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Commission Says NASA Failed on Shuttle Safety
Tsalg writes "The final report from the Stafford-Covey Commission concludes that out of the 15 recommendations they made, the 3 toughest technically are not met. The news was not official on the return-to-flight website but has been widely commented elsewhere. Says one of the task members: "It is NASA's job -- not the task force's -- to determine whether the risks are acceptable and whether it's safe for Discovery to fly." The commission said risk remained that pieces of foam and ice could break off and hit the shuttle at lift-off.
It also said the orbiter had not been sufficiently hardened and it lacked an in-flight repair system.Nasa has been aiming to launch shuttle Discovery as early as 13 July."
Let us kill the astronauts because money is short.
If we wait until there are no risks the shuttle will never fly again. If we wait until everyone agrees with the risks, the shuttle will never fly again. We gave NASA the task to explore outter space, lets give them the ability. They understand the job at lot better than most people. The people who want to fly understand the risks. Lets let them take the risks if they think its worth it.
-Daniel
KD5UZZ
www.w5yj.org
The press reporting this and taking the "glass half-empty" is similar to a conversation I had during a Disaster Recovery audit and almost every planning meeting about it.
Auditor: So what do you do with your computer data?
Me: We back up everything to tape.
Auditor: But what happens if the tape is bad?
Me: No problem, we have a sophisticated backup system where we use multiple tapes.
Auditor: But what if there was a fire?
Me: We have a halon suppression system in the server room, plus the tapes are stored off-site.
Auditor: What if a tornado takes out the off-site storage facility?
Me: Uh... we've got a backup hot co-lo with SBC a few miles away.
Auditor: Yeah, but what if a EMP takes out the city?
Me: The hell? But the chances of that happening are...
Auditor: But it could happen right?
Me: Well, sure it's possible but...
Auditor: (Checks FAIL on his report)
For space travel you can't make everything 100% certain. There's managed risk, which is really what's going down here. NASA is going to launch, but that isn't going to stop the media from focusing on those three areas that didn't have PASS checked off on the sheet. Expect every talking head to hone in on this during launch day.
The shuttle is not "safe", but it's safer than it's ever been before. Everybody knows it's not as safe as a 747, and it's never going to be. But surely, given that the astronauts flying on it are all highly intelligent volunteers who understand the risks, it's safe enough to get the ISS Contractual Obligation Tour (and a manned Hubble service mission, with any luck) out of the way before they get sent off to the Smithsonian and a new, safer CEV is built.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Private companies will almost always pursue goals that will make them money in the long run. Corporate moguls are now catching on to the fact there's a lot of rich people out there willing to spend $250K for a quick flutter into orbit.
Space programmes with ulterior motives than profit will likely always have to be finianced by the people, through governments.
Coca-Cola, sometimes War.
I think NASA takes way too much crap.
Think about how horrible underfunded everything is, and that they are still sending people up into space in a vehicle built in the 80s. They were underfunded at the time, and made do with what they had, and that's what they have to do now.
Because its so technically difficult, it takes money to solve, and money is pouring elsewhere instead of into making it safer (Iraq, SS, etc...). Space exploration has taken sort of a backseat here.
Nasa still has an exemplary record. Only 2 crashes in 20 years. I have no idea how many missions that is, but it's not a few. If you want the people we send up to be safe, give NASA some money, and stop whining about how unsafe it is.
My $.02
I have this really funny quote that I like to put here. Unfortunately, there's this really annoying thing called a char
So, who or what could serve as competitors to American companies bidding on NASA-funded projects? The answer is Japanese companies that build Japan's rockets and satellites. In the future, NASA should open up future missions to competitive bidding among both Japanese companies and American companies. NASA maintains a hands-off approach. Future missions will be mostly private ventures run by private companies but subsidized by government funding.
The mostly-private approach also involves one additional element: lawsuits. If future space mishaps occur, the company running the space mission or building hardware for the mission will be subject to lawsuits by the families of the victims.
Private companies will bear the responsibility for the success of the mission. NASA acts only as the funder. Competition and lawsuits can do wonders in producing a reliable product. Just look at American automobiles with their high quality and vast arsenal of safety features: air bags, crumple zones, etc.
Well, the first thing that strikes me is that the panel head (RIchard Covey) himself (were he younger and still in the flight program) wouldn't hesitate to fly on the revamped shuttle. So NASA fails the appointed checklist of improvements, but doesn't fail a former astronaut's 'gut instinct' test.
(While we're on the subject, let me recommend to anyone who is, has been, or ever will be interested in the subject of NASA's decision-making--under crisis conditions, or in conditions leading to crises--the work of Edward Tufte. http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ His analyses of the data graphics used in the launch decision of the Challenger, the investigation of the Challenger disaster (Feynman's experiment), and the Columbia in-flight decisions are a must-read take-no-prisoners statistical firefight. Also, well-written and heartbreaking.)
Now I'm asking, given NASA's bright-dark history in these matters, Covey's professed take, and the lacunae in the checklist...Would you be willing to fill a seat on the next Shuttle mission?
(Or would I, supposing the sudden need arose for a hack novelist/graphic designer/wicked dancer in space, of course...)
On the contrary side, would you be willing to send up a $$$$$ shuttle, $500 million in launch costs, and 7 astronauts (each representing maybe $3 million in sunk training costs, and more importantly, people, skilled, experts in their fields, brave, etc--not to mention the international incident factors if one of the crew is non-US)--with a higher-than-requested, but amorphously lower-than-previous risk of ever returning?
