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Foam Gluing Flaw Killed Columbia Astronauts
Freshly Exhumed writes "Now it can be told: NASA's Columbia Accident Investigation Board has blamed the faulty application of insulating foam for the loss of the Columbia orbiter. From the chief engineer for the external tanks project: '...NASA concluded after extensive testing that the process of applying some sections of foam by hand with spray guns was at fault.' And further: 'It was not the fault of the guys on the floor; they were just doing the process we gave them'."
Sixty percent of the time? I don't pretend to be an expert, but that number seems a bit high, especially when this can cause such damage. Can anyone shed some more light on the situation here?
Karma: Oldschool
Actually, I took that as the guys who designed the process actually taking responsibility, rather than shifting it to the poor techs who were doing the gluing. I agree that PC sucks, but this didn't look like an example of it.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Let's remember the heroes who died that day. I think it's very sad something like a little glue can cost lives in the blink of an eye. What a horrible mistake. There is an interesting article on the safety upgrades for the spring 2005 launch.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Given that the glue has failed 3 out of 5 times, earlier Space Shuttle crews are lucky to be alive.
No... if I give you instructions on how to build a house and you build it EXACTLY to my specifications, following my instructions perfectly, who's to blame if it sucks? Me or you? Me. They're saying that it's not the fault of the guys who work on the floor, as they were just doing what they were told to do. Unfortunately, the method that they were told to use has now been discovered to be faulty.
I'm of so many minds about this. Yes, we needed to know in order to fix this process. I'm glad no one tried to pass the buck. I'm disappointed that it took so long to figure this out.
I hope that we can use this as evidence the next time someone says, "Oh please, somebody thinkg of the children.. ehrm.. astronauts!" We know know what caused the problem, and we can avoid it in the future.
On the other hand, I'm already looking forward to the privatization os space, because I think the days of NASA are declining. For as great an agency as it is, it's got a terrible public opinionation...
How about.....no.
It's like saying the guy knocking nails into the wood is at fault when they give him a badly designed nail. The DESIGN people are taking the blame. The guys on the floor don't do design.
They will just launch another investigation into how this procedure was come up with to glue these tiles on.
They will find out that some budgetary advisory panel recommended these procedures against the wishes of some NASA engineer in order to save a buck.
Eventually this will fall out of the public eye (as most things usually do). In the end, no action will be taken against the people responsible for this horrible tradgedy. In fact, the same contractor will probably be hired again to advise them for the next-gen shuttles or whatever they come up with.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat is not the standard I want when the lives of some of the best and brightest people this world has to offer is hanging in the balance.
[/rant]
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
Uhm, just like the workers who applied asbestos are to blame for all the lungcancer it caused? Uh?
It was just their job, and nobody knew it was bad.
Ummmmmmmm, if you are building a bridge according to plans for some very innovative design, and the engineers certify that if you follow their plans exactly the bridge will work correctly and then the bridge fails because of an "unknown" in the behavior of the concrete, whose falt would it be that the bridge failed? You certainly can't rail against the guys "on the floor" and sometimes, no matter how much we think we know, there are things that slip through our comprehension until catastrophic failure occurs. This is why most bridges are built according to accepted norms with changes to design occuring incementally. They couldn't do this when they were designing the shuttles, the very specifications called for a radical new approach. This isn't anyones fault, it's just the price we as a species must pay if we are going to continue to push out the envelope.
that's we have the:
from the didn't-use-krazy-glue dept
You must be new here (sans Low UID)
Clearly you're not an engineer or you'd know better. You want to blame the guys doing manual labor who probably have an associate degree from ITT Tech rather than the guy who designed the process? Hint: Party A has no idea why the process does or does not work, party B is the one that should know better.
It's amazing how something like the method of gluing on insulation tiles can cause a shuttle to blow up, yet for all the serious damage done to Apollo 13 they still managed to get back alive.
If you have to ask, you'll never know.
And those shuttle crews always knew that. The shuttle couldn't somehow 'magicly' be safer to launch and use than unmanned spacecrafts.
Ok, so it was originally "my kingdom for a horse" ..
The devil is in the details
(insert another cliche here)
But the moral of the story is be it a ";" or a bit of glue , everything matters (or doesn't in a cosmic sense)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
The core problem with NASA is that it does not have a viable competitor. The European space agency is not one since it is so backward. The Europeans, only now, have a plan to launch a space shuttle.
Japan is, also, not a competitor. It shelved its shuttle program a few years ago because misguided politicians preferred putting the money into useless public-works projects.
Without competiton, NASA has degenerated into a business producing shoddy products. They are reminiscent of the shoddy products produced by Ford, GM, and Chrysler in the early 1970s, just at the start of the export drive by Toyota, Honda, and Nissan into the USA. 20 years of competiton from Japan in the automotive market nearly destroyed Ford and GM but transformed GM into a superb automotive manufacturer. GM cars now consistently beat Nissan in the quality category.
NASA needs the same dose of competition in order to improve the quality of American spacecraft. Perhaps, Japan can come to the rescue. We should encourage Japan to shift its public spending away from building highways and into building spacecraft. Doing so would be a win-win situation for both the USA and Japan.
This is an obvious troll. If it isn't a troll...
If you can't bring yourself to read the article, at least try to comprehend the article summary before making blanket accusations. That last sentence you tacked on the end of your post references 'functional thinking'. I suggest you try it sometime.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
The more things change, the more they remain the same.... (see here)
Murderers? schoolyard bullys? I hate PC too, but I don't see how your example applies here.
If you have a job at NASA, I would guess that the procedurs put in place to perform a task such as gluing foam to the shuttle are followed exactly how you were trained to do it.
I think the engineer(s) that developed the process of sticking foam to the shuttle should be looked at before those that do what they were instructed to do by the engineers..
Perhaps budget constraints didn't allow them to thoroughly test their design is to blame.
I think it is a horrible accident, a very hard lesson learned. This is rocket science, it is not easy and accidents do happen. The most important thing to get out of these accidents is, did we learn our lesson? And have all measures been taken to prevent it from ever happening again?
This is not to say that investigations looking for negligence are unwarrented. If true negligence is discovered then I will give the murderer analogy you posted a lot more consideration.
And women are made of sand
Yes they were. I remember a Russian Scientist noted this but a NASA official was simply saying..."...no confirmation nor denial...". This is the usual western [political] rant. It was clear from the photos that it had to do with the insulation. The arcitecture of the shuttle is very well known.
Everyone knows the astronauts were killed by the U.S. Government to hide the fact the mission was to start an interstellar war with aliens.
can't you take a joke slashdot? I had to laugh at the above statement.
It is a terrible tragedy, yes. They're not heroes. Enough of calling anyone who dies in a well publicized disaster a hero.
"It was not the fault of the guys on the floor; they were just doing the process we gave them," Otte said. "I agree with the (accident investigation board) that we did not have a real understanding of the process. Our process for putting foam on was giving us a product different than what we certified."
Kudos to Neil Otte for coming up like this.
To understand this, the Russians only have to prepare to sell some of their [space] tech to the Chinese, then Americans will come out screaming.
They also produce some of the deadliest weapons on earth, and all in simple production houses...and ohh...they also have the heaviest and biggest flying aircraft in the world. Please google for the Antonov-225.
Russians just need more organization.
You will never see competition in the space shuttle market, because space shuttles have turned out to be a fundementally bad idea. In a competitive enviornment, the US Space Shuttle would have been cancelled as soon as it was clear that it was never going to result in cheaper launches.
As everyone except the space geeks realizes, Manned Space Programs are not done for economic reasons but instead only for national pride/propaganda reasons. When the Space Shuttle blows up, it fails it. So now we have (1) Not cost competitive, and (2) Useless for Propaganda. What exactly is the rationale for the Space Shuttle?
