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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."
There are things that could have been done. It might not have been easy to rescue them but yes I believe they could have been saved. I mean what would they have done said "Well we know they will probably die, but we can't rescue them so let's just cross our fingers". I'm sure that wouldn't have flown as an option.. they would have had to come up with a solution and if you put enough brilliant people on the problem a solution will come i'm sure. If it came down to it, would they have tried sending the columbia towards the space station and then each astronaut space walking out of the shuttle to the ISS or something? Is it even possible? I dunno... it sounds crazy but hell it might have been worth a shot had they known that if they were to re-enter they would die.
Actually the military / CIA mislead the manager of the shuttle program about the capabilities of the satellites because he didn't have the required security clearance. He therefore determined that the images wouldn't be of sufficient quality to find a possible problem.
This was in one of the reports from the investigation board.
Let me tell you, there's a big difference between ignorance and what the article claims:
The new information makes it clear that the failure to follow up on the request for outside imagery, the first step in discovering the damage and perhaps mounting a rescue effort, did not simply fall through bureaucratic cracks but was actively, even hotly resisted by mission managers.
You get ignored once, twice, maybe even three times, but when you contact management at least half a dozen times about the same issue it gets acknowledged. In this case, article claims, not only did it get acknowledged but it was acted upon - actively, even hotly resisted by mission managers. Confidence is good, as long as it does not spill over into stupidity.
When the MsBlast worm hit our place in August and I saw the Slashdot story, I saw a spike in our call volume about two minutes before. I immediately notified my manager and told her that something needed to be done. She said, "huh, what's slashdot?" called her manager and said an employee got a message off some unauthorized site. Then she promptly did nothing.
We are still taking calls about that virus, and the bass ackwards crap they did to remedy the fallout. Managers are paid to make a team go in a direction and be productive. Not to ignore the people they "manage". Part of being productive is knowing that you listen to your team.
I can kind of sympathize with dumb managers though. If everyone who thought there was a major issue came to them and bitched their ears off, they'd never get anything done. Adding another layer between the management and team seems asinine too, because inevitably there just become too many layers to communicate through. As evidenced in the article, where Mr. Rocha ignored protocol and wrote directly to the head honcho of NASA (god forbid!). I think it goes to reinforce the fact that business managers and people who go to business school to become managers are worthless. Moving up through the ranks and cutting your teeth is the only way to find a good manager who will consistently know when a team member is talking out there ass or should worry when confronted.
Oh, well, I guess one day I'll have seniority, over somebody, somewhere, somehow.
Welcome your new Slashdot overlord non-sig.
Something I've been thinking about for some time...
It's hard to believe that the NASA managers ALL were indifferent to or ignorant of the potential damage to the shuttle. If you're an engineer, you can run through the numbers in your head in about 5 seconds flat: mass x velocity x surface area= pressure per square inch.
If you know anything about the shuttle, you know that the tiles are fragile and subject to fracture on impact (in fact a major worry always has been what happens if the Shuttle hit a piece of space junk.)
And if you know anything about the shuttle project, you also know that the crew had limited ability to fix a lot of things that might go wrong after the shuttle lifts off the pad.
So what if you're a manager with the big view and the big leather chair and an engineer or several come to you with concerns about the impact on the wing?
And you do the math in your head and remember that there are no spare tiles on board and basically if the wing has been holed, the crew cannot be saved?
Choice 1: Raise the alarm, go through an agonizing several weeks of total public panic/crisis until the shuttle runs out of food, fuel and/or life support and watch the crew die in front of the world? or,
Choice 2: Put a lid on it and let the shuttle go through its mission, hoping that a miracle might happen and the damage is not serious enough to cause breakup on reentry?
So the question is, what do you do?
___________
In other words, what NASA management knew it had only two choices and chose #2? and if they did, was that the wrong choice?
[Insert pretentious and semi-clever sig here: ______ ]
Read her side of the spy-satellite picture story and watch for spin.
Click.
There are non-Shuttle means to get food/fuel/air to Shuttle capable orbits that are both cheaper and faster. A fast survey of pending Soviet launches would reveal whether they could reach orbit with supplies.
Titan missiles are in fact still regularly used for orbital launches of communications and there has been a great deal of examination of whether they should be used as launch vehicles: NASA has discarded this on a *political* basis, not an engineering or fiscal bases, to avoid losing funding for the Shuttle and other more expensive projects.
And with the astronauts and ground crews given time to use their *brains* on the problem and any leftover experimental tools and materials present on the Shuttle, it may have been possible to repair or strengthen the system enough to pull an Apollo 13 and survive re-entry to bail out, if not land the cract intact (which seems less likely). It's very difficult to know without a crew of the most brilliant people on the planet and a few days to let them work on the problem with complete support of the folks who know what's on that spacecraft to work with.
Right well like I said I don't know all the facts but I do know that if they had known they could have done something. The people at NASA are brilliant IMO and when pushed they can respond. Look at what happened with Apollo 13. They had to find some way to keep enough power to get those guys back home alive. They ran simulation after simulation changing things here and there and finally were able to figure out a way to save enough power in a critical time of the aborted mission.
Could we have rushed up another shuttle? Launched a rocket with supplies to keep them alive longer? Hell I dunno, but they could have done something or alteast tried to do something even if the outcome was the same in the end.
I do blame the managers and I do blame congress. I blame NASA for failing to be truthful in it's own cost and safety reports. I blame Congress for not providing sufficient oversight and for forcing sub-par designs on NASA in order to appease pork barrel political hand-outs.
Also, I fail to see how you can blame "Billy boy" when he was busy fighting off impeachment and harrassment by a Republican congress when GBush I didn't do diddly for NASA either.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Why is this so hard to understand? Engineers are failure oriented. We look for ways to break stuff, and then plan to mitigate its breakage. We always look at the worst case scenario. I am an engineer, and I know the words, "Yeah, it won't break" have never passed my lips unless accompanied with several volumes of caveats.
Face it folks, engineers are sky-is-falling-folks. We could stand to filter ourselves a little bit to gain some credibility.
"Yeah, the engineers say something bad is going to happen, but they say that every day. Shall we launch, then? Okay, good to go."
I mean, if you say every single day, the world is going to end, and then one day it actually does, did you, in fact, predict it?
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.