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Columbia's Final Minutes in Detail
grub writes "This article on Newsday has an excerpt from 'Comm Check... The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia,' by Michael Cabbage and William Harwood describing the last minutes of Columbia's final flight in detail."
When the investigators ask you why the space shuttle you designed exploded seconds after liftoff, killing seven astronauts and quite probably the entire shuttle program, just tell them you were stoned.
They'll understand.
While original reports used the term "plasma", there's a good explanation at space.com's Columbia FAQ that explains that the hot gas that entered the shuttle's wing was *not* "plasma", as defined by science:Not to be a science nazi, but there's an important distinction between sci-fi-sounding "plasma" and the mundane -- but still deadly -- "very hot gas".
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
To kindred spirits and absent friends.
...of the shuttle is just fascinating. Call me naive, but it truly is amazing that aeronautical/space engineering has progressed as far as it has. Not to revel in Columbia's destruction, but I'm suprised that we haven't had more accidents since Challenger.
Nothing but the finest in meaningless drivel
There's a memorial at Cape Canaveral with the names of ALL of the people who have died in our pursuit of outer space.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
Above and beyond this article, if you can get your hands on the article on the Colombia tragedy which was published in Atlantic Monthly, do it. As always for Atlantic Monthly, easily the most intelligent commentary I've seen about the event, and a couple of closing sentences that will stay with me forever.
Depends on the level of detail, I suppose. They didn't specify that.
-1, "1337" speak
A real tragedy is millions of children dying from hunger in the world. The astronauts were well paid and knew what they were doing, understanding the risks. It is sad, really, but it is not a tragedy, sorry.
- no sig.
But this is a classic lack of communication problem, people voiced there concerns but they where shooshed away because of the "nah that won't happen" syndrom.. lets hope we all learn from this lesson.
moo
One of the crew members came to rest beside a country road near Hemphill. The remains were found by a 59-year-old chemical engineer and Vietnam veteran named Roger Coday, who called the sheriff and then watched from the porch of his mobile home as a funeral director drove by to collect them.
IIRC (if I read correctly) they were about 19 miles up when the fuselage broke apart... So this astronaut had about that far to fall before coming to rest on the ground.
I saw it over and over again on TV and thought, well, at least it was instant and there's nothing left... I was wrong and I now have deep sorrow for these individuals.
For God's sake... it isn't that hard to take five minutes to read the damn thing!
1024x768 32bpp with 4xFSAA
Anything else and you won't get 60fps!
...it's an incredible piece, and very well written. One never understands such things until it is succinctly written out, and these authors did an amazing job.
libertarianswag.com
Too soon...? Yeah, too soon to joke about it.
perhaps to give an in-depth look at what happened and to answer the questions that the public had about WHY it happened.
Rubbernecking is inevitable and pretty much unavoidable. Be thankful it wasn't as big of a train-wreck as they could have (and normally would have) written it up as.
But they probably *died* quickly.
Hahahaha. Quite funny, but a troll none-the-less. Thanks for having the courage to post that under your username, though.
From the article: The survivability study concluded relatively modest design changes might enable future crews to survive long enough to bail out.
I'm not sure how the crew can survive by "bailing out" of a doomed orbiter during re-entry (take-off is another matter entirely). Once the orbiter drops below a certain speed, a return to orbit is impossible anda very hot descent is inevitable. This "bail out" logic sounds like surviving an elevator crash by stepping out at the first floor to me.
Unless the crew module can gracefully decelerate to less than hypersonic speeds, exiting the compartment is instant death.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It did say that once the astronauts hit the hypersonic air flow, they would have died instantly.
:-(
It doesn't make things any better to know that though.
Steve
Dying quickly is fine. Think about your remains falling 15+ miles to the ground and how horrific that must be for the family of that individual...
Too soon...? Yeah, too soon to joke about it
Not to soon for Challenger though:
Q: Why do NASA engineers drink coke?
A: Because they couldn't get 7 up.
I don't think "lurid" is the best description; I found it to be informative and well written. But even so - what's wrong with rubbernecking?
IIRC (if I read correctly) they were about 19 miles up when the fuselage broke apart... So this astronaut had about that far to fall before coming to rest on the ground.
Karma me down, but I'm just amazed how quickly information about Columbia's last moments is filtering to the media (and the lack of relative umbrage from family and pundits).
In contrast, it took years for NASA to admit that, yes, the astronauts aboard Challenger were most likely aware during their final descent, but that information was quickly coupled with admonishment not to dwell on it, out of respect for the families of the astronauts.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Well given this was slashdot and you posted a link I thinks its fair to say that there *was* a memorial.. In any case thanks for sharing the link with us..
This article is kind of an intense read... I think it's important to remember these fallen heros, who gave their lives for the purpose of furthering our understanding of science.
Hats off to those brave souls.
According to the article, they would have died instantaneously at that point 19 miles up due to blunt trauma, lack of oxygen, etc. So, while it is still sad and horrible, it isn't like he fell 19 miles still alive.
//FIXME: Bad
They didn't after Challenger exploded in 1986.
Best Slashdot Co
Because it's cool to be incinerated instantly, but being burned to death and then having your body plummet 19 miles before hitting the ground is terribly sad.
It takes hours to incinerate a corpse in a crematorium, what made you think it'd happen instantly inside Columbia? It rained little bits and pieces of crew and spaceship all over the countryside. They just found the israeli guys diary on the roof of an outhouse in Kentucky a few days ago.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
-nt-
Kudos to you sir!
1986 was a lot different than 2003/2004. We're talking 18 years of information trading.
There are none so blind as those who refuse to see. The folks at NASA could have seen this coming by listening to the engineers who wanted to get a closer look at the spots hit by the foam. The folks at NASA should have been watching for this type of situation if any attention had been paid to the follow up of the Challenger explosion.
It is simply not true that this tragedy was unavoidable and that there was no way to see this coming. The most complicated machine ever built was not knocked out of the sky by a pound and a half of foam. This was murder by management.
Some people just like knowing more about what happened, and this book happens to meet that demand.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
More than 25,000 searchers, who scoured a debris "footprint" that was 645 miles long, found 84,900 individual pieces, about 38 percent of the space shuttle.
Does this not make one wonder how much of the shuttle might still be "out there" waiting to be found, or perhaps sitting on display in someone's house? Granted, much of it would have been literally vaporized, however I think that would amount to far less than the remaining 62% of Columbia.
I heard on CNN that pages of Ilan Ramon's journal were found recently in Texas. A quick google news turned up this article on the Post.
It has also been stated that remains from all seven astronauts were recovered, and that some of the organisms on the shuttle actually survived.
This all points to the possibility that there is still more shuttle out there, and that perhaps we could be finding Columbia piece by precious piece for years to come...
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Where did you see this information about the diary?
Oh, great. Now the Columbia orbiter online memorial has crashed and burned, you insensitive clods!
There's a memorial at Cape Canaveral with the names of ALL of the people who have died in our pursuit of outer space.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
well, they were already moving at a faster than terminal velocity so when the atmosphere thickened, they body slowed, depending on the substrate of the ground, the damage to the body (after the burning it took) would be minimal.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Sorry, I have to disagree. Those atronauts were furthering mankind and died in the pursuit. Most of the starvation could be solved if (not to make fun) we sent them luggage instead of food. They live in a desert with no food or water.. That's not a tragedy, that's natural selection.
