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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."
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
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.
They didn't. If the ET insulation had impacted the tiles, there would have been only minor damage (a weeks worth of repair time before the next flight was estimated).
The insulation didn't hit the tiles, it hit the RCC panels at the front of the wing. These are entirely different. They are big, tough, heavy elements which turn out to be unexpectedly brittle.
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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.
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 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.
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!
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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