Looks like the only "useless public works project" here is the Space Shuttle. The money should have been put into a useful public work like a freeway or a university or something.
Yes, please follow the process as we've given it to you. You think you may have found a Problem?
Shut up and just be happy you have a job, that kind of thinking is bad for the collective.
or
Please don't forget to attach the TPS cover sheet when you submit your TPS report on this matter.
*rotten and corrupt it certainly is, but (I think) it's still better than the rest -- we'll see in November if we can change course or remain headed for the pit.
Nor are there any tiles, as more than two fool implies.
The foam is sprayed on, and it adheres directly to the External Tank's aluminum substrate (and itself, of course). Some metallic sections of the tank are coated with epoxy before being sprayed. But the process is slightly different on the bipod structure:
The insulated region where the bipod struts attach to the External Tank is structurally, geometrically, and materially complex. Because of concerns that foam applied over the fittings would not provide enough protection from the high heating of exposed surfaces during ascent, the bipod fittings are coated with ablators. BX-250 foam is sprayed by hand over the fittings (and ablator materials), allowed to dry, and manually shaved into a ramp shape. The foam is visually inspected at the Michoud Assembly Facility and also at the Kennedy Space Center, but no other non-destructive evaluation is performed.
-- excerpt from CAIB report vol. 1, p. 51
You can get all the CAIB reports here.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
The thing that doomed the shuttle was not the glue process. It was the way the organisation reacted to the clue that something was wrong. There were many people pushing for a pro-active inpsection of the shuttle, either by camera or EVA and the "suits" obstructed it.
Let's suppose it wasn't a chunk of foam that hit the wing but some unlucky bird. Nothing would have changed - the film would show "something" hitting the wing and all the decisions form that point would be made the same way. Would we then be having an inquiry that decided the bird scaring process was flawed?
The issue is that something unexpected happened and the process for dealing with that went wrong. That needs fixing, not the glue..
YMMV
First off, Clinton cut NASA's budget to the bone - and they were better for it - Sojourner, anyone?
Second off, Bush cut Clinton's budget even further, and they didn't have enough money to stay operational.
Third off, Bush's budget was designed to make the shuttle fail. Do you think there is any profit in the ISS? How about the shuttle? Or any *existing* programs? Of course not! The only way to line the pockets of big aerospace is big new initiatives, so they can burn billions in R&D, that never have to be accounted for.
By grounding the shuttle, and then promoting his stupid plan to go to Mars, via Cleveland, New Mexico, the Moon, and a quick stop on the sun, Bush has given a green light for the big spending spree that big aerospace used to have under the cold war stewardship of Reagan.
When you are spending money to develop something, you don't have deliver shit. All you have to do is make phoney videos and simulations, showing how large the CEO's boat is and shit.
When you spend money to keep an existing system working, like the shuttle, every penny is accountable. You have to produce either a success or a huge failure, not some hokey mockup in a cleanroom somewhere that wouldn't survive a minute in the real world.
Mark my words: in 150 years, when Bush's records are finally unsealed, although we'll be dead, the people who read how gullible we were to believe all this horseshit from that walking disaster area, propped up by a pasty-faced scumsucking bottom feeder, and how they are glad that such willfully ignorant people are dead, and that science can progress.
Remember kiddies! Global warming is junk science, but "the jury's still out on creationism vs. evolution", so says that piece of shit who stole the election, acted like a deer in headlights when the country was under attack, had ties with the people responsible, appointed unelectables like Cheney, Ashcroft and Ridge to serious positions for them to screw up, presided over a GOP breakin of democrat's computer networks, crashed the shuttle and the economy, demolished the evidence against Worldcom and Enron in WTC6, leaked the names of undercover intelligence officers working against terrorism, launched an unprovoked war, joked about the phoney reasons for it (yeah, its real funny), called 12 million worldwide protesters "irrelevant" cut social programs, lost 8 million jobs, said that outsourcing is good, increased the arsenic in the water supply, proposed mandatory ritallin therapy for children, reduced the education system to a series of meaningless standardized tests, ruined our nation's credibility around the world, from food safety, to the Kyoto Protocol, to the World Court, the Geneva Convention, the Nuremburg judgements, etc, etc. This guy is hard to impeach because we can't figure out which impeachable offense to go after him for!
The notion of the, "reusable space plane," is simply stupid. If the astronauts ran NASA, we would have vehicles, like Saturn V, that lifted mass into space and capsules that bring down only what we need. The shuttle is a boondoggle to throw money to the aerospace industry. The Progress M-50 craft is vastly superior to our shuttle when it comes to lifting weight to orbit. We lost a shuttle because Senator Orrin Hatch (Bush-loving republican, natch) overrode the engineer to throw work to Thiokol. The original design called for one piece boosters which would be transported by barge. Orrin made them cut the booster in half so Thiokol could bid. (There aren't many barge routes in Utah.) The two haves were joined by -- o-rings. In the United States, there is only one agency with the tradition, tradition and ability to explore. Let's turn the space program over to the Navy and go back to the moon.
Just some ideas - genetic algorythm for the design of fuel tank or whole shuttle. - New better process for applying insulation to surface. - multiple layers to insulation. - different type of protection altogether than tiles on surface of shuttle (100's layers of cooked on diferent ceramics?) - Space elevator? - Big dumb booster? - Spectra fiber rope lift? - NASA actually listening to experts? - robotic missions? and on and on... I suppose it will all come in time.
"Persistance is Fertile" - Me. I can quote myself if I want to.
What are you; an American?
It's "should've". Should've!!!
My goodness, if you accidentally hit the wrong keys, then I can understand it. But common bloody sense alone should make you understand why "should of" is wrong, wrong, wrong!
This is from the infamous Saven Marek, the boy genius who insists that his middle school science textbook is right and everyone else is wrong and then stomps off and refuses to listen when they try to explain to him that the same side of the moon does not always face the sun. "Foe" him now, dudes; he's either an irredeemable idiot or a troll.
IMHO, the main advantage that Apollo 13 had was that the people on the ground and in the craft were trying to save it almost from the moment the damage occurred. This in spite of the fact that it seemed completely impossible to save the craft almost up to re-entry. They didn't accept a "can't do" answer and kept trying.
Contrast with the "no problem" approach to Columbia, followed by a big surprise on re-entry.
Its great to find the point source of the failure, but after reading the report of the committe, it was clear that the real cause of the failure was systemic, going back many, many years.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
If you REALLY want a space program you need to scrap 90% of the NASA bueracracy and get automotive level engineering involved. Auto engineering surpassed the aerospace industry in reliability, tolerances, and productivity a long time ago [and that's just the americans!] we need space parts cheap and reliable so we can toss 1-out-of-4 because they're not PERFECT...and not bother to reuse them...perhaps even design launch/payload vehicles to be reused as station components... for any space program to really work well we need to build parts by the HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS, not the one-off engineering samples we fly now.
The Shuttle was a great project for our national identity. As the biggest, baddest country around we should be doing stuff like this...that shows how cool we can be...rather than beating up third-world countries to show how big our prez's balls are. We may have won the Cold War, but we sold our souls to the capialists/corpratists just as bad as the russians sold out to the commies... If the corperate masters can't find the money to do truely GREAT things we're much worse off for it. There's been nothing GREAT done in america in the 20 years since we "won" the cold war. The last great Skyscraper was built 30 years ago [and wiped out in 01...we're arguing about how tall it should be!] the last great public works were longer ago than that..and the last great space work was 30 years ago [yes the shuttle is THAT old!] The generation Who's parents won WW2 and the cold war have done NOTHING great but count their silly stocks and interest rates...the current adminstration is the most glaring example of that... They're selling our soul while riding the coattails of greatness..
And then, eventually a tile falls off and hits somebody on the head and kills them.