How can a hole being ripped in the wing, or any other part of the shuttle not be picked up by some sensor?
though, what could be done 81 seconds after beginning re-entry? anything besides acknowledge that you're going to die? if you level your course, instead of going down into the atmosphere will you just gradually burn up? I'm thinking, skim the outter atmosphere, since the air is thin it isn't having a drastic effect on the structure (compared with a few minutes later the change in atmosphere rips into the shuttle a lot more). skip out of the atmosphere and resume some sort of drift through space. try to control the drift so you're not hurtling into nothingness, although if your travelling at 1,568 mph maybe that is a little far fetched. then, assess the damage, and deal with it somehow (emergency rescue mission, repairs if at all possible?).
i am not a rocket scientist. but at what point of re-entry is it too late to do any sort of constructive abort?
And the parents of those starving kids didn't have a clue when they were having sex?
It's not tragic, it's just retarded. Use Norplant and be done with the problem.
bullshit, it was a texas field you wanker and it was found months ago.. Stop distorting the facts.
The shuttle astronauts are true heroes -- think of the bravery it takes to fly one of those things. And let's not forget the Challenger mission which failed on January 28, 1986, seventeen years ago tomorrow.
I'll be outside at about 1130am tomorrow, looking up at the skies as I do every year, thanking that shuttle crew for their sacrifice.
Tragedy isn't just measured in terms of the number of people killed. Though most of us spend our entire lives seeking our own comfort and profit, there are some who are willing to risk their lives to advance the entire enterprise known as science, enriching all of our lives. More perished in that accident than flesh and bone...they were carrying with us our very hopes and dreams. You may look at it as a loss for the shuttle's crew and their families, but I see it as a loss for everyone who's ever looked at the stars and imagined touching the sky's blue roof. The death of a starving boy is pitiable beyond description, but the death of our dreams is truly tragic.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
At the end of the day they knew the risks, and they took them, hell I'm not an American, but I respect them, and know they served humanity with all they had to give, shame we all are not like that, could be a nice place otherwise, this world that is.
moo
Like Challenger's crew, the Columbia astronauts met their fates alone and the details will never be known.
The initial government line is always that that people die instantly. After the Challenger crew compartment was recovered, it surfaced that some of crew's PEAPs (Personal Egress Air Packs) had been activated. This lead to the debate on whether anyone was conscious prior to impact with the ocean, and if there was any improvements that could be made to escape such a fate.
It may seem morbid as first but spacecraft, unlike automobiles, aren't as easy to crash-test. This promotes learning as much as you can from the mistakes.
Unfortunately, its unlikely more meaningful debris will be recovered from the Columbia.
Right, but I believe the article said it was 38 seconds before the cabin seperated, and another 24 before it broke apart, resulting in instant death. Those poor men and women knew what was happening for the last 62 seconds.
A very sobering thought.
--Insert catchy
I remember when the Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed, and I really never imagined that another space shuttle would be destroyed in my lifetime.
I've heard complaints about feeding starving people instead of exploring space, and that does sound compelling in light of the fact that there is so much human suffering, but I believe (as do many) that space exploration represents a greater destiny for mankind.
Maybe that destiny could be put off a few decades while we solve all the world's problems, but I don't want that long.
It's like that t-shirt my one trekkie buddy used to wear, "The meek shall inherit the Earth... the rest of us shall go to the stars."
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
"Hey, I don't remember this button. I wonder what it does? [click]...."
That's a really kind, articulate thing to say. If you actually read the article, you'd realize the intensity and horror of the event. I'm glad that your life has been so blessed that you haven't experienced anything so terrible in it, but please be sensitive to the fact that people lost their lives. Maybe next time you should think about being more courteous about tragedies such as this?
A million starving children is a Bad Thing, but it is not tragedy
Seven (14) astronauts and a $3B spacecraft (oops, two of 'em), dying because of fucking powerpoint slides written in bureaucratese, however, is about as tragic as it gets.
That applies double when it's the second time this has happened.
And finally, if - after riding a million pounds of explosives into orbit, phoning home about a foam strike once you get there, being told "Naw, our experts told us it weren't nuthin' to worry yer pretty little heads about", and then seeing the diagnostic panel light up like a Christmas tree as your wing collapses and your ship yaws hard, and your last thoughts probably including "Oh shit, I wonder if we've lost a wing?" doesn't qualify as a "moment of discovery in which the hero realizes what has happened to him", I don't know what does.
I'm getting the same feeling in the pit of gut when I was reading final accounts of the World Trade Center collapse. If this was some unmanned satellite the same detailed account would have no impact. In the end, our fascination with the shuttle was not about the technology, but the fact that humans were involved.
We all die alone and nothing can change this fact. How our own lives will end is the ultimate question. Why wouldn't we all be interested in the minutia of how other lives ended. I put myself into their seats and feel the fear and guess at the oblivion that followed. It is natural and I refuse to apologize for these supposedly sick feelings.
Google's attempt at showing the above Excel as HMTL
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
This is an opportunity to reflect on the sacrifices of these astronauts, people who knew horrors like this were possible and faced them anyway.
We can do the same.
I'll be outside at about 1130am tomorrow, looking up at the skies as I do every year, thanking that shuttle crew for their sacrifice.
/. tomorrow @ 11:30.
I call bullshit! You never did that before and you wont do it tomorrow either.
As proof I shall point to the pointless karma-whoring drivel you'll be posting on
For me, this was definitely a "Do you remember where you were when this happened?" moment. It comes as a punch in stomach.
May God rest their brave souls in peace.
Free XBox, PS2
I know it's not possible or they'd be doing it, I'm just not sure of the science behind it, but what's to stop one from, say, firing the shuttles rockets to stop the forward motion of the shuttle while in orbit, till it matches that of the ground below, and just drop to earth? Why try and sneak down through the atmosphere while still at orbital speeds?
Um, that would be 18 years ago tomorrow. And the Apollo 1 oxygyn fire was 27 years ago today -- Jan. 27, 1967. Kinda spooky how they're all within a few days of one another.
SMQ 90AE4B2BC4F6BEAF7340F0B40BA2DEF7340F6BC2D0392
Most of the starvation could be solved if (not to make fun) we sent them luggage instead of food. They live in a desert with no food or water.. That's not a tragedy, that's natural selection.
At least credit Sam Kinison. (Not like he's gonna do anything about it.)
Not exactly. Bear in mind that after 1989, Americans are allowed to consider Russians as people too.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Although they've apparently already redesigned the way the foam is applied (or how it works... I forget) so this won't happen again, this and the description of the Challenger breakup both have that one point in common, as noted in the article: The survivability study concluded relatively modest design changes might enable future crews to survive long enough to bail out.
Am I the only one that finds those words hauntingly familiar? I could have sworn the very same thing was said when they finally puzzled out Challenger. I hope they actually figure out a way to do it this time.
Sorrow? These guys were so pumped up full of adrenaline in a explosive free fall... god damn what a rush that must of been.
If I have to die, that's got to be one of the more exciting ways to go.
00101010
I, for one, find myself wondering what happened in the final seconds, both from a personal perspective (how long did they know, how long did they survive, etc.) and a scientific one (what, exactly, happens to a shuttle wing when there's a hole in it during re-entry, etc.).
Every time I get more information, I can put some of those thoughts away. Eventually, maybe we can all put enough of our thoughts away so that we can move on.
Umm . . . Aristotle's profound but narrow literary definition of the term 'tragedy' does NOT encompass all possible meanings of the word in normal discourse. I would expect any well-educated person to understand that - but I guess I would be disappointed.
The openning quote really infuriates me.
It takes s special breed of bureaucratic self serving bozo to describe this accident in the most bizzarre terms possible then say something like "I don't know how anyone could have seen that coming" when the truth is people DID see it coming and tried their darndest to stop it happening and long before this NASA had been running foam inmapct studies due to earlier strikes.
it was found in texas, not "some outhouse in kentucky".
google news
According to the article, they would have died instantaneously at that point 19 miles up due to blunt trauma, lack of oxygen, etc. So, while it is still sad and horrible, it isn't like he fell 19 miles still alive.
