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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.
I've held one of the replaced shuttle tiles. They're almost as light as a brick of styrofoam. It is no small wonder that the damn stuff broke off so easily.
Honestly, I am very glad we are going to be at least planning on going back to the moon and too mars (hopefully this isn't just an election year ploy). But personally I wonder what we are going to do from 2010 to 2015 in terms of manned space vehicles. I think that if we just gave NASA a kick in the pants they could easily roll out a new vehicle by 2010, and hopefully they will not only get that kick but will be given the money to actually make it happen.
A Bugg
As they say "the show must go on" and with these passing years i hope that we can come to terms with the dangers of space. As we do perhaps we can extend our civilization into space and transcend our fears and inhibitions. What is holding us back? Why cant we approach space with the common goal for the advancement of knowledge and ultimately our species? Can we put money aside for once? must we captialize on everything?!
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Some junior NASA engineers made an unauthorised request to the military to get some photos of Columbia so that they could see if there was damage. At the same time, a senior NASA engineer made the same request. NASA management heard about the first request, and (rightly) were upset because it was made without authorisation (these photos are very expensive, only the boss can ok them). So management contacted the military and told them not to take photos at this time. Now this is the scary bit. What they didn't realise was that there was a second (authorised) request. They accidentally cancelled both.
Now how do you protect yourself against that sort of misunderstanding? The only way I can think of is to go overly bureaucratic and assign tracking numbers to everything. The amount of paperwork explodes and you drown in self imposed red tape. Is there a way for a large organisation to avoid this sort of no-fault errors without needing a signature every time someone sneezes?
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The day after the tragedy I went out and bought a newspaper to save.
Everytime a major tradegy happens I try to save an editorial peice or something of the likes so my grandchildren/great grandchildren can remember the errors of the past
As they say: "Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it"
Hopefully in future generations, they will take this into account to assure the same error does not happen twice.
Those who trade in their freedom for security, deserve neither.
- NASA has known there were problems with tile flaking for a long time.
- Stress from the impact was noted on the black box recorder, but not transmitted to the crew or ground control
- Some of the shielding floated away during orbit, a fact confirmed by radar data, but no one noticed at the time.
- NASA turned down repeated requests to inspect the wing for damage during the mission.
- There was no real reason Columbia's flight couldn't have been delayed after tile problems with Atlantis except for the bureaucratic need to maintain "momentum."
All in all, the article is pretty damning for NASA's management.Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Does anyone have links to any proposed Constellation vehicles?
PS - no Star Trek Constellation Class vehicles please
2010. Many years too late, but at least there is still an intended time to end of life the orbiter program. What a pain in the ass that thing has become. Like anything else, it's past its prime, and we now have new science to apply to making its successor. Hopefully we'll end up with two vehicles; A ship with a bunch of crew and little room for anything else, and a heavy lift vehicle. I also hope that NASA will continue their space elevator research, so that once the materials technology gets where it needs to be (which at this point is a case of if and not when) we can put up an elevator and stop burning all this rocket fuel.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Anyone besides me taken aback that it has already been a year? It seems like it happened, at most, 3 months ago.
Seems to me that an event is etched clear as day in our memory, and a week afterwards we push it aside as we go about our daily lives, and when the memory is brought back, it is so clear that it couldn't possibly have happened a year ago. Where did all this time go?
an excellent article I found in another /. thread about this disaster.
I was out waiting on it to enter & was taking pictures as it flew over my house in central TX. I didn't know what I had caught on film until I watched it break up on the horizon. I went inside & looked at the pictures and I caught it with the first visible piece seperating. NASA was quite interested in it when I emailed it to them. They made a couple of phone calls to get my exact location, direction of the photograph, and even called a couple of months later with a thank you follow up. Apparently it helped them find that big piece that landed near Dallas.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
I agree. I marketed computers to the gov't for about ten years and there was a great desire to spend a bit more for a higher quality product, but the rules made it tough. I am not sure how the bidding process works for NASA projects. I am sure it is not just the low bid as I said in my previous post. But, clearly, a better system would cost more and they should spend that amount or not do it at all given what is at stake. I sold NASA the ThinkPad computers that they are still using for Shuttle missions. The only reason I won that bid was that I was the only bidder. So, in that instance, they probably did better than expected given some of the stuff that was on the market at the time. Happy Trails, Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
In the plant across the street from the one I work in, they make the main engine controller for the Space Shuttle. The Columbia tragedy had a close-to-home impact for many of the people who work in that program. They set up a small memorial over there. It's not much in the way of grandeur, but it shows they still remember those that were lost in the pursuit of man's dreams.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
NASA, that is, not the shuttles.
Aren't two NASA culture-induced shuttle disasters enough?
Both shuttles disasters can be directly traced to NASA brass CYA maneuvers at the expense of human lives.
Privatize space exploration and get rid of NASA once and for all.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Many of the findings are not unique to the space program, but reflect the pressures when the bean counters are chasing targets and are in the driving seat. Of course, the converse is that a true engineer is a perfectionist so things are late and too expensive if they run things. You need the mixture of bean-counters and engineers and that is difficult. One issue is that these days, the bean-counters are professional managers and have thus been educated in communication. Some engineers are but many aren't. The core problems addressed by the CAIB revolve around miscommunication and misunderstanding. Powerpoint didn't help either.
