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.

Comments

I am split

[A Bugg]

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

No-fault errors.

[FTL]

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board found lots and lots of errors in the way the shuttle flight was handled. That's only natural when you spend months and millions of dollars examining an event in microscopic detail. Some of those errors were trivial, others were serious. But one in particular frightens me.

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?

Re:No-fault errors.

[costas]

As a former Army Aviation maintainance bureaucrat, I can safely say that in your example above the fault lies with the engineer(s) that submitted the second request: if you are authorized for such a request and are denied you can still appeal through proper bureaucratic channels up the chain of command.

If that fails, then clearly the error lies with the person that made the second or N+1 request: the Air Force is not in the business of losing spacecraft or astronauts: if the importance of getting those pictures was clearly shown, there is no way that any reasonable officer would have denied it.

Bottom line: bureaucracies don't fail, people do (because they can always work the system). There is no such thing as a no-fault error in engineering.

disasters

[dkode]

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.

An article that talks about problems with NASA

[Nova Express]

This article in The Scotsman takes an in-depth look at the Columbia disaster and presents a number of disturbing facts:

• 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.

Thank god shuttle has an EOL date

[drinkypoo]

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.

Seems like yesterday

[fafaforza]

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?

I remember

[Cat_Byte]

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.

Read the CAIB report

[Slashamatic]

If you ever are involved in QA or project management in *any* engineering discipline, even developing and maintaining computer systems, you really should read the report.

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.

From a year ago

[El Volio]

One year ago tomorrow, I posted in my weblog:

I hope to God that we don't go through another day like this. We will, though, and just like we did 17 years ago -- and 19 years before that -- we'll come out on the other side, a little saddened, but ready to take the next step and move ahead, never forgetting the memory of those who have preceded us in time but do not join us on the road ahead.

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.

Re:Hamming it up

[enkidu]

This quote from The Atlantic article says it all.

One of the caib investigators told me that he asked Linda Ham, "As a manager, how do you seek out dissenting opinions?"

According to him, she answered, "Well, when I hear about them ..."

He interrupted. "Linda, by their very nature you may not hear about them."

"Well, when somebody comes forward and tells me about them."

"But Linda, what techniques do you use to get them?"

He told me she had no answer.

Forget Mars, we have better things to do in space!

[alizard]

Now that I have your attention. . .

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.