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Columbia Disaster Anniversary
Jorkapp writes "One year ago today, seven astronauts perished in a horrible silver-white comet over Texas skies. Since then, life at the Johnson Space Center seems to have returned to normal. Still, memories of the doomed STS-107 mission can be found throughout the center. Space.com has a rather interesting editorial about NASA's past, present, and future with the Space Shuttle program. In the immediate future, returning the Shuttle fleet to flight is a key first step. Eventually, NASA plans to launch Constellation, a new Crew Exploration Vehicle designed to replace the shuttles." Jim Lovell has a few words to say.
No, but things like these should never be totally forgotten.
"I'm not sure we ever want to get over it," McCulley adds. "You learn from it and, as we work through these technical issues, folks are asking questions today that they might not have asked before."
You have a bunch of techie geek engineers who know their shit, and could probably succeed 10x beyond what they do now if just left alone to do it. But they're hampered and held back by moronic bueracratic managers. Throw in the fact that it's a government agency and underfunded and well, you get fireworks and 7 dead astronauts. It amazing they manage to have succeses like the Mars probes in spite of this. The saddest story I ever read regardign Columbia was about the engineer that tried in vain to get his manager to ask the DOD to use one of their satellites to image Columbia's wind, and was turned down repeatedly. PHB to the max, only not quite so funny in the end.
Space.com article: "The Columbia board's scathing indictment of NASA's culture was the direct result of problems they discovered in how the MMT operated and members failing to speak up if they thought a problem should be handled differently."
I don't know if this reflects the author's attitude but I'm pretty sure the CAIB report didn't have this tone, which we saw after Challenger as well. Then it was engineers failing to "prove" their case (although they did speak up). This time the engineers "failed to speak up," although they had conferences on the foam strike involving dozens of people and escalated their concerns to the highest levels of NASA. I guess that does not count for "speaking up."
Next time they will be blamed if they don't commit mutiny, kidnap the managers and threaten them with torture. Roger Boisjoly moved large rocks in his backyard. I wonder what the Columbia engineers are doing?
You're absolutely correct. It was the weight of the tiles that was the problem. If only the shuttle were much heavier... [/sarcasm]
Communication issues? A fair criticism. NASA bureaucracy? Makes sense. But to criticize the weight of the tiles - which are designed to be heat-resistant yet lightweight - seems a little ignorant to me. I think a heavier object of similar size (say... a brick) would have no problem falling from the sky.
It's always pretty amazing how some of us feel qualified to give aerospace engineering advice to Ph.D. aerospace engineers.
I don't mean to diminish the tragedy or the loss of life. But, you gotta wonder how any astronaut must feel sitting on top of a vehicle taller than most buildings, with over a million separate parts, with a propulsion system that could take out a small country, and all of this assembled by the low bidder. Happy Trails, Erick
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Is that there's not going to be another launch vehicle comparable to the Shuttle in terms of capability for the next half century. Look it up- all the plans on the shelf are either for expendables or for much lighter-lift craft.
The diaster occurred because it was a PR game.
They were not using astronauts but doing a multicultural PR gameshow. Lives were lost and the management was to blame for this stupidity.
Most of the real trained astronauts realized this and spoke out later. Most should have been very angry.
We were doing highschool kitbox experiments up there instead of pushing the frontiers.
I worked in Huntsville in the early days. Everyone I knew that had background knew immediately that the tile areas were at fault. NASA knew it also but put up the lame excuses so the PR could continue.
O'Keefe should be working as a greeter at Walmart.
An accountant bean counter should not be mading these decisions. I hope he never gets a full nights sleep the rest of his life.
This may be where I blow my good karma, I mean no offence but Columbia was an accident not a tragedy.
Any loss of life is a personal tragedy for the individual and the family but 7 lives lost in a spacecraft accident is not the worst thing to have happened in the last few years.
It's just an event, to be noted with due respect. Space is a dangerous place to travel, its just that the relatively good safety record of the shuttle craft has pushed that awareness out of the collective mind.
7 astronauts agreed to those risks and sadly paid the price. Real tragedies happening at the time and since have been forgotten in the rush to cover and re-cover this issue.
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No my issue is that two NASA managers were overconcerned with 'efficiency', that is Ham and Dittemore both seemed rightly concerned that everything should go smoothly with minimal cost overrun that they ran roughshod over those who actually knew something who were unhappy but had no real evidence at the time.