Who's to blame? The architect that told you that it was a prototype design? Or the house owner that keeps sweeping the problem under the carpet and not investigating?
Or the house builder who keeps using the same design that is known to be flawed for more than 30 years?
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to belittle the Russian space effort, they are without a doubt the leaders in the areas of heavy lift and long duration manned space flight - but predicting a crash and abandoning a space vehicle as too expensive are not the best examples of Russian space dominance.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
The Dutch guy who just went up with the Russians once said in an interview: Like the USA, at ESA we are very thorough on our equipment and we cherrish it. If it is not necessary, you are not even allowed to point at a rocket, let alone touch it. When I went to Russia for my first Russian training, I saw engineers hammering away at their rockets and boosters. They were sitting on the stuff working on it with wrenches and other heavy tools... it was not like anything I every experienced with ESA or NASA at all. It scared the shit out of me.
/. way: with a hammer and duck tape.... who knows? Fact is that they have been up there longer than anyone.
Maybe the Russians just do 'Space' the old fashioned
Is it not the case that they changed the formulation of the foam in an attempt to be "environmentally friendly"?
And that the foam did not have these problems when they used the original, non-green formula?
Political correctness is going to kill this country. It already killed those astronauts.
The Russians still have the best technology in space.
...their [space] tech to the Chinese, then Americans will come out screaming
That is a broad statement, Russian and U.S. spacecraft where designed for different purposes. Each type of spacecraft has it's own advantages/disadvantages. For example, the shuttle can release, dock, and bring back satellites in it's docking bay. Also, what about GPS, US Satellite imaging, Mars rovers, etc?
Can't disagree with you there. We are not on the greatest terms with China, but the US governent would probably complain about any country selling significant technology to China.
heaviest and biggest flying aircraft in the world. Please google for the Antonov-225
The U.S. has found that using several smaller cargo aircraft such as the C-130 Herc is typically more efficient for military use. The Herc uses a smaller runway, requires less maintenance, and is a smaller target for those nasty SAMs. In this case, bigger does not mean better. Don't get me wrong, a big aircraft is cool, but how practical is it?
But these people actually were heroes, like all early explorers who venture out into the great and deadly unknown (be it land, ocean, or space, depending on era and context) in the interest of making a better life for their fellow beings. Every astronaut takes his/her life into her hands as a matter of course just to better lives for everyone else, just like firefighters or police officers. Not just that, but astronauts do something fantastic and inspiring and educational that kids can really look up to without their parents being particularly down on it.
The people who are decidedly not heroes include:
- Sports figures
- Politicians
- The 3k or so people who died on September 11th
I'm also not set on calling the military "heroes" simply because their job danger comes from the fact that they are actively engaged to kill others, i.e. they're in the business of kill-or-get-killed and they know it; they're not out there trying to do something peaceful to better humanity, they're just violent mercenaries for whatever state they happen to have been born into.
But your point is well-taken: a lot of people call just about any corpose a "hero" anymore, and it's a bit silly.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The individuals on board Flight 93 who counter-attacked to try and regain control of the plane are heros. They knew they were going to die regardless, yet they had the self control and motivation to act.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
The guys on the floor probably would have been reprimanded for modifying the procedure that the engineers worked out even if their way worked better. Imagine the consequences to them if it was found that they modified the procedure and it killed someone. With something that complex, you really can't be certain what's going to happen. There's a lot of heat at takeoff, a virtual vacuum in space, and then a lot of heat again. I imagine that the engineers worked out the procedure they used after extensive testing, and their method certainly wasn't scientifically tested at all.
That's the way most places work, especially when it gets as bureaucratic as NASA. I've worked at places under explicit orders not to comment code or to leave serious bugs that I find in the program, even when the problem is so obvious that it could be fixed in one line.
~Ben
No, as I see it, the core problem is that today manned spaceflight is so difficult, so close to the limit of what is possible with chemical rockets, that every safety margin has to be shaved down to the bone for it to be even possible. There are a million things that can go wrong, because every part is designed as close to the limit of the materials as it can be. If we put in a safety margin that would be considered normal in most earthly applications, we could never get to orbit. IAAME (I am a mechanical engineer) and it would drive me crazy if I had to shave everything so close just to make the thing work marginally.
You and I are exposed to the incompetence of MBAs and bean-counters in our day-to-day lives as well.
I have a very good personal friend who has been a civil engineer for a very long time, designing large-scale structures (think high-rises, bridges). Not only does he have to fight like a bastard at times to even get safety features past the budget people and on to the blueprints, but you would be shocked to hear him tell the sheer number of times in his career that he's gone to a building site and found that some manager somewhere in the chain with budget concerns and no formal engineering training has completely revamped the designs after the engineer had signed and submitted them, removing safeguards, scaling down beams and bolts to thinner or cheaper or lower-grade parts, reducing the number of welds or loosening the tolerances on grinds and matings by large factors... just "throwing in numbers that make things cheaper" as my friend is fond of saying.
They do this because the dollar rules; as managers, they are determined to come in under bid and early, so that the next time the firm bids for a job, they're more likely to get it based on good publicity and a track record of doing things on the cheap that are "just as good."
Only in most areas in the U.S., a large percentage of the structures we work and live in on a day-to-day basis are basically unsafe.
The political and budget concerns at NASA are probably 10x what the mid-level managers at engineering firm X or Y are dealing with; I wouldn't be surprised to find the engineers 10x more ignored.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I wouldn't trust my life with Russian Technology. I'm not very familiar with their space program, but I know that their weapons systems are plagued with problems, and design flaws that essentially discount the lives of their operators. Their nuclear powered submarines are especially prone to this, as their crews were regularly swapped out on deployment due to the deterministic effects of chronic radiation exposure over the course of their deployment, i.e. they got radiation sickness and died. Their, tanks, their planes, their warships all suffered from a similar philosophy and were generally a few generations back technologically from US equipment. Certainly the Russians made some effective equipment, and there was definitely a lot of it, but most of it was designed with the more is better philosophy rather than technological know how.
> If it is not necessary, you are not even allowed to point at a rocket, let alone touch it. When I went to Russia for my first Russian training, I saw engineers hammering away at their rockets and boosters.
You are actually pointing out at the very core of what makes the Russian space project better than the Western (Yes, NASA as well as ESA): Russian equipment is made with and also using, the lowest technology that gets the job done. Thus it is so simple that it can hardly fail, and if there is a problem you can fix it yourself with a hammer and a spanner.
In the West there has been a plague of techno fetishism that adds more and more tech for very little gain. Tried fixing a modern car yourself? See what I mean?
> They're heroes because, like all astronauts, they put their lives on the line for the betterment of mankind.
No. They did their duty. A hero, on the other hand, is someone who rises to the occation, steps forward at the time of crisis and serves above and beyond the call of duty.
Please do not dilute the concept of heroism.
The radiation stuff you are talking about happened to only 3 or 4 subs. The tanks are great, simple to repair, hard shield -> low penetration-> more safety. Planes don't know.
Heh. I've had to complete that same argument, and got the same response. Over six years ago, and it's still memorable.
Err, the Chinese "Shenzou" spacecraft which launched the first "takionauts" was essentially a Russian Soyuz.
Perhaps the fact that it's 1960's technology makes it less jarring, but there are serious thoughts to using an upgraded Soyuz for the International Space Station since the shuttles are going to be problemmatic for quite some time.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Knowing you are going to die anyway gives you a certain level of freedom. If your life is forfeit, what have you got to lose? Not to discount the actions of these brave individuals, but I don't think that knowing you're going to die anyway is much of an inhibitor to such an action.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Please mod parent back up. It's true, and it's relevant to anyone thinking of replying to his latest bullshit.