(Here I reveal my ace-in-the-hole for getting onto a mission someday, despite being the hack novelist, graphic designer, etc--no sunk training costs; I'm worthless, so if I don't come back, the taxpayer is getting an awesome deal.)
The shuttle missions assume that manned flight is required for research in space - in this day and age, that supposition should be questioned.
If the US government can not regularly and reliably put and retrieve people from orbit, we need to look at the alternatives such as private missions or a return to exclusively unmanned research - both of these have tradeoffs, but the cost to the taxpayers and the beauracracy involved goes WAY down as soon as you take people out of the equation.
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The shuttle flew for years without any burnups or crashes.
Wow, you lost ONE after decades of GOING INTO SPACE where meteor showers and solar flares are always possible, and then returning to earth WHILE YOUR SHIP'S OUTSIDE IS HEATED TO THOASANDS OF DEGREES while trying to land a "flying brick" on a landing strip built on a fricken marsh.
I guess I'm not really phased.
Think - when are the two times the Shuttle has been dsestroyed? Challenger, when NASA bosses decided that freezing temps were fine, because they had a propoganda coup going with the school teacher, even though engineers were screming at them, left, right and center, to postpone the launch and check for damage.
Columbia was lost - when? During NASA's other attempt at a propoganda coup, with getting an Israeli into space. Engineers wanted images of the wing, to check for damage. The intelligence agencies even offered to produce the pictures for free. But the NASA bosses - again - put the risk of bad publicity as being more important than the risk of a disaster.
Take risks - take as many risks as you want or need, to get the space program into a functional state - but please don't take risks with other people's lives because you want your photo on the front page of a newspaper. If it works, it achieves nothing and is lousy management. If it fails, it sets everything back and is catastrophic management.
I don't agree with the NASA bosses deciding that they should overrule the safety monitors, because the safety monitors' chief objection is that NASA bosses keep overruling things they shouldn't. It somewhat defeats the purpose of the exercise, if NASA repeats the very worst "crime" of all, in an effort to move forward.
I do agree, though, that the shuttle won't ever be 100% safe. It is a 1960s concept, built around 1970s technology (and having spoken to people who have built components for it, not very good technology at that), and it urgently does need retiring with something better. It's a pity Congress has cancelled all the replacement Shuttle programs, through budget cuts, or we'd have one by now.
Hey, Congress isn't the only bad boy. If Britain hadn't scrapped HOTOL, we would have had a replacement shuttle program years before the Columbia disaster, the ISS would likely have already been completed, and space technology would be easily a decade ahead of where it actually is. (We would also have commercial space travel by now, as HOTOL would have been damn good at that, as it was a design consideration.)
I also agree that NASA has made all the changes that are going to make a substantial difference, so that any further delay would be pointless.
There ARE a few things NASA could do to improve things, though - ice buildup is only a problem if there's enough humidity in the air for the water to form ice. It shouldn't be too hard to build what would be basically oversized hair-dryers to blast warm dry air over the top of the tank. At worst, there would be less ice, at best there would be none at all.
How long would it take to plug a hair-dryer in at the top of the launch tower? My guess is not very, even if it is very large. Switch it off before launch, so there's no weird air currents, and you should be fine.
This simple addition would not only cut back on ice, but should also cut back on foam risks, because the foam wouldn't be rigid and unusually heavy by being blocked up by ice.
I'm sure NASA engineers have proposed - if not this scheme, then countless others that are similar in nature. They're not dim, even if it seems that way at times, and know perfectly well that ice is water, and therefore if there's no water, there's no ice. They also know that warm air will expand into cold air far more readily than the other way round. (Pressure * Volume / Temperature = Constant, so if you double the temperature, you double the pressure. Air flows from high pressure to low pressure, on average. The rest, as they say, is obvious.
Leave space exploration to NASA and agencies and private organizations like it. Yes. Definitely. But PLEASE, will NASA and the others PLEASE leave the technical decisions to the technical experts and NOT to the P.R. crew? Doctors of spin are not necessarily doctors of physics or aeronautics.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The shuttle is a low earth orbit vehicle. It's a billion-dollar-a-trip Ford van, and not a very big one at that. What, exactly, are they "exploring" up there?
If we're going to put things in orbit, put things in orbit. If we're going to explore outer space, explore outer space. The shuttle does the first badly, and the second not at all. Let it go.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I wonder if the reporting here has been a bit skewed by concerntrating on specific technical safety recommendations. Surely those are just symptoms that may or may not be addressed (and may or may not cause problems even if they aren't), the real compelling question is do NASA have an appropriate degree of safety culture? I know this is probably a less interesting issue for the Slashdot crowd to discuss than technical details but as anyone working in a safety-critical engineering area will appreciate, its really whats at stake here. And IMHE, whilst I appreciate to some it may sound like management wankery, safety culture is both absolutely vital and also damn hard to inculcate in an organisation. Whilst I understand the President was making rash claims about missions to mars, he was really needed here to make some very clear statements and devise policies to encourage NASA to change. It would seem to me if NASA are failing to meet clearly defined 'action points' they certainly haven't a safety culture which bodes ill for the future frankly. Seems in 2003 quite a few people called it correctly ("Experts say NASA's safety culture may be too broken to fix")
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Sure. And overhauling them after each flight has turned out to cost far more than building new single-use engines. US taxpayers have been soaked for countless $Billions over 3 decades in this epic demonstration of the phrase "penny wise, pound foolish".