We will never truly know.
but it was reported that somebody heard from above: "Hey NASA, I quiiiiiiiii...."
- The astronauts knew that they had had a foam strike on the orbiter.
- The informed mission control, who would look into it.
- Mission control decided to roll the dice and take a calcualted risk WITH SOMEBODY ELSE'S LIVES and told the astronauts that there was nothing to worry about.
- The astronauts believed them.
- The shuttle broke apart.
- The astronauts died.
The fault for taking an unneccessary risk lies not with the astronauts, but by on-ground management.Your analogy is "people die in car wrecks every day, but still they chose to die". But you overlook that "the mechanic didn't bother to check the brakes after he fixed them".
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Whenever I read these sorts of narratives about Columbia, I'm always sitting there unconsiously thinking "Come on, a few more minutes. Hold together just a bit longer." Even when I know the exact times of breakup, it doesn't matter, I still think it.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
That's a really kind, articulate thing to say. If you actually read the article, you'd realize the intensity and horror of the event.
I apologize. It was inappropriate.
Table-ized A.I.
There's also a Columbia crew memorial on Mars now.
Having just read that piece I found myself totally absorbed by the technical description and blow by blow events of the last minutes of the shuttle.
However, the final paragraphs describing the last minutes of the crew is quite touching. One can't imagine the horror of the last moments of the crew. Mercifully though, it seems that the end was swift.
You know, after the Challenger was lost, my birthdays were never the same. My birthday happens to fall on the 28thof Jan, and everytime that date comes around, I remember the Challenger and its tragedy.
The crew of the Columbus are heroes. I've always wanted to be an astronaut, but to be honest, the fact of flying at tens of thousands of miles per hour, hundreds of miles above the atmosphere, in a small manmade spacecraft scares the shit out of me.
Amazing, but very sad article to read. My hats go off to the crew of the Columbus, as well as the Challenger. I'll probably be thinking more of the Challenger and Columbus, my birthday is nothing in regards to the tragedies.
Godspeed.
We see here how the astronauts lives depended critically on technology performing flawless during a complex series of steps, and begs us to wonder how many times in our own life we also depend on technology performing a flawless series of steps. This doesn't just have to be your car your job, but perhaps you live close to a nuclear power plant. One could easily imagine a series of assumptions in this environment leading to even more tragic consequences.
I will not go into my job description, and this is little in my everyday performance of it to remind me that at times peoples'
lives might depend on me having done it correctly and not having cut corners. We are all part of very complex web of interactions both personal and technological. Poignant descriptions of events likes these are a wake up call and a reminder we all have responsibilities to those around us to do our best everyday.
Letter To Iran
It still seems like a monumental task to design an ejection system that humans can survive at 15-22 MACH.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The difference, of course, is that we all know what happened during Challenger today. If we were not given these details about Columbia, we would still be asking them, as this is the second time a major tragedy has happened.
In the end, I imagine wild media speculation is not what NASA wanted. Instead of the news agencies writing storied like "Did Columbia's crew suffer Challenger's fate?" we have the truth, laid out in front of us.
Having said that, reading the article made me nauseous and I have tears in my eyes as I type this. I hope we learn from this, I really do.
"For the astronauts, the final sequence was mercifully brief, but no doubt terrifying."
IT was 2 minutes from the time all hell broke loos until the died! 2 freaking minutes!
Ever hold your breath for two minutes? While somebody you don't know is forceably holding your head under water?
Most roller coster last about 40 seconds.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So every fatal car accident caused by untimely mechanical failure is "murder by manufacturer"?
There's a decent-sized step from "In this case NASA didn't exercise the proper degree of caution, and its culture seems to have quashed the concerns of engineers who were worried about this happening" and "Every untimely mechanical failure resulting in death is murder."
Early Chrysler minivan hatch failures resulted in a number of unintended deaths due to failures in rear-end collisions. Not astonishing news, nor did it necessarily imply culpable behavior on Chrysler's part. However, when the company tried to suppress crash test reporting that showed how bad the problem was -- and particularly when an internal memo showed up that said they could improve the latches for 25 to 50 cents apiece, but that doing so would seem to concede that the earlier ones had a problem -- then you got a very bad picture of how the company's management had dealt with a safety hazard. Having a problem is one thing; compromising your attempt to fix the problem for reasons to do with bureaucratic self-protection, that's filth. (Scarier example: Bush administration opposing the investigation of 9/11 in every way it can.)
NASA's people did know this foam could be a problem, they'd kept track of the patterns of tile damage for that reason. During Columbia's last flight there were engineers on the ground who were incredulous: those above them were taking the position that the risk of foam damage wasn't worth doing anything about.
Yes, it was an unintended mechanical failure -- but management had something to do with how it went down. Management had to do with the lessons of Challenger not being learned. "Murder" isn't the word, okay, but "shit happens" doesn't keep it from happening again.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Words mean things. Witness our constant squabbles over "hacker" vs "cracker", or "Linux" vs "GNU/Linux". The original poster got "sad thing" and "tragedy" precisely backwards. (Which is hardly tragic, but it sure is ironic :)
For what it's worth - the two or three starving kids with IQs of 200 who die of starvation every day - if they achieve even the modicum of education necessary to realize that they're special, different, and smarter than their peers, and who start to try to rise above their station, but who finally realize they'll never amount to anything and will die in the gutter like their worthless peers, also qualify as tragedy.
And to be clear that this isn't about first-worldism; A good 49,999 of the 50,000 of us who get killed on our highways every year are also merely a statistic.
I don't get why having the misfortune to be on a shuttle that came apart on re-entry makes the crew heroes. It doesn't require any heroism to get killed, you just have to be in the wrong place at the wrong time; physics will take care of the rest.
To me, what makes them heroes, and the other shuttle crews just as heroic, is knowing that they could die a spectacular flaming death, but getting on the shuttle anyhow.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
nt=no text
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
Gnumeric also pulls it up just fine (including the column headers which seem to be missing in the Google version)
Yes, sorry, was a line from Kinison. there was a debate about who's line that was. I was under the impression it was Eddie Murphy, with the whole "shoe" thing. I apologize Sam, wish you were here.
Each piece or component was cleaned, decontaminated, bar-coded, photographed and entered into a computer database.
What gets me is on some hard drive on some server or workstation somewhere at Kennedy Space Center there's probably a folder that's called "Crashed Space Shuttle Data Bases" and a file that's called "Space Shuttle Columbia.mdb". Which I might add is the same folder where they keep "Space Shuttle Challenger.mdb".
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
Are you retarded?
finally, dictionary.com:
'nuff said. It was longer than that. I feel very sad for those astronauts.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
This is another quite detailed look, bringing events at several locations into one timeline. Here
That would be 37 years ago.
To be a plasma, the gas should have many free electrons (or ions) in each Debye length. There could be many more neutrals, just along for the ride, in the same space.
Most molecular gases become more or less fully ionized at around 10,000 degrees Kelvin (give or take a factor of four or so, depending on composition) since that's the temperature at which the collision energy becomes significant compared to valence electron binding energies, so most collisions can make new ions. So anything hotter than that is definitely plasma.
But even a fraction of a percent ionization is often enough to give you the nice bulk behavior of a plasma, because the ionized particles do their thing and drag along the neutral ones by collision. Depending on the density, it's probably reasonable to call the 8,000F (3800K) gases "plasma".
And my friend Gord's birthday is September 11. :( Birthdays don't always fall on convenient days.
Parent poster is operating under a series of faulty assumptions and applying some bad reasoning.
When you've got an object traveling very vast what happens? What happens when you move your feet across the carpet? Static electricity. What is static? Electrons stripped from one object to another.