MIR operated for three times as long as intended. How is this not impressive?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Birds generally stick around pretty close to the ground. The overwhelming vast majority never venture more than 3000' AGL. The highest flying birds in North America are generally the migratory geese at around 10K feet, which is very impressive considering how lower the oxygen is up there and how much muscle power and metabolism the geese must burn to keep flying that high for long distances, and they're always flying in formation, the tremendous noise of the shuttle's engines will undoubtedly encourage them to fly away from the ship as fast as they can, and they'll have ample warning to make course corrections. The shuttle simply isn't yet going fast enough for a bird strike to do much damage at those very low altitudes where most birds are found near the ground, plus the sound at launch has got to be a huge deterrent to any birds in the immediate airspace above the launch site, the tremendous SPL has got to be extremely bad for their health and even their ability to fly too.
The Antonov-225 was designed back in the Soviet era, and like many of the USSR's military concepts was expected to be useful in non-conventional warfare or "police action" programs. It took Afghanistan to teach the USSR that there would likely be anti-aircraft assets in the hands of local rebels and resistance movements.
One of their assumptions was that there would be need for a military controlled asset in areas without anti-aircraft weapons deployed. The US typically relies more on civilian assets for such functions as disaster relief. We would also normally pay (in both time and money) to pre-position really large industrial equipment by ship instead of plane. The USSR wanted to be able to fly in enough gear to resume oil production and refining on very, very short notice, for just one example. The time involved was much shorter than would be needed to restore an oil based economy post war, and more a matter of having fuel for Soviet armored divisions still in full active combat mode. It is left as an exercise to the reader to decide just where the USSR hoped to use this capability.
Who is John Cabal?
They will just launch another investigation into how this procedure was come up with to glue these tiles on.
Somehow I find it hard to accept any "insights" from someone who can't tell the difference between the gluing of heat-resistant tiles to the orbiter and the application of cryogenic foam insulation to the external tank.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
What I want is the name of the executive who quashed the suggestion voiced by a NASA engineer who'd watched the launch and seen the foam debris bashing the leading edges that the attitude of the shuttle be adjusted to allow ground telescope imaging of impacted leading edges.
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
...with the people who made the decision that they didn't need to inspect the orbiter using satellites before having it return. If the extent of the damage had been properly evaluated, perhaps we'd still have seven brave talanted people and one very expensive piece of equipment.
It's good to know what caused the problems with the insulation in the first place, but unless there are procedures in place that insure that the orbiter is properly inspected if there are problems during launch we'll see this happen again. The shuttles are incredibly complicated machines that are quickly reaching the end of their design life because of procrastination on designing replacements. We need to make sure that we take that into consideration when evaluating problems in the future.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
"It was not the fault of the guys on the floor; they were just doing the process we gave them"
translation:
"It was the fault of the guys on the floor, but in keeping with our fraternal 'code of silence' we don't want them to feel guilty about it or give any leads to the press through which specific blame could be given."
Practical enough that the US military has been renting it out... :)
http://antonov-an-225.wikiverse.org/
Interestingly and maybe ironically, the Mriya has recently (in 2003) been spotted at Shannon Airport, Ireland and in various US airports. It is assumed that US authorities and/or the US military hired the Mriya for transporting cargo to the Gulf in connection with the 2003 Iraq war and/or the occupation of Iraq.
...they didn't blame SOFTWARE!
Good post, AC. The Russians also accepted long ago that space is dangerous and people are going to die. Of course they prefer to minimize the number of deaths and the loss of expensive equipment, but they don't make an impossible level of safety the primary principle behind their space program. (Especially when it really doesn't end up being all that much safer.)
Which is why NASA is paralyzed for ridiculous lengths of time when anything goes wrong, and why private space programs are likely to make much faster progress. Private companies do all sorts of dangerous stuff all the time, people sometimes die, equipment is lost, and life goes on. It's as safe as it can afford to be given the mission at hand and the demands of competition, and that's usually Good Enough. If you're willing to spend the money from public coffers a millitary space program (as the Soviet-era space program essentially was) would also be pretty efficient.
Whoever modded parent a troll must surl(e)y be in NASA management.
Russian nuclear safety is laughingly bad, it always has been. I'm in the nuclear navy, and generally when we explain why we do our things the way that we do them, by comparing it to a russian design and point out their flaws. Look at chernobyl, in what way was that good design? The whole reason russian subs are faster than american subs are because they lack as much shielding in the reactor compartment. This is a known fact. Even the movie K19 highlights poor russian nuclear designs. Where are the equivalent US nuclear incidents, if Russian subs are so equivalent? I can't go into a detailed discussion of Russian tanks or planes, but I leave you with this. Many of our opponents in the last 20-25 years have used Soviet weaponry. If their equipment is so effective, why has the US basically decimated every standing army that stood against it during that time? The Iraqis had Russian tanks, it didn't seem that they did too well against American weaponry either time.
Yeah, I have tried fixing a modern car myself. No, I don't see what you mean.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I think that the Russians generally use lower tech equipment because they lack the money, know-how, and facilities to build state of the art equipment, rather than a simpler is better philosophy.
flamebait?
wow, you got screwed man. fucking mods need death.
a couple of roundups and executions and this bullshit moderation will come to a quick fucking halt.
i think then the guidelines about "mostly mod up", and it's "not whether you disagree/agree, but if it adds to the thread" will start to carry weight.
and not 11 yearold fucktards
Thats is exactly my point... there are no-doubt some amazing achievements of the Russian space program. Mir's longevity is one of them... its predicted impact accuracy is not.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
For all of you /.'ers out there there's an interesting new technology out there to detect these types of flaws. I'm a nuclear student at UF and some in our department are working on lateral migration radiography. It's a rather cool process, shoot x-rays into the foam and get an image of what's inside and find out where delimanation or debonding has occured. http://www.nre.ufl.edu/facilities/backscat.php
On one hand I got screwed, on the other hand karma is easy to come by and it only serves to vindicate all of my statements about moderation in my journal, not that such vindication is going to make any difference as to the way moderation is carried out.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
From this page:
"In November 1995, the partially completed (Russian) shuttles were dismantled at their production site. The manufacturing plant is scheduled to be converted for production of buses, syringes, and diapers."
Gotta love capitalism.
Don't mod parent post down!
It may have been an anonymous coward, but he is 100% right. Soyuz is in fact a 1960's design that has been improved in small steps. It is in fact relatively low tech compared to a shuttle, yet it works. Hell, a perfectly good example is how the capsule orientates for reentry: It is just heavier on the bottom side. Check it out yourselves: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_5. You don't get much low tech that that, and it's definitely makes the capsule safer.
GPG 0x1B479C78
Wow, what shitty math. Ok, first you quote 400 km/h: .
The 'Foam' couldn't possibly have been traveling at the 400 km/h when it struck the Columbia's wing, as claimed. Consider. .
Then you quote 400 km/second:
The Shuttle lifter, while enormously powerful, certainly doesn't accelerate at 400 km/second.
I think we can all argree the shuttle doesn't accelerate at 400 km/SECOND.
That, and your accelerations are listed as velocities. Of course, the fact that air resistance could have played a role in accelerating the foam into the shuttle probably never crossed your mind. Finally, the shuttle is not an aircraft. It is primarily a space craft. Space craft tend to be "fragile." The heat shield tiles tend to be "fragile" as well.
Try again, with more math.
That's right. All your base.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Or something like that. When given impossible requirements, and the freedom to actually try something, it's amazing what people can come up with.
NASA has a huge budget, and absolute safety is number one priority, over anything, by far. You'd think if your goal was to go to space, that would be your number one concern. That's how we put a man on the moon. But that is not the case anymore. NASA, and its employees, are paralyzed by fear of failure, when failure is totally expected. When you launch something for the first time, you're pretty confident that everything works and that it's safe, but if it blows up before it even gets off the launchpad you shouldn't be surprised. And for some reason, that's unacceptable anymore.
