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Sequence of Events During Columbia Mission
applemasker writes "Today's NYT is reporting that NASA managers actively resisted requests from vehicle engineers for on-orbit imagery. This should answer Administrator O'Keefe's question of why no engineers 'spoke up' during the flight. Seems they did; managers just ignored them."
Here's a BBC story on the same subject.
For those like me who do not wish to register with NYT
There is something called a "cost/benefit" analysis that has to be presented every time a decision like that has to be made. It takes into account such things like the present solution, something called "cost of opportunity", and a lot more factors that are, more or less, standard in all industries. Managers have to justify their decisions to someone, and not all companies have a goal of short term cost cuts, let me assure you. Does it happen? Yes, without a doubt. Whose fault it is? The manager's superior who has blind faith in the manager's ability to solve problems creatively.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
The BBC article says that if they'd known by day seven, another shuttle could have been hastily sent up to rescue them. RTFA
Eleven of the 14 mangers in that (in)decision making loop have been reassigned or have left NASA. No one at NASA seems to know or is allowed to say where these ex-managers have been reassigned to! Mark Dittimore who was the Manager for the Shuttle Program retired and left, but he had planned to leave[no one will say they now employ him!] and had filed for it before Columbia launched. The only other one I have heard about was Roy Bridges the head of KSC during the launch and he has been asked to head the new NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) over at Langley,VA.
Interested observers are invited to try http://nasawatch.com [good inside info, but not an offical NASA site].The NASA Safety motto that is expressed at the part of NASA I support is: "If it isn't safe, Say So....and then clean out your desk".
Engineers make recommendations. Managers disregard them. Things like impressing VPs, etc are way more important to get ahead in an organisation unfortunately.
That's bullshit. I manage people. I impress my management by getting the job done in a better time frame than they expected and at minimum cost.
When we have safety/security concerns it's my job to make sure they are brought front and center and made clear to my management before they are a problem, not after.
I'm not perfect, sometimes they have to tell me 2 or 3 times about something before I can get it fixed, because of bureaucratic inertia or my false perceptions of the relative importance of the problem. In this case, however, even I would know that it's dead serious and needed to be dealt with.
These managers just plain sucked and deserve to be canned. And yes, I work in the federal government.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Ok, I know I'm not the only person, but still.... Anyway, the report talks about what if... in section 6.4. It's the most interesting (aside from the board's version of the stuff in this article) section of the report. In this section, the options Columbia would have had had the managers (Ms. Ham, specifically) agreed to image the orbiter while on-orbit are discussed. There were two options for saving the crew, not zero.
Really, check out the CAIB report. It's an interesting read, and while it's long and occasionally dry and technical, you can skip around, and only read the parts that interest you. If you're an American citizen, our government paid $300,000,000 to recover debris and study the accident, so you owe it to yourself (you tax-payer, you) to read the report.
Especially read about the "safty-culture" in NASA. This article does a good job of getting the general idea across, but the CAIB report goes into much more detail. The astronauts could have, should have, and were almost saved.
PS: It wasn't in the article but it's in the CAIB report that an employee at NASA actually called the DOD and got them working on a request for imagery, only to have Ms. Ham call and rescind the order 90 minutes later.
Yes, I'm still a junky. Are you still a bitch?
I read the entire Columbia report, and this article. Although I don't think we should always look for a person to blame after an accident, this was such a case of gross mismanagement that I really hope both Ham and Schomberg get at least a few months in "Club Fed" for their actions. Ham had future launch dates taking priority over her current mission. She quashed three requests for imaging personally, primarily because it would be the admittance of a problem that would throw the next mission off schedule. Schomberg on the other hand was just a poor engineer. He spouted off all week that he was the "EXPERT". Without doing a single calculation or having a shred of evidence, he just knew the Shuttle was safe regardless of what others said because he was the "expert". Sounds more like a petulant child to me.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
Columbia was mostly a science experiment mission. I heard a talk a month ago from the Principal Investigators of two experiments. Because these both had cameras and telemetry, they each returned 90% of their results. They were hoping to retrieve the apparatus for final analysis, but the pieces recovered after the accident weren't too useful. However, one of the experiment had got 5% additional results when a disk platter was forensically read after the accident.
Both investigators said the astronauts were crucial to the success of their experiments. Although they were supposed to be mostly automatic, Murphy's law intervened, and the astronauts had to help. One astronaut even devoted several hours of her recreation time to fixing a busted valve (The ground crew had stayed up 96 hours straight working on a solution). All of the ground material was impounded for two months after the accident to rule our experimental causes of the accident.
One result is of immediate use to NASA. It was a study of extinguishing fires with a new kind of water mist that could only be studied in microgravity. Since the prediction was successful, this means that water-based extinguishers could replace chemical extinguishers in space and on earth in more situations.
Overall 60% of the results on the entire missionwere successfully returned. Slightly more may be retrieved through forensics. I was surprised to hear this high a success.
It was not decided yet whether there would be a collective publication of their successful results as a memorial to the mission. They will of course publish in their respective journals.
a. Tell the crew the situation, and let the crew decide whether to take a chance.
b. Breaking every single shuttle launch safety rule, try to launch another shuttle with 1-2 crew, and a bunch of space suits, before Columbia ran out of consumables.
Neither choice would look good to me.
Luckily your question is answered by the CAIB report. First, an ad-hoc wing repair using a combination of water (frozen in space), titanium tools on board the shuttle, and miscellanous junk might have held in place long enough to allow the shuttle to reenter without being destroyed. Second, by working around the clock in shifts, the next shuttle launch could have been moved up in time to rescue the Columbia with about 5 days to spare, without skipping any safety checks.
The CAIB report rejected the possibility of tranferring to the ISS (too much delta-V for the fuel left on board), and flying a different reentry pattern that would take load off of the damaged wing (too dangerous). Of course those were just the first four suggestions for approaches that might have been tried had they known that there was something wrong; no doubt there would have been dozens of other ideas floated if the engineers had had the need to do something.
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