Static charge accumulates when loosely-held valance electrons transfer from less to more electonegative atoms. (Electronegativity is a measure of an atom's tendency to attract electrons.) It is analagous but not identical to dissociation, which occurs in plasma formation. Dissociation is the complete stripping of electrons from the nucleus, even the tightly-held inner shell electrons, which do not transfer when you shock someone by scuffing your feet on the rug. Dissociation, especially of diatomic gases such as O2 and N2, the major components of the atmosphere, requires immense amounts of energy. N2, for example, dissociates around 9000K (~16,000 deg F). For comparison, graphite vaporizes at about 6000K (~10,000 deg F).
Static can be a huge problem in pipes that move large amounts of non-polar fluids. Guess what most gasses in the upper atmosphere are? Non-polar fluids. So, there is your ionized high velocity, high temperature gas. Plasma.
I don't know alot about the shuttle's design, but I'd guess that if you talked with some NASA aerospace engineers they'd confirm this phenomenon. It's got to be a factor with all very fast aircraft.
Static charge is not plasma. Plasma requires complete ionization, and static doesn't even come close.
Static is not a problem insofar as flight mechanics are concerned. It may be a factor for avionics, as much as it is for any electrical system, but that is outside my area of experience.
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
It's true, exploring space is dangerous and lives will be lost.
The real tragedy is using this as an excuse to keep flying the shuttle and killing more astronauts. The US needs to develop a new vehicle ASAP. NASA needs to step up to the plate, admit that the shuttle is too unsafe to fly as is and too old to reengineer, and get the money to develop its replacement on a fast track. A number of opportunities to develop a replacement and retire the shuttle were wasted before the loss of Columbia. NASA is unwilling to risk ending the shuttle program, their most prominent icon, and their fixation on it blinds them to other possibilities. There are ways to keep the ISS operating and astronauts flying without ever launching another shuttle. NASA just doesn't have the political will to pursue them.
The "studies" of in-flight repair are hideous examples of a cheap hack gone too far. It should be a joke. Who would ever voluntarily go through re-entry in a shuttle with a hand-patched wing?
Why won't NASA just admit that the shuttle is a first-generation vehicle and cannot be "fixed"? Why doesn't NASA recognize that Soyuz, and Apollo for that matter, prove that space flight can be much safer than the shuttle? When was the American way ever to throw people's lives away when there was an alternative?
The shuttle is just a piece of hardware. It has killed fourteen people. Walk away from it. Put the remaining three orbiters in museums. Move on.
oops, I meant Columbia. Was in class and typed out the response as I listened to a lecture, haha. I'm dumb.
I can't believe i'm reading this. !!! What kind of sap does'nt understand the concept of birth-control??.... To equate what these people... - crew -.. were doing with starving children in the world just makes my contempt for this idiot author even more concrete... "A real tragedy is millions of children dying from hunger in the world" Feed them yourself..... i lost a personal friend on the last mission.. " It is sad, really, but it is not a tragedy," sorry...no you are sad
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
Man that end is a bummer. There goes my day.
"The most complicated machine ever built got knocked out of the sky by a pound and a half of foam." In my opinion this is clearly a call for a more robust, maybe simpler technology. O-rings, lost pieces of foam, what will it be next time? I'm starting to believe that the current shuttle technology is so TITANIC, that it's better to stop the running program immediately and switch over to disposable rockets until a new, more robust generation of shuttles becomes available.
...consisted of flaming reentry.
1. Of the two, only Marie Curie died from causes of radiation exposure. Pierre got run over by a vehicle, but would have probably met the same fate.
2. Clarence Dally was Thomas Edison's assistance with Xrays. Here's a link.
This is not my sig.
I believe the shuttle pilots call it "like flying an aerodynamic brick."
"Relatively modest design changes" would probably still mean scrapping the remaining SSTs andf building new ones.
It's easy to make design changes while your space craft is still a CAD drawing (or probably paper in those days), but when it comes to welding new bits of metal on, there is probably no such thing as "modest".
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
You just design the whole crew cabin as an ejection pod. Just add some insulation and some parachutes to the capsule and everyone rides that down. (Or at least rides it down far enough to bail out -- like the original Russian Vostok reentry system.)
A more rational approach, though, is to design the launch vehicle so that it either has no throwaway parts or such that the throwaway parts cannot damage the main vehicle.
In Challenger, a throwaway part (the SRB -- okay, technically reusable in a "crash and salvage" sort of way) caused flame to impinge on another throwaway part (the External Tank and attachment strut) until the latter disintegrated (and the fuel caught fire).
In Columbia, a piece of throwaway foam from the throwaway External Tank came off and broke a massive hole in the wing's heat shield.
With previous manned spacecraft (including Russian and Chinese designs), the only throwaway pieces beside or upstream of the main crew vehicle were/are the launch escape rockets designed to pull the crew vehicle away from the (throwaway) booster if it blows, and those just sit there passively during routine launch.
Better yet would be design the whole thing so that you can safely abort (ie, land) at any time during the launch. The DC-X experimental rocket successfully landed (vertically, as per design) after an external explosion at launch (an unexpected build up of vented hydrogen gas) blew off a good piece of the vehicle's fuselage. As soon as observers noticed the problem (big pieces falling off!) the ascent was halted and the thing went into autoland mode. Try that with something that uses solid boosters, or takes off vertically but has to land horizontally.
-- Alastair
I'll be outside at about 1130am tomorrow, looking up at the skies as I do every year, thanking that shuttle crew for their sacrifice.
Now if that isn't karma whoring, then I've got a life. Jes' a sec.... Checking. Checking. Yep, that's good karma whoring.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
For a system designed with virtually no abort capability it is interesting that that the crew compartment survived intact immediately after both shuttle disasters. Perhaps if the compartment designed to be detached in the extreme aerodynamic and thermal environment it could have slowed to subsonic speed and have been recoverable by parachute. B-1B bombers have a similar recovery system, though they do not fly in as extreme an environment.
an ill wind that blows no good
"It doesn't make things any better to know that though. :-("
It does for me. You donn't want heroes like that dying painfully.
"Derp de derp."
NOT funny! Sheeesh....
Keep in mind that the shuttle designs are pushing 30 years old.
The thing that amazes me is the 1969 moon mission. Ever see the kind of equipment those guys had back then? Think about what kinds of computing power they had with them. Your car has more computing power than the Apollo mission modules.
Ask yourself this: Would you volunteer for a moon mission using the same equipment as they did in '69? From today's perspective, it'd be suicide! And yet, back then, that was the state of the art, and people did it. Amazing.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Well there is some difference here, the challenger astronauts were probably alove for most of the fall, as they were moving much slower and the crew cabin is thought to have survived until impact with the water. With columbia, they were moving at something like mach 18 when the crew cabin began to break apart, at which point they would be killed instantly by the massive presure change. While the astronaut may have fallen 19 miles to the ground, he was long dead before that (thankfully).
Umm... I have no wish to upset you or anything. No doubt, you feel very uncomfortable at the idea of tragic events being used to buttress a joke.
But, well, I found it funny.
Maybe it's just me.
- Peter Ravn Rasmussen
At the end of the day they knew the risks, and they took them...
Indeed, and I respect them as well. Screw Star Trek, these are the true explorers, and I hope their curiosity and wonderment lives on as an example for the rest of humanity.
But, with that being said, why don't we care about the soldiers, peace keepers, missionaries, etc. that die every day, in countries all over the world, trying to help? Just because they're not going on a relatively routine mission into a place with no atmosphere doesn't make their jobs any less important, nor does this mean they don't deserve our respect for their sacrifice.
Not to take anything away from the crew of the Columbia, but I don't agree with ignoring the less "interesting" (in the scientific research sense of the word) sacrifices.