Lack of money:
I'm 100% with you.
Lack of facilities:
Maybe. After all they have a big money problem. They used to have some damn good facilities, they just have little money for maintenance.
Lack of know how:
Are you smoking crack?
It's the RUSSIANS we're talking about. They've had space stations in orbit since the seventies.
MIR itself was the best until ISS was orbited. And they sure had a lot of influence designing ISS.
Those guys run progress unmanned craft to ISS, as they have been doing for years. Have most endurance records and even the shuttle docking system was designed by russians(NASA bought it in the ninetees).
I
GPG 0x1B479C78
You took my statement out of context, I wasn't specifically referring to their space program's successes vs. their failures, but rather why Russian engineering has seldom relied on State of the Art technology in its implementation. You're looking at the result, whereas I'm looking at the process, and involved components. Perhaps the Russians have tons of gee-whiz techno-geekery all designed and ready to go but they just can't afford to build it, but I'm assuming it's more likely that they have fallen behind in computing, materials, and other bleeding edge-technological fields.
They realized long long ago that the space shuttle was way too expensive...but they had one of their own that flew and landed within feet of its intended target on the runway
Uhm, that *happened* to be a virtually exact copy of the US space shuttle, down to the scorching and melting on the tail which one would expect to see if you under-predicted the amount of heat that the tail would see.... or designed your space shuttle using data from the NASA data which was intentionally falsified because it was known that someone was selling it to the Russians.
However, that in-and-of itself doesn't discount your point. The Russian rocket scientists are easily the equal of the American versions in many ways, better in some and worse in some. I speak as an American 'rocket scientist' (not active, and my field is actually orbital mechanics), so I can argue that 1.) I certainly have little to gain by such statements and 2.) I'm fairly qualified to judge.
There is a 20 year old Russian rocket engine which has been purchased by American companies for use in the Atlas V. Personally I think that it is sad that *any* 20 year old technology is still 'top o' the pile' in the aerospace industry, considering the field has only been around for a few decades. Which is the underlying problem in Aerospace today; NOBODY is innovating. There are a few research projects here and there, but companies are still using oodles of 'original rocket scientists': guys who got their training 30 years ago! The average age of Aerospace engineer today is 54 years old. While a few of them are probably stodgy old men, I am not blaming age on lack of innovation. It is the companies themselves being too risk averse.
Anyway. The shuttle is a POS and needs to be replaced. It was f*ing incredible 20 years ago. Now it is the proverbial yugo. Let it die, dump an assload of money into a new vehicle. And if you say 'SSTO' I will personally hunt you down and bitch slap you for your ignorance of exponential functions.
that ABC has messed up the story. What is really getting into the voids is water vapor or nitrogen. Either that or the tank is so poorly constructed that dangerously flammable liquid hydrogen is leaking out, in which case it is a wonder that the shuttle hasn't exploded right on the launch pad.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
You are probably a troll, but I'll bite.
The problem was that air was trapped under bubbles in the foam. When the engines were fired the temperature suddenly went from liquid oxygen temperatures to several thousand degrees, causing the trapped air to expand and blow the pieces of foam off explosively.
Thats how the foam was travelling at supersonic speeds relative to the shuttle.
The damage might have been due to faulty foam glue. But if that flight had included the usual arm/camera, the crew could have inspected the damage from the impact on liftoff. The shock was noticed at the time, but the extent of damage was unknown. The low budget of that mission cut the camera from the gear, so they took their chances on reentry. If they had inspected the damage, they might have had a chance to do something different that could have saved their lives, and the shuttle program itself.
--
make install -not war
What happens to a very draggy chunk of low density foam in a supersonic stream of air? It will rapidly decelerate, right?
Imagine you impale a cheap styrofoam cooler on your car's hood ornament and head out on the highway. At 70 MPH, the cooler pops off the hood ornament. What happens? Does it keep coasting along with little relative velocity with respect to the car? No. It smashes into your windshield at close to 70 MPH. Whether the car is accelerating or not has almost no effect on the outcome. It's the rapid deceleration of the foam that causes the significant relative velocity when it strikes the car. Only the relative velocity is important. Sorry the NASA engineers confused you by not suspending a block of foam motionless in the air and hurling a section of wing at it.
As for the bulk of your post, containing that half baked ranting, UFOlogy and conspiracy theories, I'd have to say you get the tin foil hat award for the rest of this century. I imagine you with your tinfoil hat, wrapped in tin foil from head to foot, in a titanium submersible on the bottom of the ocean. And the mind control waves still get through. All that trouble, and all you really need to do is...
UP YOUR DOSAGE.
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
Linda Ham dismissed the issue, saying, "Really, I don't think there is much we can do, so you know it's not really a factor during flight [be]cause there isn't much we can do about it."
A far cry from the early NASA attitude of "Failure is not an option." I think Ms. Ham should be charged with negligent homicide for that decision. She was wrong on the foam and she was wrong that NASA couldn't have done anything about the problem had the spy cameras provided clear evidence of the damage.
omg you rock!
Actually I'm Scottish, thanks for the grammer tip tho. Too much IRC for me lol. Yeah anyway I actually got an A in English and I still get -1 troll ;__;
"The Russians still have the best technology in space"
But at what expense? Perhaps they can be proud of their space program, but their country and and social system was/is a disaster and failure.
Hmm... the USAF still flies the C-5. It is not being replaced by the C-17, the C-141 is.
The C-130 is a tactical air lifter. Because the C-5 is so huge, it's a "strategic" air lifter.
The C-5 can carry 2 M-1 tanks.
For the navy, it also can carry the DSRV subs and their hardware.
Calling the C-130 a "small" target is amusing. Sure, it's small compared to a C-5, but it's still a big airplane that doesn't fly very fast...
As for air resistance. .
Sure. Air resistance will of course affect the situation, but I really don't think it's that big an issue. Heck, as the NASA scientists were able to fire foam blocks out of cannons and blow holes in test materials to demonstrate their point, it would seem to indicate that perhaps air resistance isn't enough of a factor when it comes to foam blocks moving through space.
And as for 'fragile' space craft. .
You seem to be under the impression that space shuttle wings were not built to withstand massive sheer forces, (like atmospheric re-entry), and object impacts, (ice pellets, rain drops, birds, etc.,), as ALL aircraft wings are designed to do, (and in this case, probably much more so given the forces in question). I would suggest that perhaps you need to investigate at a few more details before you go about splitting hairs.
Remember; the Columbia exploded during launch, not re-entry. NASA tells us that a key piece of machinery was damaged when a piece of foam struck the surface of one wing. I find this very hard to swallow given the facts available. Just because a PR department for a government which has a long track-record of lying through its teeth offers me a questionable bit of data doesn't mean I'm going to eat it without looking at it first. But then I'm not normal.
-FL
Maybe so, but maybe many people in such a position would piss their pants and plead for mercy too.
Not necessarily. They could have succeeded in taking over the controls in time. After that all it takes is to engage the autopilot, and then the airplane will be back on the preset course and altitude.
Since the airplane had plenty of fuel, the passengers would have enough time to contact the ground and decide what to do next. A relatively safe crash-landing would be always an option, onto a foam-covered runway and into the safety net; with most of the fuel used up or dumped they would be all OK.
But even that would not be necessary, they had a pilot among the passengers:
Donald Greene, 52, was a licensed pilot and the vice president and chief executive officer of the Safe Flight Instrument Corp. of White Plains, N.Y. (link).
Quite possibly this guy would have landed the aircraft with no damage at all, maybe with a couple of dry runs and with an advice of a professional Boeing pilot in order to learn how to handle such a large airplane.
