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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.
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.
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.
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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