One year ago tomorrow, I posted in my weblog:
I still believe that. Bush's Mars program may or may not be the best way to go, and NASA may still need to figure out what it's really going to do about the Hubble, but the public is still talking about space exploration, the latest batch of Mars probes are capturing the imagination of the entire world, the X-Prize is still going strong, and we're making progress. The naming of the landing sites and nearby hills after those who gave their lives in this endeavor was a wonderful touch. We're ready to move forward.
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
12 years elapsed between the launching of Spoutnik (a small 84 kg sphere) and the landing of men on the moon, who came aboard a fully functionnal interplanetary spacecraft. Now 35 years have passed and all we have done is build a piece of junk space station that uses essentially the same technology that NASA had in 1969. Even the astronaut's suits from 1969 are basically the same than what they have today. Why did progress stop?
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
- The effects of debris strikes are never formally investigated with real world experimentation and become "acceptable" over time.
- The top managers don't understand that foam in a Mach 5 slipstream deccelearates VERY FAST and that a 1 pound peice of anything is deadly at 500mph.
- Engineers who present analysis don't put their assumptions and uncertainties first and foremost
- No fault tree exists which have the RCC panels with huge red flashing lights around them.
Apologize all you want for the mealy-mouthed, platitude spewing, engineering ignorant incompetents at NASA, I will not.There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
NASA is very good at what it was intended to do. Unfortunately, that's not running a space launch business.
NASA was originally the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, with the purpose of "..to supervise and direct the scientific study of the problems of flight, with a view of their practical solution." (official history).
The main difference between the Moon program and the Shuttle program is that getting to the Moon was a development project - the creation of new technology - while the Shuttle program is basically running a business - doing the same thing over and over again. About 1/3 or NASA's budget goes to the shuttle, with little benefit.
Calls for NASA to "just do it" ignore the importance of the research and development. As an example, getting to Mars may cost only a fraction of what it would cost today, in about ten years time, as many of the propulsion technolgies reach maturity and can be developed into practical systems. But if those programs are abandoned to go to Mars now, then in ten years the cost will be little different. In other words, if NASA is allowed to do its job, the world may have the opportunity to get to Mars affordably, but if it's done now without adequate technology, only a few humans will ever set foot on the planet for a very long time (much like what happened with the Moon).
A comparison might be communicating across the U.S in the 19th century. One way to communicate quickly would be the Pony Express. Within a few years, the telegraph had been developed - technology produced a much more affordable solution. NASA is in a position of being the only ones developing certain types of technology, which means that directing resources away from that research will postpone its development, which would cripple space flight for the world.
You could argue that the rest of the world should spend more effort on this research themselves. It should. But since it doesn't, we're stuck with deciding how NASA can contribute most to humanity.
There are things we can do with manned space projects that would mean a hell of a lot more to the taxpayers than a small handful of people bringing back a few pounds of Mars rocks and a ton of observations that'll be of use to generations of science grad students, and we need to get on with them.
Whether you believe the peak oil projections that say:
- already happened
- 2010
- 2030
it's plain that we're looking at the end of cheap oil and the beginning of the fossil-fuel energy end game. This means that we already need to be at work on reducing our own energy demand and replacing fossil fuel with something else. Renewable is cool, but it probably won't cover all the demand and will probably be too expensive for the Third World.We're better off starting with the quick-fix measures for energy conservation now and starting work on a the demo Space Power Satellite (SPS) satellite project already designed by NASA while development is done on an SPS network, a cheap orbital skyhook for at least freight, (elevator or railgun), a moon mining and processing facility.
The timeframes and the cost to do the above are about the same as Bush is calling for in order to send a handful of people to the moon and Mars, with these resources in place, a trip to Mars and to the asteroids to scout locations for the next phase of expanding our industrial base into the Solar System as a whole will be far less expensive, a lot safer, a lot faster, and will probably be done by the private sector. Looking for profit, not just scientific research.
If you want to read about alternatives to current technology policies of the Bush Adminstration and of all the Democratic candidates, check this page out. The information links that would ordinarily substantiate my post here are on that page and mostly work. If you don't like what I've got in mind, come up with something better and start working on turning it into public policy.
The best way to celebrate the lives of the astronauts who died in space is the way we celebrated the pioneers who died in the American West. By turning the lonely, isolated places where they died into places for human industry and human habitation.
We've mourned our astronauts for long enough. It's time to get on with the real goals they were working for.
Tech Public Policy stuff
OK, could we get this straight? The tiles on the shuttles aren't styrofoam. They're a foam-like ceramic material. And we already have something better, but it was neither sexy nor sufficiently expensive for NASA. It wasn't developed with NASA funding, but rather got its funding from the Space Defense Initiative. It was called the "DC-X", and you can read all about it at: http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/dcx.htm This test/demo vehicle could take off under rocket power from a very modest pad, translate itself horizontally a few hundred metres, and then land on another pad. So, it demonstrated the hardest task that a single-stage-to-orbit would need to perform. A full-scale vehicle of this type would need no aerodynamic surfaces at all, because it would use its restartable rocket engine to both achieve orbit and to reenter under power. This concept was Boeing/McDonnel-Douglas' entry in the competition for a demo of a successor to the shuttles. It lost out to Lockheed-Martin's entry, apparently because Bill Clinton needed to carry GA in the '96 election. (Lest you think that I'm some foaming-at-the-mouth Republican, please note that I'm a registered Democrat....) I'm not a "rocket scientist", just a garden-variety engineer/astronomer who worked for NASA and the Navy for a lotta years. It wouldn't surprise me if we could get a full-scale version of the DC-X operational as early as 2008-2009. It's just that simple. All the really hard work is done....