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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."
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/
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.
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.'"
Online at Space.Com
The Online Columbia Loss Faq, compiled through March 2003 much of which might be outdated, but good for lots of small details, and a sense of the history as it happened.
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board Website, due to become inactive on February 1st, 2004 (!)
People might want to download the final report while they can, dated October 2003, although It is also available on the Nasa Website here
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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?
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
http://www.busyweather.com/
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?
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.
sPh
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.
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.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
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
A friend of mine worked for a company that is a major subcontractor for NASA. Before he was laid off he had worked on the landers that just hit Mars.
One of his biggest complaints was that for every hour of actual engineering and fabrication he did, there was about TWO hours of procedure documentation he was forced to write before anythig he built was used. Yes, this makes sense for major components, but he had to document EVERYTHING he did, including the most minor one-shot test rig.
Just suporting the point.
s'wut i sed.
They were going 18 times the speed of light...
h t.jpg
http://www.gongoozler.com/images/cnn-speed-of-lig
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
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
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.
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"?
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?
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.
New Voyages has fan-created Star Trek episodes with all donations going to The Space Shuttle Children's Trust Fund
Please tell me you're not really that stupid.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
- 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
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 like the reference to Pournelle, he's a great guy. Used to buy Byte just for his column but after Byte went paid-only on the web I lost interest.
Have you seen this parody? Excerpt:
"When we finally got home from the monthly Rambling Writers Conference (this time in Djemaa-el-Fna), we found Fractal Manor's main hall shoulder deep in brand-new state-of-the-art totally free computer hardware and software for me to check out. Drat. I'll never get around to most of it, of course, and probably will end up dumpstering 90% or more. What I really need to properly handle all of the wonderful things companies send me absolutely free to review and enjoy with no obligation whatsoever on my part, is a trash compactor.
I thought I'd start by reconfiguring my main computer, the Hyena 986SXDXMCMXCIV. Right now the sectors on the hard disk run clockwise, but I heard a rumor that you can squeeze 0.2% more throughput by running them counterclockwise. It's worth the effort. Recommended.
I slid the shrink-wrap off version 7.126 of DiskMember Gold (I know, you thought I'd never upgrade from version 4.79, especially after all my bad-mouthing of versions 5.33 and 6.02, but what can I say? Only a Corinthian drinks kevis in a Veronese cantola.) and fired it up. No joy. I reread the documentation to no avail, then scanned the whole manual in, OCRed it, spell- checked the file and uploaded it to BIX with a question mark appended."
More at the link above.
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.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
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
It flabbergasts me when people insist that ISS is a failure because it hasn't accomplished anything when it isn't even finished being built!
If we were to compare ISS to Skylab, I'd say we were about 10 days into the Skylab II mission, and they hadn't accomplished much by then, too busy making repairs. But even on the original timeline, they'd have spent almost three weeks setting up and bringing the station online.
I apologize for the delay. The URL is http://www.initialized.org/etc/slashdot/. Cheers. :)
Do you like German cars?
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....
And many others have heard that also, so many in fact that it qualifies as an urband legend.
It's not true however. They're still there. The problem is that you couldn't get the parts (sixties vintage) today, and the launch pads have been rebuilt. We've also learnt a thing or two since the sixties. Once you've resourced the parts and rebuilt the launch pads you might as well have started from scratch and gotten a better vehicle for it.
Stefan Axelsson