So it is very likely that the passengers attacked not because they wanted to die in a different way, but because they wanted to live. This does not make them any less heroes - people in trouble sometimes just fall in pieces; heroes don't. It's just not a requirement for heroes to die in process.
Well, a 2.67 pound foam block, (according to Boeing), and a styrofoam lid have somewhat different aerodynamic properties. --But then, I've noticed that the objects used in these kinds of arguments tend to vary depending on which way the person wants to bias his point. --As somebody else pointed out to me, if one were to hurl a styrofoam bicycle helmet at my face, air resistance would probably not prevent it from giving me a nose bleed.
I really don't think air resistance would be quite as big a deal as you suggest.
And just as importantly, I think, is that we're talking about an aircraft wing here. Many people seem to be under the impression that space shuttle wings were not built to withstand massive sheer forces, (like atmospheric re-entry), and object impacts, (ice pellets, rain drops, birds, etc.,), as ALL aircraft wings are designed to do, and in this case, almost certainly more so given the forces in question.
Remember; the Columbia exploded during launch, not re-entry. NASA tells us that a key machine part was damaged when a piece of foam struck the surface of one wing. I find this quite impossible to swallow given the facts available. Also, given the track record of honesty from the U.S. Government, doesn't it seem just a little naive for anybody to take explanations offered at face value without questioning them first?
As for your attempts at ridicule, re: the very tired, 'Tin Foil' routine. . , this is the most interesting thing of all. --Common, but always very revealing.
Consider. . . What exactly does it say about you that rather than look at the material, you engage instead in personal attacks. This is the weakest and most common form of argument when difficult questions are brought up. --And such reactions are quite automatic, stemming from sources within people which key on feelings of discomfort. Honestly! Think about this; look at the sources of those feelings; it is a very revealing study which most people simply don't have the spine for. Self-examination is one of the most difficult things to do; one must overcome false senses of ego and self-importance in order to discover that not all of their reactions are their own, or come from places which make sense.
Automatic responses of this sort are hard-wired into hundreds of millions of people specifically so that they are not able to look at certain questions as they constantly pop up.
I dare you to try.
-FL
It was only a matter of time.
The problem is that NASA management ran the program as if it were "mission critical" or less whereas the engineers, public, and probably astronauts assumed it was "life critical."
That philisophical difference led to repeated launches in cold weather, despite warnings that the o-rings were not spec'd at those temps.
That philisophical difference led to repeated launches without a means to inspect or repair heat tiles, despite the fact that shuttles always came back with tiles damaged or missing.
Many and various problems were well understood, known to occur, and ignored. Risks were taken conciously and then hands went up with an "oh my" when the numbers came up unfavorable.
This difference between public and goverment assumptions are why the government will fail in space. At this point in our history, it is too expensive to mount a 100% reliable space program. Five 9s might be possible, but probably still too expensive. But a private space industry, with massive competition and cheap craft will be more understood when it loses humans and cargo. A government train wreck is a tragedy, but 43,000 vehicular deaths per year is merely the price of freedom of movement.
Had Mike Melvill died in his pursuit of the x-prize, the contest would continue. Whereas NASA gets a massive inquiry and shutdown until they come back with a 200% budget requirement and get killed on the congress floor.
Privatization isn't merely something we want, it's the only way things will move forward. Let the government be the first to fund giant new projects like an interstellar colonial ship. But leave the already-done projects to business.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
Are you smoking crack?
It's the RUSSIANS we're talking about. They've had space stations in orbit since the seventies.
At that time they(not Russians, Soviets) had unlimited resources to do whatever they wanted. They still didn't have good technologies.
MIR itself was the best until ISS was orbited. And they sure had a lot of influence designing ISS.
Common, if it was the only space station you can't compare it with anything that did not exist.
Those guys run progress unmanned craft to ISS, as they have been doing for years.
I don't see it as a big deal. They push Progress into orbit in vicinity of a space station and manoeuvre it to dock...
Have most endurance records and even the shuttle docking system was designed by russians(NASA bought it in the ninetees).
Actually Shuttle-to-Mir docking station. Somebody had to design it and it was cheapier to do it in Russia. No problem.
Now Russians do not have those resources and those facilities that Soviet Union had. They had thousands of scientists and engineers in those days. They still have some people around but it's 13 years since Soviet Union dissolved. And almost no money. They cut corners. They pride themselves on robust but cheap technologies.
They do not. Antonov-225 was designed and built in Kiev, Ukraine. As Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union Antonov-225 was numbered CCCP-82060 and had red flag painted on it's tail. Now it's registered UR-82060 and carries Ukrainian flag. It never belonged to Russia.
Don't feel bad. A lot of people don't have a very intuitive grasp of the dynamic pressure (Q) created by supersonic flow. There is A LOT of drag on a block of foam in air as fast and dense as the SST was experiencing at that point in liftoff.
Whaaa?!?
Remember, my last post where I suggested you up your dosage. I was wrong. Took too much! Took too much! You're hallucinating. When you come down, check your facts.
It wasn't a personal attack. More of a reality check. I almost didn't respond, because I was fairly certain you were joking. Then I realized you probably weren't joking.
I'm usually the one arguing for relaxing dogmatic beliefs based in the status quo, examining the facts with an open mind, and formulating a fresh hypothesis that best fits the facts, instead of parroting the common belief. But you totally lost me on the EM pulse conspiracy theory with bonus points for extraterrestrials.
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
That's a matter of perspective. They are very good at getting things to work, but it usually very low-tech. It's like saying a 1970 Ford Pickup that is still running fine is "better technology" than a 2003 Honda Prius Hybrid that keeps breaking down. (Not that this is true of those vehicles, but it demonstrates the apples and oranges comparison.)
The Russians are quite good at building reliable vehicles. But they do have their own accidents and poor administrative decisions, such as those that caused the MIR accident. Even before the accident, MIR astronauts had to deal with "...fire, power blackouts, chemical leaks, docking failures, nail-biting spacewalks, and constant mechanical breakdowns". For anyone interested, and who believe the Russians have superior technolgy or a superior program, I suggest you give Dragonfly a read. That isn't to say NASA is any better, but in some areas NASA is light years ahead and in others they need a lot of work.
On page 53 it also concludes
The news report is wrong when it says the CAIB "left the matter open". All this new work seems to be related to test and certify a new process.
The book "Dragonfly" described the Mir missions that U.S. astronauts took part in. The U.S. astronauts come off as prima donna pussies in the book, and NASA comes off as an NIH outfit devoted to perfection at the expense of getting stuff done. My feeling after reading the book is that the Russian way of doing things is the way it will be in the future. Rather than spending billions trying to avoid any mistakes, the Russians leave that 1% part undone that would raise the budget by an order of magnitude. The Mir was a _real_ space station, up there forever and starting to wear out. The Russians just figured out how to fix it and keep it going, where we in the U.S. would trash it and start over. Imagine a world in which your car gets inspected every 100 miles and needs to be rebuilt or replaced every time something is not perfect: that is NASA's world. 40,000 people die in traffic accidents in the U.S. every year, but let one shuttle blow up and everybody freaks out. Hey, it's a dangerous job.
And the cosmonauts didn't panic and freak out at every little thing: I remember one astronaut was afraid the air was not clean and might cause lung cancer or something. I guess he was used to being able to call up OSHA about every little thing in NASA's spacecraft.
One of the most amazing stories was about the cosmonaut who was sent up to revive an abandoned space station, and how he entered the dark, empty station, with ice floating everywhere, and little by little brought the thing back to life.
In the West there has been a plague of techno fetishism that adds more and more tech for very little gain. Tried fixing a modern car yourself? See what I mean?
Agreed. While the added technology CAN be a good thing, it is, too often, taken past the point of diminishing returns.
