NASA Finds Critical Assembly Fault in Shuttle

mzs writes "During corrosion inspection on Discovery, technicians noticed that one of the gears in a rudder actuator had been installed backwards. This particular actuator was the top-most of four that control the air brakes on the tail. As luck turns out, if it had been the bottom-most actuator, loss of the shuttle and crew would have been nearly inevitable. Plans are in place to have four spares by the time Shuttle missions resume next year."

Comments

Re:Instead of slamming NASA

[molo]

It'd be nice to give some credit for the people that have put in layer upon layer upon layer of safeguards to check for exactly this sort of thing and the dilligent people that find this stuff. And caught it.

Maybe you missed the details, but this has been in place on the Discovery for over 20 years.

-molo

Re:Geez...

[Unknown Kadath]

Like all high-tech endeavors, "rocket science" is a blend of many different fields. I happen to think that electrical engineering is far more difficult than aerospace engineering ever could be, but I have helped EE friends with their required mechanical engineering classes, and they got stuck on things I thought were simple and obvious. I'm sure they felt the same way when the time came to help me with my EE requirement. Ditto me and my CS friends. A lot of it is a matter of training and experience.

I'm qualified to work on things like airframes and engines, and I can calculate a pretty mean orbit, if I do say so myself. But I'm lost when it comes to things like avionics or heat shield design. So "rocket science" is indeed complex and tricky, and a successful rocket design will require experts from many fields. But things like compressible flow, which seems to be what Carmack's talking about, aren't really outside the grasp of a dedicated student at all. And of course, all of this sounds like black magic to the nontechnical layman.

Of course, we don't go around telling people this, or we wouldn't be able to look down our noses at everyone else. "I design jet engines, and I've done some work on the Mars program. Oh, you write computer games? Aw, that's cute." ;)

-Carolyn