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?

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.

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.