Mir demonstrated the different philosophy quite well. The U.S. space program goes to sometimes outrageous lengths to prevent equipment failures. The Soviet (now Russian) program simply designed so that failure wasn't catestrophic.
The part I find most interesting is the way that carried into communications failures. While a popular cold war view in the U.S. was that the Soviets were dominated by authoritarian central control while America was more independant, in the space program, it was the Americans who didn't make a move without discussing it with mission control (such that communications loss would be a disaster) while the Soviets were trained to act independantly and then inform the ground what they had done (such that communications loss was more annoying than anything else).
Even a total power failure was non-fatal, though it might end the mission if uncorrected.
Oh well. I'm sure I have lost all credibility at this point.
Nonetheless, it does actually remind me of another point. .
Since the video was available of the actual tile striking the wing, then this means that mean the event happened during the very early moments of lift-off. --The camera was presumably attached to the launch tower. --So, if the shuttle was still in range to be filmed, how can it possibly have had enough time reach super-sonic speeds? --Thus, how could there be super-sonic flows of air to catch foam bricks and hurl them in ways most people, as you put it, "don't have a very intuitive grasp of"? (A very common explanation from the authorities; "You are stupid and we are 'experts'. We will tell you what to believe, so stop thinking. It is very annoying!")
Yeah, so that was my other nagging thought during all of the explanations being spun about.
--And still, through all of it, the fact that aircraft wings are designed to put up with massive abuse still hasn't been adequately addressed. The more I think it over, the more impossible it seems that a small foam brick, which was essentially only dropped on the shuttle wing at very little relative speed, could have caused critical damage.
As for losing you on the UFO stuff. .
It's actually not nearly so flaky a subject as many believe. I also always looked the other way until I came across Richard Dolan. --A great deal of what people base their opinions and rational explanations on regarding UFO stuff is a very limited and corrupted set of data. I read Dolan on a recommendation; his approach is very different from most of the New Age candy out there. He studied a specific stretch of history, from WWII until 1973, working primarily from Military and Police reports, since those agencies have systems designed to properly record and track reports from their personel, and as such tend to have a far greater degree of clarity, technical data from radar and multiple witnesses etc., than sightings made by the general public. Interestingly, when public sightings were discounted, the number of reports just from military and police is staggering. Hundreds of them! People just don't hear about this stuff. --Dolan also worked with several air-force officers who had been active over the three decades his book covers.
Very fascinating stuff. --And that's just one source. There is a lot of amazing data out there if one is willing to look. There is certainly a lot of misinterpretation and silly behavior, but when it comes right down to it, unless one is willing to personally put in the time to examine things, you really can't expect to learn what's what.
--These days I really can't take people very seriously when they scoff unless they have taken the time to properly investigate these and similar issues. Thoughtless dismissal is just too easy, too common, and nearly always based on limited, corrupted information.
I'm also weird. --When people try to prevent me from thinking in certain directions through social punishment like ridicule, my first and immediate question is, "Hum! Why it is so important that I not look at this stuff? Friends, family and total strangers are willing to go out of their way to ridicule me. These cannot be reactions stemming from the conscious. Nobody would consciously ridicule a total stranger. These are reactions stemming from somewhere deeper." I just don't trust automatic reactions of that sort.
-FL
Fair enough regarding tiles, but it doesn't really address the point.
The offending tile which fell hit a wing, which is designed to put up with massive sheer forces. --And if it wasn't designed to deal with unexpected impacts, (like ice crumbling from the main fuel tank during the same phase of lift off that the foam block was seen to bounce from the wing in the launch video), then the designers were being foolish.
Boeing made the thing, for goodness sake. I'd be very surprised if they didn't use material sciences and design philosophies garnered from their existing knowledge pool. Why would they deliberately invent a new and weaker wing design when all the technology and knowledge for standard designs was pre-existing?
I took a quick look, and it seems that NASA is now retroactively fitting the shuttle with heaters to prevent ice build-up so that the danger from debris falling during launch is minimized. This is a very slick bit of PR, (they've had a year or more to polish it, after all!), because through saying this, they cleverly make a point of saying that the heaters are being installed to replace insulation which was previously there and vital to preventing ice build-up which could fall and damage the shuttle during launch.
--With this they point out that there was always a danger from ice, and that they took care of it before but now they're taking even more care. Very slick. The only problem is that it's total bullshit.
There has always been ice build up and it has always fallen during launches. You can see the ice falling and striking the shuttle in the same video clip where the 'foam block' fell and supposedly did its damage.
Which brings me to another point. .
Since the video was available of the actual tile striking the wing, then this means the event happened during the very early moments of lift-off. --The camera was presumably attached to the launch tower. --So, if the shuttle was still in range to be filmed, how can it possibly have had enough time reach the super-sonic speeds necessary to have impacted the tile with the same force as those bits of foam the NASA demonstrators were firing out of their test cannon at 400 Km/hour? What's up with that?
Apparently somebody already asked this question, and the response was, "Well, actually the foam was blasted away from the body of the Shuttle, due to air bubbles in the glue heating up. So the foam block was actually explosively launched at the wing."
Well, now! This is the biggest reach yet! --So now, the block, which we all saw in the video not moving any faster than falling ice, was supposedly explosively launched at the wing because of air bubbles?
For me, all of these points add up to a big, "Huh?" The NASA story only makes sense if you don't think about it too much or examine it too closely, which, luckily for them, most people are perfectly willing to avoid doing.
-FL
They also produce some of the deadliest weapons on earth, and all in simple production houses..
Yes, and they also laid waste to thousands of square kilometers of land as nuclear no-man's lands while doing it, killed hundred (if not thousands of people) from exposure to radioactivity, and made entire lakes and rivers unfit for life for the next 10,000 years. Oh yea - they're great.
I took a look at the video footage again, and it was indeed shot through a telephoto camera. Enough time has passed between my first seeing it over a year ago and now, for my memories to have decayed. I've certainly learned something about myself, namely that it's worth going over old files before trying to speak with authority on a subject!
However, (and you're going to love this. .
When looking for the video footage you were describing, I ran across the following:
Like I said; a very scattered series of arguments and a very difficult puzzle to zero in on. --All I can say with total clarity is that from Day One, the foam story struck me as being 'off'; I've studied a fair bit about public relations work, and I was definitely picking up on the scent of panic and haste with which NASA hustled their explanation together; the cannon demonstration in particular seemed sensationalist and forced. This was my intuitive insight of the situation, and so I went searching for other ideas, and I found several as offered previously.
Now, clearly, my memory of events has decayed over the last year since I was looking at this, and I definitely give you a tip of the hat for your superior recall of the facts and details of the story. My efforts were, and continue to be, primarily attempts to explain why the whole thing felt 'off', and still does. I've been rewarded many times through life for trusting my intuitive insights into things, and while my attempts to explain them aren't always on the money, the reactions themselves tend to sing true, and my willingness to look further afield for reasons often procures fascinating and useful results.
Coincidentally, I find my best results are arrived at when I work with an individual like yourself, who clearly has a superior grasp of Right Brained stuff. But you really do need to work on your attitude. It's really becoming quite insulting.
-FL
I re-thought the wording of that one as I hit, 'Submit'.
Interestingly, it calls appropriately to the point of what I was trying to say, because you're quite right! People do commonly treat others this way. So why exactly do people feel compelled to ridicule certain sets of ideas before properly considering the content of those ideas?
This is the knee-jerk reaction I'm talking about. It clearly has the ability to severely limit how a group thinks and deals with new information, and like I said, I have learned to use it as a warning signal that interesting, and potentially valuable ideas are in the offing.
-FL
Apparently you aren't very familiar with accident investigation. It's quite common in the early stages of an investigation for experts to have suspicions about the likelihood of a particular failure scenario. The good ones are open minded and don't rely very heavily on their initial gut feelings. They continue their analysis and definitively rule in or rule out the various possible failure modes.