If the managers were running a production line, there call was correct. If they were involved with something safety critical (not just the shuttle, the same could have been said if they ran a chemical plant) then until the engineers are convinced, they should play safe.
Another issue was the confusion felt by the lower ranking engineers. They realised that the capabilities of the military cameras were *very* classified. Some who really wanted the imagery hasd the impression that a more senior peron had seen it and there was nothing to worry about. If they did not have that impression, they may have fought harder to get the pictures.
No, from the initial (and stupid staetments by O'Keefe, where he completely discounted the foam) through to the detailed errors earlier, it shows a lack of engineering knowhow at the top of the shuttle program. Bean counters are useful and an invaluable aid to budget control, but puting them in charge of something they don't really understand is stupid.
I don't really agree with this. There may have been fault in this case and in most cases, but a culture that believes that someone is always at fault will be one where people will not attempt anything new or risky.
All potential failures cannot be anticipated. If you have to find fault with a person, you'll sometimes end up just finding a scapegoat.
The fault might well be with the bureacracy, too. If the bureacracy creates so much paperwork that engineers didn't have time to do their engineering, then that's a fault of the bureacracy itself. Of course, you could always find the fault with the top managers that didn't staff sufficiently or authorized something that was inherently risky without allowing for failure, but I bet top managers won't ever be found to be the proximate cause of a failure.
Every crashed plane? No, you investigate the incident, learn the technical lesson and then get on with the job.
Anniversaries of accidents and disasters are for the families of the victims, anyone else is just ghoulish.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Having had the oppotunity to work at NASA and get to know some of the astronauts and staff, I know that they are remembering the people who died in the Apollo 1, Columbia and Challenger accidents. If you work there you become part of a very large family that has been tasked with doing the impossible on a shoe-string budget.
Many are ex-military, many have PhDs, all of them are the best of the best. The loss of any member of the family, whether it's an astronaut or a technician, is felt by all. All honor those who have given their lives in pursuit of space exploration.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
I do not believe it is resonable to design a single vehicle that will transport people from the earths gravity well to the rest of the solar system. We need to have vehicle that deliver people to LEO, vehicles that can transport cargo from the earth or LEO to the planets, vehicles that can trasport people from LEO to the moon and planets. Until we can get it to a few thousand dollars per kg, eveything is really too expensive to do on a large scale.
The US government will not fund these things. They want us to duplicate efforts of 40 years ago. we have been there and done that. We need infrastructure. It isn't sexy, but it is neccesary.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I think it is very clear that the fault here lay with NASA. It was pure butt-covering that they have been engaged it.
The cost of the photos is irrelevant. The satellite is a sunk cost. Taking a look at another space object is a reasonable experiment to consider regardless of whether you use the data.
NASA nixed the photographs because they were not interested in looking for failure.
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Perfect, unless you like sleeping indoors and feeding your children that is. It appears that various bureaucracies brought enormous pressure to bear to shut up the engineers who were reporting problems. Sure, they could have tried to run to the New York Times. Assuming anyone at the NYT would have listened to them, that would have gotten them a vote of thanks from a grateful public (monetary value: 0.00) and a lifetime blacklist from the aerospace industry (monetary value: $-2,000,000). What would you have done?
sPh
It is of course very sad for the families, but I bet even they appreciate that those who died would always be left unfulfilled and dissatisfied if they had not taken the chance offered to them (perhaps they would still go even if they knew the consequences..?).
I do not think the actual loss of life was the real disaster: it was seven people who 99.99% of people hadn't even heard of before the accident. I think the true disaster was the tarnishing of a vision: the idea of the human race reaching beyond our home and "exploring the great unknown". The idea that our technology had allowed us to conquer the solar system. And why were we doing it? Just because.
Slightly offtopic, but I really hate it when people ask what the point of space travel is. If those people don't realise, they will NEVER understand why the rest of us look upon astronauts with such envy. In my view, these doubters are missing a key characteristic of humanity - the desire to increase our knowledge and understanding and to make the world a better place.
Read the CAIR report or the Tufte paper on it (the famous "Powerpoint is harmful" paper); the engineers did try to show to their managers how important the foam impact was; but they covered their behinds too much, made a bad presentation, and as a result the not-too-technical managers discounted the importance of the impact. The bureaucracy in this case worked; the engineers failed.