But those that do amazing things tend to be more focused on people than those that do more mundane, or in some cases, less enviable tasks.
One of the astronauts, Dr. Kalpana Chawla, was an alum of my school. Chawla Hall is a $20 million dorm on campus that is nearing completion. I remember a story in the school newspaper that her husband was not happy with the dedication service when construction began. Everyone tried to make it out to be a deep, spiritual event and that is not how she would have wanted it. She was not a religious person at all, and her husband felt that the religious subversion was completely inappropriate. He even said she would have walked away from the service had she been there.
I have found there are just two ways to go.
It all comes down to livin' fast or dyin' slow. -REK, Jr.
I know much of it is copyrighted by various parties but an event like this deserves to be properly documented online.
Bleh!
Troll? That's freakin hillarious. Mod this guy up!
From your site:
Microsoft Photoshop, from Microsoft, costs a lot of US dollars, but works under Windows
It's ADOBE Photoshop, not Microsoft. Your on a Mac, you of all people should know Adobe makes PS.
Me too. In fact, this is about the only time I've found an AYBABTU pastiche funny.
Well done!
Essentially this is a myth circulated by some NASA management apologists.
The term ``plasma'' is often stretched and abused by the low-temperature community. It is sometimes used to refer to a gas that consists only of ions, or only of electrons, even though the term was originally meant to describe charge-neutral clouds. Some Bose-Einstein condensates consist mainly of ions, since the electromagnetic field can then be used to confine them (so they don't hit the floor of the vacuum chamber that holds them). Colloquially, these clouds of cool ions are often referred to as plasma even though free electrons would rapidly neutralize the ions. Likewise, other physicists have captured clouds of electrons (which are fermions and hence can't directly form a bose-einstein condensate, absent some sort of pairing mechanism) and referred to them as a "pure-electron plasma" despite the fact that the cloud is clearly not charge-neutral.
phoning home about a foam strike once you get there, being told "Naw, our experts told us it weren't nuthin' to worry yer pretty little heads about"
Actually, the astronauts had no idea about the foam strike until the last day of the mission. It had been noticed, studied, and dismissed entirely on the ground. The administration kept the info (and the decision) from the astronauts.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
The parent article is describing a superheated froth, not a plasma -- which is just an ionized gas.
It really depends on exactly how modest the change is.
I understand that some supersonic military aircraft had crew ejection modules. The module would separate from the rest of the plane and would be slowed by a parachute. After the module slowed and dropped to a reasonable altitude the ejector seats would be fired. I don't know where it was deployed, but can remember reading a very superficial account of it many years ago.
The F111 crew modules were designed for ejections at maximum performance (Mach 1.2, 60k ft); at those speeds and altitudes the crew requires protection from the extreme environment. So, the entire cockpit ejects and parachutes to the ground. I'm sure such a system could be worked out for the shuttle, though the added cost (both in terms of weight and design/engineering) could well be excessive. Clearly the better solution is to scrap the shuttle altogether, and use the lessons learned to design such systems into it's successor.
ehintz
Being buffeted by a hyposonic wind only counts when there is enough air pressure.
I spent a few hours pouring over the CAIB report which contains a lot of very clear and sound details about how they found out what went wrong.
It's worth taking a look at, as it gave a lot of insight into how they used the recovered parts to determine exactly what happened. The graphs that show where each tile fell on the ground makes it very clear where the problem started. The sensor timelines also give clues about how the fire spread inside the wing. Internal emails are included to show how the problem was acknowledged but played down, and how many missed opportunities there were to have discovered the problem while still in space.
It's definitely worth downloading and at browsing through if you have any interest at all in the space program.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
One of the things that really struck me while watching Apollo 13[1] was the scene where a dozen guys start checking somebody's arithmetic .. using pencil and paper. I realize this is drama, and not necessarily accurate (where were the slide rules, at least? Or other manual adding machines?) but it made its point, pointedly, how much we rely on accurate calculations .. even more than we do more advanced computer automation.
Hell, would you want to drive a car that was built by people without pocket calculators?
[1] Look up your own damn imdb.com link
That might be a nice solution if that's what the problem really was. Famines are political, not agricultural, in nature. Ever heard of the great potato famine? While people were starving there were great piles of potatoes piled on up on shipping docks...rotting.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
that article made me really depressed but that joke actually made me laugh a bit.
people treat death way too seriously. its like people enjoy feeling sad or something. if i die i wouldnt want the people around me blathering and wimpering about how magical i was. i would want everyone to have a stiff drink and start cracking a few tasteful jokes.
your joke was not untasteful at all. it was kind of clever and didnt make me picture columbia at all really. the cracked out mods however do not agree. oh well.
i think its shitty that this happened to some solid explorers and fine human beings, but being all depressed and shit never helped anything.
Uh....they did show one of the "checkers" using a slide-rule in the movie. I remember this vividly as I recently re-watched that movie (whiling away the time waiting for MER-A to touchdown).
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
What you are describing is a supercritical fluid (A fluid or gas beyond the critical point pressure on its phase diagram). While superciritcal fluids have funky properties that don't seem to match gases or liquids, they are not plasmas. They are something else entriely. Google for it and you may be able to find some extra info
- Sig
In contrast, it took years for NASA to admit that, yes, the astronauts aboard Challenger were most likely aware during their final descent,
Can you give any citation for this? I've never seen this backed up by statements from a knowledgable person (i.e., someone who's run simulations or has access those simulations). All I've ever read were bogus transcripts, though I've long suspected there's more.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I want to thank all of Slashdot for not being typically "Slashdot" on this article. I've not read any comments containing knee-jerk blurbs that are so old they're cliche (SCO, RIAA, Microsoft, Linux, etc).
I'm happy to know that this mass of people, who so often harangue each other without consideration, taste, humility or respect, can still display those qualities.
I saw it over and over again on TV and thought, well, at least it was instant and there's nothing left... I was wrong and I now have deep sorrow for these individuals.
Well, that's one way of looking at it. On the other hand, each day thousands of people die horrible deaths (probably much more painful than 2 minutes of panic + 10 msecs it takes for your body to disintegrate). Being exposed to the open air at the speed the capsule was going is instant death.
One more thing about this "crew member came to rest beside a country road" business. Don't let those ethically correct media phrases confuse you - what "came to rest" there was a charred ribcage and almost half of a human head that hit the road at 200 mph. Let's say it like it is, huh! (not sure about those 200 mph, though)
After Challenger, I had a feeling that NASA would eventually lose another orbiter. Even under the best circumstances, space travel is dangerous. I wouldn't have expected it to be caused by damage to the wing. My fear has always been that one of the SSMEs (Space Shuttle Main Engine) would suffer a catastrophic disassembly during ascent due to turbopump failure, leading to the loss of all three SSMEs.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
There's no way Columbia could have rendezvoused with the ISS. It didn't have the fuel to reach it. The better slim-to-none possibility would have been leaving them in orbit and sending up a REMO (resupply module) to give them supplies and possibly a wing repair kit, and battery power. It's still very unlikely they'd have been saved, but it's better than the absolute failure of trying to reach the ISS.
Virg
He put forth the thesis that famines are almost always caused by political action and/or inaction, and only rarely is lack of food the real problem. His cure for famines?
Democracy and a free press
That's it. With democracy, the people in charge have a reason to prevent famines. A "reasonably free press" ensures that potential problems are widely known. His claim is that there has never been famine in any society that has both.
TSG
What sacrifice is that exactly? It's not as though they are fighting for the freedom of their country or saving others from the wrath of tyranny. No, they're flying a shuttle into space to perform menial research tasks.