That CBS news report is from three days after the incident. At that time, Dittemore's gut feeling was as he stated. I'm not going to take the time to look it up now, but I suspect he has publically stated on many occasions since then that the subsequent analysis and testing has convinced him that the foam was the primary cause of the damage to the wing.
In contrast to your intuitive insight, the engineering analysis on this isn't a close call. They're fuzzy on a very few of the precise details, but overall conclusion is about as clear-cut as is possible in this sort of thing. The evidence is consistent from several different engineering viewpoints (video analysis, telemetry during reentry, foam application methods, properties of the foam when subjected to cryogenic temperatures, properties of the foam in a supersonic slipstream, strike tests on the leading edge, etc) and all support the same conclusion:
The foam did it.
Anyone with an alternative theory has a *huge* burden of proof to overcome.
Note the difference in the way science seeks to solve a problem, versus the method that disappeared after the Dark Ages. Scientists have intuition, but they use that to develop a hypothesis based on a rational understanding of the real world and a thorough understanding of the relevant science (mostly physics and material science, in this case). Then, they test the hypothesis. A scientist would not say, "Foam damage sounds unlikely to me, so I think extraterrestrials shot down the shuttle with an electromagnetic pulse."
Not being able to recall key events and facts is natural, when your head is full of alien conspiracies.
You need to work on your tenuous grasp on reality.
What's insulting is for someone to make a lot of obviously false statements, and then expect people to believe an alien conspiracy theory.
Bad NASA management was once again the cause of the loss of an orbiter and seven crew members. Specifically, the Columbia disaster was caused by a foam strike on the left wing during takeoff, which damaged a critical insulating tile, resulting in a structural failure on re-entry. There were no evil extraterrestrials involved. That's reality, and welcome to it.
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
Occam's Razor is a rule of thumb, and it is a pretty good one when used responsibly. But it is not a scientific law, and unfortunately, it is broadly mis-applied and mis-used. Based on its fundamental logic, it cannot work well when being used to test the viability of many emerging possible realities simply because it is designed to measure against the strictures of old accepted realities. To put it another way, asking, "Is it more likely. .
Further. . , the Columbia incident is only a 'closed book' to you because you have chosen to believe the NASA public relations efforts. --And here all I can do is stress that NASA is just another U.S. government body, and the U.S. Government has been shown to have told countless lies and to have used the media to deceive the public many, many times before. It behooves one to think twice before accepting such stories as truth!!!
But I have at this point largely destroyed my credibility through my very half-assed recall of details and my exceptionally poor handling of those few details I did have right. (Which is definitely not par for the course with me. I blame this on the event being over a year old and my reluctance in going over the old details. Laziness nailed me on this one.). Either way, I don't see that there is any point in further attempting to correct this, particularly with somebody who has (ugh) firmly chosen to become entrenched in rudeness and conceit. --Those are walls which most people, and I suspect you as well, generally feel compelled to defend even at the expense of gaining further knowledge. Should the day ever come when you realize you want to change your mind, you will have to dismantle those walls yourself, and they generally prove to be among the most difficult!
I've really not made such a fantastic mess of an argument in years, and I apologize deeply. I know that must sound utterly ridiculous to you at this point and that you will not value such an apology, but it must be offered.
Good luck to you! I'm gone.
-FL
Oh, sorry. I got it all wrong then.
I still think they have some aces under the sleeve, such as a project for using SLBM (yes, submarine ballistic missiles) for probing hurricanes or something like that. Sometimes I check rosaviakosmos.ru and get a suprise.
GPG 0x1B479C78
What do you mean with "didn't have good technologies"? Is Soyuz a bad product? Was their space program lousy? You're talking about the same people that orbited the first satellite (granted, sputnik was crap compared to explorer), first human in orbit (and vostok was really good), and had more experience than anyone else. I think their program was quite successful.
However I could easily compare it with Salyut, Almaz or skylab stations. And compared to them, it was a leap forward. Modular design, to be build in stages. Don't you think these ideas had an impact on ISS?
These are automated ships. No crew on them. Even assuming it is not a big deal, they run scheduled supply ships to ISS. That alone get a lot of know-how (oops, that docking foobar thing is having such or such problem, lesson to be learned, oops a progress ship crashed against MIR, BIG problem, then BIG lesson learned). Those little bits of know how add up fast.
No problem at all, but the system was already designed. And yes, they bought it because it was cheaper than designing a new one from scratch. However, do you think NASA would buy a cheap-and-crappy docking mechanism? They bought it because it was cheap and GOOD.
And it's just fine. Cheap AND good, what else do you want?
GPG 0x1B479C78
The shuttle was always a POS since 1960s conception, biggest strategic screw up since the Portugese pissed away an early lead in the colonial sailng race to the Spanish over 500 years ago. The AN225 is just a one off transporter hang over from the USSR's cheap clone of the shuttle. I hope the Ukranians can do something with it - a stick in Airbus' eye. But remember the US has had "the biggest" since 1944 (the H4). Soviet/Russian aerospace superiority? Ha, ha we won - we could afford over 100 flushes of the $2 billion bill shuttle crapper before our country goes broke (vs just one flush for the USSR)! (yes, all totaled, we have spent well over $2 billion per flush avg since 1960s on the shuttle program, see 1st sentence)
1. NASA public relations and the media presented a very tight argument for falling insulation damage being the culprit in the Columbia disaster. --Historical evidence was presented from the NASA archives purporting that previous missions of both the Columbia and other shuttles had shown some limited damage to heat tiles resulting from foam insulation falling from the fuel tanks. The speculation and arguments were that a larger piece striking in a certain way could cause a critical failure of the heat shielding.
2. Despite the recommendation by NASA engineers during the mission that the foam insulation strike in question did not pose a problem and that the mission was in no danger, the conclusion was reversed after the disaster and subsequent investigation.
3. In doing follow-up on this whole story, I ran across this curious item about a photographer who was shooting the Columbia minutes before it broke up on descent. He captured an image of an energy bolt striking the Columbia.
This is a follow up on that story.
I was unable to find a copy of the image in question, not any stories regarding the conclusion about this image. The name of the photographer was Jay Lawson, an electrical engineer who works for Sparks defense contractor Sierra Nevada Corp., and a volunteer at the Fleischmann Planetarium at the University of Nevada, Reno.
His video captured two things, apparently; according to an article in the RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL;
So. . . A bolt of energy striking the Columbia, followed by a bright flash and the break-up of the shuttle.
Now, I have been completely unable to find any copies of the image of the energy bolt on the web. Nor have I found any follow-up stories regarding it.
Curious.
So. . . What we have right now are two stories. The first is the big media story which broadcast the NASA claims regarding the incident; a piece of foam caused damage to heat tiles, which in turn resulted in a critical failure.
The second story is one which comes from two sources; a channeled source claiming an energy weapon was used to shoot down the Columbia, and a photograph of an energy bolt actually striking the shuttle instants before it broke up.
So which is more likely. . ?
One:The U.S. Government can be counted on to not fabricate stories, and that NASA's own engineers who originally said the foam strike did not present a problem were actually wrong.
Two:A photograph of the shuttle being hit by an energy bolt was wrong or fabricated, AND the channeled claim that the Columbia being shot down by an energy bolt was also wrong or fabricated, --and that BOTH were wrong or fabricated by different people in different parts of the country without any contact between each other.
The channeled claim has been instantly disregarded on the basis that it is supposedly impossible that alien intelligence could be in contact with humans. Occam's Razor has been suggested as the means by which 'UFO conspiracy' theory should be disregarded and indeed scorned.
Interestingly, Occam was a monk who
In Soviet Russia, the competition lacks you!