chinese on their burgeoning space program. Why not make them into partners instead of competitors?

    1. Re:Shuttle: wrong tool for the wrong era by Bob+Vila's+Hammer · · Score: 1

      We have all seen during the cold war, specifically the Soviet and American space race, that competition gets the best results. I think the case in point is the moon landings of the Apollo missions, NASA's (and the world's) ultimate space faring success. They just need more money. Money is what worked then, and it will work now if they had more. Space is expensive no matter what.

      But thats not to say that it will take a hatred or a war to divy up the teams. Real, intense and creative competition is what works in our world. I would hope that we maybe had learned enough in the last century to start thinking about it in the way that it wouldn't take a superpower struggle for bragging rights to cut the edge, but rather the strive for true achievement and the promise of the future to get things accomplished. I guess that promise is money...

      But I would say that the real campaign killer for new projects seems to be politics, of which we have only ourselves to blame...

      --


      --"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
    2. Re:Shuttle: wrong tool for the wrong era by jwdg · · Score: 1

      We have all seen during the cold war, specifically the Soviet and American space race, that competition gets the best results. I think the case in point is the moon landings of the Apollo missions, NASA's (and the world's) ultimate space faring success. They just need more money. Money is what worked then, and it will work now if they had more. Space is expensive no matter what.

      Of course, space exploration is expensive - human spaceflight more so. This leads to a vicious circle where commercial contractors each wanting money spent on their technology cause the final vehicle to be a curious hybrid whose implementation doesn't live up to the promise of the theory. It's a marvellously intricate piece of construction, but is so complex that it is time-consuming and expensive to maintain or upgrade.

      And if you're going to spend more money on space, you need to ask what you're trying to achieve - in the cold war it was national prestige and public confidence that was being bought. I think our priorities may have become a bit more pragmatic since - and technology has made unmanned flight useful for many activities.

      Routine human spaceflight is an aspirational goal rather than a practical solution - and aspirations are often expensive. (This is not an objection to it).

      Replacing the shuttle with a new design from scratch might well be better, but there are plenty of vested interests in the shuttle programme to contend with - and a case of not wanting to write off existing investment in the shuttle.

      The politics involved may also be "let my state keep its shuttle jobs". Of course, this happens on all sorts of military-style projects (another consequence of the Cold War space race was to tie US and Russian space programs rather too closely to the military.) NASA seems to become a political football between various vested interests.

    3. Re:Shuttle: wrong tool for the wrong era by foooo · · Score: 1

      I was with you until you said "work with the Chinese"

      Are you insane?

      1) We shouldn't trust them because they've proven to be untrustworthy in the past.

      2) Sharing space programs would require trust because of the need to share dual use technology.

      3) Human rights violations mean that we shouldn't even be *trading* with China, let alone participating in a space program with them.

      4) We have way cooler names for our rockets. Shenzhou IV? eh?? translation: Sacred Vessel IV?? How could this possibly compare with Enterprise or Discovery! Or even Saturn.

      Anyways, working with the Chinese = bad. Buying products made in China/Hong Kong = bad.

      ~foooo

  11. Jeez, thanks for makin' me feel old.... by StressGuy · · Score: 1

    I was a sophmore in college, watched it on TV that morning and my elective psychology class wound up being cancelled because the professor was way too depressed over it to teach the class. By the next day, I was already hearing "Need Another Seven Astronauts", "You feed the kids, I'll feed the fish", and so on. I've yet to hear one wisecrack about the Columbia accident though. It seems that times have changed - for the better I think.

    --
    A goal is a dream with a deadline
  12. Exponential Improvement Trend by DumbSwede · · Score: 1
    50 flights, WAM ! Challenger tragedy. 100 more flights, Columbia tragedy. This is simplistic extrapolation on my part, but I would expect on the order of 200 flights before the next catastrophic failure (a doubling of safety for every mishap), assuming we have learned from the design flaws that lead to this one.

    I guess one could ask if 1:200 is an acceptable risk. Oddly, NASA use to believe that it was, as I have seen 1:200 as the expected failure rate in some risk analysis estimates (granted I have also seen wildly more optimistic numbers in some other studies).

    To expect changes in Management structure to fix this "problem" is naive. To over spend on management is to under spend on development of safer alternatives. Time and experience will likely make Shuttles safer -- and apparently have, if you look at the trend, though not necessary in a cost effective way (but that is a different debate).

    Of the current astronaut corps, given the 1:100 failure rate we currently seem to have, I bet down to the last man or woman, all would get on the next Shuttle mission without hesitation, without any changes to launch procedure.

    Lets accept that flying into space is a risky proposition, and let these people be the heroes, we generally expect them to be.

    --
    Letter To Iran
    1. Re:Exponential Improvement Trend by promethean_spark · · Score: 1

      Um, more like 51 flights, *wham*, 62 more flights *wham*. Seems more like a fairly constant ~2% failure rate. They'll inspect the TPS in orbit after this though, that should improve rentry safety considerably.