The F-111 and the B1-A had crew ejection modules instead of seats (The current B1-B has seats). The F-111's could be used as a shelter or a life raft.
I'm tired of memorials for astronauts. They explored space because they (and ultimately, the public) thought that it was worthwhile to do so. However, it's not unreasonable to expect that we should value the lives of the people that do this; while they volunteered for risky jobs (just like soldiers who walk into harm's way, police, firefighters, etc.) and thus have to accept the risk that comes with their jobs, they should not have been viewed as expendable assets.
In both of the major disasters that have befallen NASA in the last twenty years (Challenger and Columbia), NASA management ignored (or was unwilling to obtain) information to minimize the risks to their astronauts in performing the misions they were assigned. In the 1st case, management knew that lanunches below 50F posed a threat to the solid rocket boosters but chose to launch. In 2nd case, people were aware that there might be problems with Columbia's heat shield integrity, but management was unwilling to get pictures of the orbiter to assess potential damage. When there is a decent chance of problems (rather than simple "blue-sky" contingency), management chose not to take simple steps to protect the astronauts and their mission.
If you think that the brakes in your car may not work, and yet you don't check them and kill yourself in the process, you can't have valued your own life much, because you were unwilling to take simple, cheap steps to preserve it (while maintaining your ability to live your life they way you wish). While we send soldiers to war, and sometimes send them into battle knowing they may die, we are supposed to at least try to make sure that their deaths are not meaningless (that their deaths had a purpose in achieving their mission) and that if they do not need to die to achieve their mission, we provide them with protection to maximize that chance. When astronauts are sent on mission while their management is unwilling to take simple steps to increase the chance of success of their mission (and of their survival), management cannot have valued either their mission or the people executing it very highly.
I don't value the lives of the astronauts enough to prevent them from doing dangerous things for me. I think that their lives should be valued enough that we should make good-faith efforts to preserve them. If we don't value the lives of those who take risks for us or the missions for which they take those risks enough to put our best effort to preserve both, there isn't a reason for them to go. Management at NASA showed a willingness to preserve its illusions over the mission that was supposed to be its primary job and over the people they sent to do that job.
Asking people to give their time and lives for goals we say are important but are unwilling to take even a modicum of care to achieve demeans us and sacrifices others for nothing but our illusions. The fact that the astronauts chose to take extraordinary risks does not negate the fact that we asked them to do so. We owe them (and their mission) some modicum of respect; when the people we ask to oversee the missions fail to respect either the mission or their people sufficiently, they need to be removed. If we are unwilling to take care with the lives and missions we ask others to give their lives to achieve, then perhaps we need to think about what we should be doing instead, or what we ought to be doing to care for them.
I do not mean to imply that you intended to be cavalier about the astronauts' lives, just to say that we asked them to take these risks for us, and ought to care enough for them and what we ask of them to try to make sure it doesn't happen again (or at least, doesn't happen because of our laziness, obtinacy, or contempt.)
What does NASA stand for ?
Need Another Seven Astronauts
Bear in mind, though, that a hypersonic wind strong enough to rip the shuttle apart is enough air pressure to kill the astronauts - if not by itself, then by hurling them against pieces of the crew module.
Disclaimer: IANAL. This post is, however, legal advice, and creates an attorney-client relationship.
Test it with this sim to see if you can do it, or how much fuel it takes and if you can survive.
i t. html
http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/~martins/orbit/orb
You can make your own space ships etc..
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
The account of the shuttle's final minutes is very detailed and has a lot of useful information that makes clear just how complex and dangerous an undertaking that space travel is.
(You may argue against that, but have *you* worked out a way to end hunger, to end want, to wave back the forces of nature? No, you haven't. And nor has anyone else. But people *have* worked out how to send people into space - to other worlds, even - and bring them back safely. But yet...)
People dying in the most complex piece of technology ever created, exploring the most dangerous environment known, when they have the backing of the greatest concentration of human brainpower on the planet, and it *could* have been prevented if the bureaucrats hadn't ignored the engineers and scientists... that depresses me. That tells me everything I don't want to hear about humanity. That tells me the Dream - of accomplishing the impossible, of pushing the boundaries, of going beyond mundane everyday existance and achieving what conventional wisdom believes cannot be done - is dead. After reading the Atlantic article, to find that fucking PowerPoint slides helped contribute to the destruction of the Columbia and the death of the astonauts when there was a chance they could have been saved... Jesus Christ!
It's not like I don't feel sorry if I hear that people have died somewhere. It's just that I feel more sorry if they die in space. I can't explain it, but the idea of space travel has always stirred powerful feelings in me... and to have them shattered by what after investigation turn out to be the most stupid of reasons (metric/imperial confusion, slightly too low temperatures at launch, a piece of foam I could hold in my hands) really hits me hard.
Hell, I was depressed all Christmas Day after learning that Beagle 2 had basically cratered. Maybe you might think my priorities are wrong if I care about the fate of a machine, but it's not just the hardware - it's the hopes of all the people who worked to create it, and hoped to discover something new about the universe, being shattered.
(Plus I want to get on good terms early on with our new robot overlords...)
You must think in Russian.
...but, honestly, if there's a cooler way to die than at 200,000 feet above the surface of the planet, going 18 times the speed of sound in the world's most expensive and high-tech airplane, wearing a day-glow orange jumpsuit that says McCool on it, I'd really like to know.
Everyone was shocked to learn that Challenger was completely avoidable and largely due to management indifference to engineers' warnings, and incredible pressure to launch on time or else. Of course, another large part of the cause was the culture of "do more with less, because that's all you're going to get" crap that has been flowing down from Washington to NASA since Apollo was cancelled by Nixon.
And now Columbia, the first to launch and second best shuttle vehicle (behind Challenger), has also fallen to launch timeliness pressures, budget pressures, procrastination on correcting serious safety issues (debris strikes during launch), and management pooh-poohing of engineers' warnings. Will we never learn?
In the end, you get what you pay for. And although I am 100% behind Bush's Moon and Mars goals, I am very worried about his stance that it can all be done with only a 5% bump in the NASA budget. This is what has gotten NASA into trouble before: give low-ball figures to get project XYZ started, start experiencing cost overruns, then testify that the project (XYZ) can't be cancelled because of all the money we already spent on it.
Sorry for the rant, but I'm old enough that the space program actually means something to me. I want to remain a member of a spacefaring nation, and I don't plan on moving anywhere!
Cheers!
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
I have a distinct recollection of
Dan Rather playing a audio clip on
the evening news maybe a year or two
after Challenger. It included a
"What the hell was that?", I was
kinda suprised that they said that
on TV. (Curse words on TV, gasp!)
Anyway, at the time, they said that
there were at least SOME_NUMBER (4?)
people who survived the explosion,
and probably died immediately on
impact with the water. I never heard
much else about it, which I found
puzzling, because I figured it was
something that everyone would want
to know.
"We never lost a Saturn V, but it was only used for 13 launches," Your point is right on; the shuttle's safety record is spectacular, but didn't NASA lose the crew of a Saturn V when they were doing a "plugs out" test during Apollo 1 testing? They filled the crew compartment with pure oxygen and the astronauts were incinerated on the pad. If you take that data into account, the shuttle's record looks even better (1:13 v. 2:113)
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
You will be interested in the following links:
1 2crewfate.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3078062/
http://cbsnews.cbs.com/network/news/space/51Lchap
Then why not compare with Soyuz? Or Gemini/Apollo/Soyuz combined? The last fatal Soyuz accident happened in 1971. More than a hundred launches since, no fatalities or injuries. There *were* two accidents in which the escape system saved the crew: Soyuz 18-1 (1975 -- in-flight failure) und Soyuz T-8 (1983 -- rocket exploded on the pad). Both these accidents would have been pretty much "unsurvivable" had they happened with the Shuttle.