As for your comment on culture, I agree with your thought but disagree with the conclusion: the whole point of a bureaucracy such as NASA's is to minimize risk, not maximize profit/reward. In engineering the risks/innovation should be done at the design stage, not during implementation, maintainance or operations.
I had just gotten up that morning, and switch my TV to nasatv and watched the final moments of the reentry. When they lost contact and started to make those comm check calls i knew something was amiss, so i kicked it over to CNN and they had it on the air that the shuttle had disintegrated. I switched it back to nasatv and watched as the control room crew go into their emergency mode collating all their data that they had before they lost contact.
I sat there on the edge of my bed, thinking back to the reentry of Apollo 13 and when they came in shallow, scaring the entire mission control, not to mention the rest of the world.
The shuttle has been a major money hog for the space program, as well as the nation herself.
We HAD a heavy lifting vehicle. Hell, it laid down the heavy lifting record and it still stands today... The Saturn V and her sister ships.
You bring that baby back and we will have a multimission, easily modifiable vehicle capable of lifting multiple satellites that would make the Delta V's bust their rivets, to lofting entire space station modules, stuffed with spare parts and supplies.
There were proposals on the boards that had the V lofting the atom-powered NERVA vehicle that would have made Mars easily, to additional modules for SkyLab, if that program never got the axe.
One problem with the NERVA stack though is that the overall height would have been a good 10-20 feet higher than the door on the VAB.
Bring her back folks.. We'll be rolling in research projects that will be coming from the savings on the vehicle.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
I respect the hell out of Jim Lovell. The man's got a set o' stones on him like Notre Dame Cathedral. That said, he's wrong about the shuttle and ISS. They are not magnificent technological accomplishments and their value is minimal at best. The flaws with the shuttle are well known and get documented every fifty flights when one of them kills its crew. The ISS is a floating joke, in which the 3 "scientists" spend all their waking time trying to stay alive. The ISS doesn't deserve to hold the jockstrap of the memory of Skylab or Mir.
I understand the fear that so many have, that if we stop manned spaceflight until we have a sensible replacement for the shuttle or a sensible place to _go_ other than LEO (again) to do "science" experiments submitted by grade-school children (again), then we'll never go back. The money will be appropriated for other purposes, and that will be that. Maybe they're right. Maybe the only way to stay in space is to keep pouring billions of dollars into creaky, unsafe vehicles going nowhere and doing nothing. If so, though, what's the real point?
The most-often cited reasons for manned spaceflight are science, the human drive to explore, and the need to get our eggs into at least one more basket. The science coming out of the budget-gobbling manned program is dwarfed by that of the robotic probes. We're not pushing the boundaries of anything by going to the same place we've gone 100 times before for a couple of weeks each time. Anything extraterrestrial human dwelling would be inexorably tied to home so a disaster to Earth (e.g., Shoemaker-Levy bopping us instead of Jupiter) would doom them as well.
I guess I've just lost the "vision". In my youth I was a big proponent of manned spaceflight. We were going to swarm the solar system and after inventing FTL, the galaxy or even the universe. Those were the dreams of a fat kid with a poor understanding of physics, though. The reality is that there's nowhere for us to go, nowhere we can reach. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I see an unmanned spaceflight program as vastly more worthy of our money until we've gathered far more information about "the neighborhood" than we have now.
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I think this comment should be stressed. A lot of posts here have been basically aimed at the management ("damn PHBs"), but you also have to say that there were techs at fault as well. Now I don't feel I am in any position whatsoever to place blame, so I'm not even going to attempt to.
I think, though, the Slashdot crowd should calm down a little and try not to blame management. Most seem to do so because of their own personal experiences and frustrations with management. These are not completely unfounded, but it's mostly a finger pointing situation with the geeks standing by one another.
Instead of this (which ultimately amounts to blocking ears and singing, "la la la! I can't hear you; you're wrong!"), as the parent said, engineers and other techies should be learning from this. All of those involved with management types should take communication/management classes at a local college, read those management/motivation books in the bookstore (e.g. Steven Covey). Get inside the minds of the 'PHBs'.
Think of it as an engineering problem: you have to get permission from management on something tech-related, but they don't understand. Well, you could just say, "It's too hard to convince them. Those PHBs wouldn't know calculus from their asses." That'd be easy and resolves any blame for yourself. You have to make them understand and the way to do that is to learn to talk how they do.
Tsage