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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.
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.