The Shuttle is inherently less safe than Soyuz/Apollo designs. You have lots of completely useless structures like wings which only add complexity. You only have a few airports to land on in case of emergency, instead of, say, the whole ocean. There is no escape system like Soyuz's or Apollo's. The crew compartment is not mounted on top of the rocket, but strapped to the side of it, which means that in case of any serious failure of the rocket, you're pretty much doomed, where on Soyuz or Apollo you would have activated the escape system. And remember -- with the capsule mounted on top, foam can fall off the rocket all it wants -- it can't do any harm.
you sir, have failed.
P226
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
phoning home about a foam strike once you get there, being told "Naw, our experts told us it weren't nuthin' to worry yer pretty little heads about",
Mission control told them about the foam strike and their assessment of the situation. The astronauts had no way of knowing on their own that it had happened. But it is more dramatic in your version than it was in real life.
A few inches away from the leading edge, just beyond the boundary layer, molecules are torn apart and temperatures can exceed 10,000 degrees. But the boundary layer keeps temperatures on the leading edge RCC panels at around 3,000 degrees.
How kind of the authors to avoid specifying exactly what sort of degrees they're talking about. One wonders, are they writing for certain readers in the United States, Myanmar, and Liberia - the only countries that use British Imperial measurements - or for everyone else in the world?
-----
PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
Bombs are flying
People are dying
Children are crying
Politicians are lying too.
Cancer is killing
Texaco's spilling
The whole world's gone to hell
But how are you?
I'm super!
Thanks for asking!
All things considered
I couldn't be better I must say!
My exact words upon hearing my mother call up the stairs with the news. Only the second time in my life I ever used the "f" word in front of her.
That time she didn't wash my mouth out with soap.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
As in so much else, even though the concept is simple, the details are not.
And not only that, if the Shuttle on launch were to take a left turn towards Titusville or a right turn towards Cocoa Beach or Cape Canaveral, the Flight Control Officers (FCO) might have to initiate the flight destruct units on the SRBs. The odds of that happening are much slimmer than the type of accident that befell Columbia, but it is still nonzero. Plus, the astronauts may have the chance to separate the SRBs or regain control and allow the FCO's (and especially the astronauts) a chance to breathe again. Situations abound and fortunately none have happened. NASA exercises the different possibilities regularly. And the FCO's would take action if necessary, potentially killing the astronauts onboard, to save the lives of thousands. Just one more thing of which the astronauts are fully aware.
Our founding fathers removed the guys in charge. Be American. Vote incumbents out.
No, he got his definitions right. Millions of kids starving is sad, but it isn't a tragedy. Technically, it's a statistic.
"I think so, Brain, but 'instant karma' always gets so lumpy." - Pinky
"Decepticons FOREVER!!!" - Ravage
I'm acquainted with plasma, the ionized(electrically conductive) gas, and I've always wondered why they don't use magnetic fields to help steer the plasma away from the critical areas, ie. leading edge of the wings and nose. What would it take to generate such a field?
I can understand if there is a lot of power required, but couldn't some of it be taken from the supersonic plasma/airstream in some way, perhaps through MHD(MagnetoHydroDynamically)? In this way you would have a self balancing system, as the ship goes deeper into the atmosphere, where it's hotter, more power would be generated, and thus the field strength could increase?
I'm not a plasma physicist, but there would seem to be some merit in such an idea for re-entry craft such as the shuttle. Anybody of the appropriate technical persuasion have any comments about such an idea?
In memorium.
In niether accident is there any record of any engineer going on the record to state that the danger of LOCV existed. None. When it comes to murder, the managers found willing accomplices in the engineers.
In short, blaming management for the failures of engineers, is utter nonsense. That's not to say that management is innocent, because they are not. But to let the engineers who failed their professional responsibilities walk away scot-free is condoning murder.
Mass starvation and the Columbia disaster are both tragic. But birth control simply doesn't enter into this.
You might as well say that if the astronauts' parents had used more birth control, then the astronauts wouldn't have died either. It may be true, but it is totally irrelevant.
I'll never understand people's veneration of corpses. Once they're dead, it's just a chunk of meat. Why is it horrifying to think about a piece of meat falling 15+ miles to the ground?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Thanks for the correction... been a while since I've seen the movie.
Yeah spooky when there is only a what, a few in 365 chance of this happening. Man, thats like as weird as two people having the same birthday!
Is the unmaned probes they had back then. The viking landers used a more accident prone method of landing than did the most recent rovers. More over they were bigger and heavier. On top of that, they landed using ancient computers with miniscule amounts of power. It's a maricle they landed at all.
oops, can't spell today: should read amazing
I always just thought of solving the world's problems as more of a journey than a goal. Honestly, people have been trying to solve the worlds problems for literally thousands of years. It's just that no matter how many problems you solve, more always become apparent. I don't think you need to choose one or the other, exploration or humanity. In reality, exploration is just another way we try to better ourselves and our way of life.
WTH, you know it's going to be quick and painless when it does come, so you might as well enjoy the last Big Ride In The Sky (and I say that with the utmost respect).
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Certainly the flight profile of the XB-70 (high altitude supersonic) was more like shuttle re-entry than that of either the F-111 or B-1. The system was designed to allow safe ejection at Mach 3 and 70,000 feet.
This system was actually used after a midair collision, and saved the pilot's life.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
My most favorite Challenger jokes:
Q: Did you know Christa McAuliffe had dandruff?
A: Her head and shoulders washed up on the beach.
and
Q: What were Commander Scobee's last words?
A: No, Bud Light!
(The second one only works for those who remember the 80's)
Goals for 2011: 1. Stop plate tectonics. 2. Prevent animal predation. 3. End supernovae now. 4. Rid the world of evil.
There's one on Marsl ay.cfm ?IM_ID=743
s /jan-2 7-2004/captions/image-1.html
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/multimedia/disp
It seems memorials are popping up all over Mars
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mer2004/rover-image
Goals for 2011: 1. Stop plate tectonics. 2. Prevent animal predation. 3. End supernovae now. 4. Rid the world of evil.
ha ha
AYB never dies. Gotta love it.
Even if suitably temperature resistant alloys can be found I do not believe it will have the same heat resistance as a ceramic tile/blanket - mostly in terms of conductivity, abrasion and preserving structural integrity. Due to the difficulty of large segment manufacturing the wing will also still probably involve a number of joints between alloy plates - ie. like the tiles it has strong and weak points.
Additionally, this will not increase resilience to wing penetration in the slightest. The disruption of the boundary layer, combined with the partial reversal in wing stress (gasses now trying to escape the wing from the inside, instead of the usual compressive pressure) would still cause catastrophic failure in my view.
I could of course be completely wrong. :)
Q.
Insert Signature Here
1. Fuck the ISS. It's a money sink. Screw our international commitments. We can't afford it. Bring the crew home.
2. Kill the Shuttle program now. If we can't operate it safely, then we shouldn't be operating it.
3. Start immediately on the Crew Exploration Vehicle. We need to get to the moon ASAP.
4. Ramp up Prometheus. We need nuclear propulsion in the next ten years for Mars transit. By the time we're ready to launch, we should have VASIMR or a GCNR ready for use.
5. Get the military involved. They have their shit together, and they will force NASA to stay on schedule.
"I thought I could organize freedom. How Scandinavian of me."
I believe the article contains a slight inaccuracy in that the RCC panels were actually made to take the heat and force of a turbulent flow.
Remember, back in the 1970's when the shuttles were designed, Computational Fluid Dynamics didn't really exist and they didn't have the techniques or the brute force computational power to solve the Navier-Stokes equations to see if it was going to be a turbulent flow or a laminar flow. So as a result the RCC panels are actually about two times as thick as they need to be.
So, basically the other panels were handling the temperature and aerodynamic loads just fine, it was the stream of super heated gas that got inside the wing that did all the damage. In fact if you read the CAIB report it says that the shuttle could have survived if the RCC panels had not been breached and instead had only been damaged. It was the breach that caused all the problems, not the rough surface nor the turbulent flow.
I know this because when the Columbia accident occurred my incompressible aerodynamics professor pulled out copies of some of the actual analysis of the shuttle from back in the '70's. They were pretty cool to look at and were using some of the same techniques we were learning.
Anyway, thats just my slight nit pick. On the whole it was a very moving article.
"We Don't Need No Truthless Heros!" - Project 86
I had thought about hypersonic survival since Challenger. There are essentially two problems, velocity and altitude. The emergency egress system is only designed to work if the shuttle gets subsonic, has a clean orientation in relation to the ground and isn't too high. This is great if there is trouble with the landing gear but otherwise not much use.
This is why the idea of a crew compartment that can separate interests me. It doesn't have to be able to land intact, just to protect the crew from high altitude and hypersonic flight and with paracchutes or whatever to slow itself down. The crew compartment is relatively strong as it is a pressure vessel, and it was the last structural assembly to fail in both disasters (it is even arguable that the Challenger crew lived until the module impacted the ocean).
...actually, it is outside the front of the KSC visitor center.
One of the more humbling places I've been to, along with the Vietnam memorial in DC and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, at Arlington Nat'l Cemetery, which also has the memorial for the Lockerbee (sp) plane crash. Haven't been to Pearl Harbor memorial or Oklahoma City...
thats some hectic shiat. glad i didn't have to experience it.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
In a heartbeat, no hesitation whatsoever. To be that significant a part of the greatest endeavor mankind has ever achieved was what kept me going through my aerospace degree. The short time I spent at NASA (before budget cutbacks caused the first NASA layoffs ever) is still the most memorable and amazing part of my life. I am saddened by the bean-counters and professional managers that seem to have sucked the life and spirit of adventure out of the NASA culture that I knew. While I was there the feeling that everyone was on the edge (or sometimes in the middle of) the most amazing discoveries was palpable. The conversations overheard or participated in in the lunchroom were so far outside of "normal" life that sometimes I had trouble re-adjusting to dealing with "normal" people and conversation.
After all this time I still miss it.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
had to go for a walk after reading that ..."
... i not second ...
... what would you do? prolly no
... so i quit
... military/dangerous ...
... cassandra complex.
...
article.
and yes while reading it i was like: "oh
cool! they're going to make it
hot gases don't seem to hurt the tiles alot
while some foam can
guessing that is was the foam just noting
the gas-solid discrepancy
maybe even if mission control knew about
the hole in the wing while the shuttle was
in orbit
one is more qualified on the planet to
make the decision to "bring them back".
the above scenarion happens alot in war
zones too. more or less some general decides
to take that hill and every soldier hearing
that command knows probability of survival
will be less then 50 %
military service.
maybe the whole shuttle system was constructed
in the time of the cold war ("you know, the
russian are pointing 2'000 megaton inter-
continental rockets at us RIGHT THIS MOMENT")
gave the project abit of a
flair (as opposed to commercial/safe).
yep, x-ray can kill you. even today i find
many situation where my logic -or- gut feeling
tells me it's going to go horribly wrong sooner or
later but in 90% cases if i tell someone they
don't really care
humans are creature of habit. "it went well so
far so why should something go wrong."
methinks the space shuttles are an amazing
engineerng feat, but don't fit in our post
cold-war time.
buran (russian space shuttle) made one !unmanned!
orbit and landed safely. just one!
it think the original buran is somewhere in
kasakstan and the roof of the hanger where it is
house has collapsed on one side of the wing
If this was some unmanned satellite the same detailed account would have no impact.
I can watch crash test dummies on TV for hours.
I've read all four volumes of Macarthur Job's epic "Air Disaster" series. The best episodes are the ones where the crew get the plane down with no loss of life.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
B52s are still heavily used in the US air wars. They saw first flight in 1955. I believe their innards have more or less been completely replaced a few times. And we used to joke about MIGs using vacuum tubs.
In a twist of irony, the Columbia science mission were mostly successful, according to a Principal Investigator I heard from. Most of the experiments telemetered their results back to earth, with relatively few depending on equipment return. His experiement achieved 90%, with some of that by in-flight apparatus repair by the astronauts. Ghoulishly, there was some additional results derived from mostly intact parts of the apparatus recovered on the ground.
This rings up the question whether a quarter-billion manned flight should be used to conduct space lab experiments. This and earlier missions both established that mostly automatic lab modules are successful. Yet at the same time dont always work correctly and human hands can rescue them.
The fact is that a moon mission today is impossible despite the rantings of the non-elected, intellectually challenged, presidential impostor, because the software and other complexity issues would make it cost far too much, take far too long, and probably suffer a BSOD.....
Another factor to consider is that in those days the semiconductor industry did support aerospace, which basically they do not nowadays, (it would be less than 0.2% of the total industry output) there are hardly any components fully screened as part of the manufacturing process for example. The surface mount packaging we have to use today has many reliability problems in adverse environments, particularly in coping with temperature cycling, and the packages are not even moisture-proof (not that it matters in space, but it does on the ground!). It would be impossible today to duplicate the reliability of an Apollo computer. BTW I currently work as a Reliability Analyst in a safety-critical industry, so I might know a little bit about the subject.
I have an article in front of me which suggests that the failure rate of the Apollo Guidance Computer was less than 10 in a billion hours, that equates to about the same as one small to medium chip or 5 to 10 best-quality transistors nowadays.
Why? Blame the consumer industry, PCs and mobile phones, areas where solid-state electronics is of no vital importance, but which dominate the semiconductor market. In all fairness, it is true to say that the quality of a normal commercial quality components has improved greatly over the years, but this can rarely be proved, and there is simply no way of getting the extreme reliability rtequired for manned missions, unless by using a much greater degree of redundancy, and therefore more complexity, than used to be the case.
Not only that, but with the increase in bloat in complex systems, overall software reliability is declining, hastened by "unsafe" languages like C++, and the tendency to use "junk" operating systems (we all know which, it has been debated here many times...) in critical applications.
This generation is making backward progress, and with the rise in the use of cannabis and other mind-damaging drugs as a direct result of corrupt government policy, it will soon be impossible to get sufficient fully sane people to undertake a major project anyway.
If flight control had known the seriousness of the problem, could the shuttle have disengaged the boosters and glided back down? I've never found out if they can even do that. I know the Saturn5 rocket had some type of small thrusters on the top to do something similar by seperating the crew capsule. (IIRC) I remember when the foam impact was mentioned, I didn't think it was a problem, since I and probably a lot of other people was just thinking soft crushable styrofoam. However, that high density stuff is quite strong and does not yield easily. I think that the astronauts probably lost conciousness pretty quickly, from the initial shock and instability and lack of air. God rest their souls.
-- After all is said and done, more is said than done.
Disengaging the boosters early (while they're still running) isn't possible. There are a number of "abort modes" once the boosters have burned out though; see this link.
The Russians conned NASA into the ISS boondoggle both for the fat pensions for their retiring scientists, and the distraction from their laser sail project staffed by their actual go-getters. Now we're left holding the bag on incomplete 1980s Soviet technology in an orbit unsupported by a real NASA mission plan, with the Shuttles it depends on facing cutoff by "fiscal disciple" Bush. And Russia is heading for the stars with 21st Century tech they won't share with us. Don't count on our only real competition in space for help in dismantling their franchise, especially when they're winning.
--
make install -not war