Slashdot Mirror
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."
and honestly, does NASA have the billions it'll take to fix the shuttles up again? Will the public even care to pay for a program that would be down another two to three years? Five years between shuttle launches?
Why bother, I say.
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
Is it me, or is all of this making a great case for developing transporter technology...?
Heisenburg won't mind...
The last sentance in Dr. Feynman's Appendix F on the Challenger Shuttle Accident Report: For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
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.
NASA really needs to move on with the space shuttle. The only reason they been kept around so long is because NASA promised too much with the 1970s technology while shutting down competing technologies (e.g., space capsule and Saturn rockets) and that the shuttle contractors needed corporate welfare payments. They put all their eggs in one basket and the eggs are cracking. The NASA space monopoly should be broken before they lose the rest of their flying bricks.
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?)
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.)
Prior to the Columbia Disaster, NASA's fleet made numerous flights while being pelted with enormous chunks of foam as the shuttles were in their previously thought safe and stable condition. I'm still not convinced that the incident wasn't just a fluke.
Now, in order to ensure/improve the safety of a few dozen future rocket riders, should the government allocate millions of tax payer dollars?
I think that astronauts getting blown to smithereens shouldn't be unexpected, nor should it enrage anyone, no matter what the NASA chooses to launch astronauts into space in. It goes with the territory; risk goes hand in hand with riding rockets.
Falun Dafa is good!
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
It has been 29 months since Columbia was lost over East Texas in February 2003. Seven months after the accident, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) released the first volume of its final report, citing a variety of technical, managerial, and cultural issues within NASA and the Space Shuttle Program. To their credit, NASA offered few excuses, embraced the report, and set about correcting the deficiencies noted by the accident board. Of the 29 recommendations issued by the CAIB, 15 were deemed critical enough that the accident board believed they should be implemented prior to returning the Space Shuttle fleet to flight. Some of these recommendations were relatively easy, most were straightforward, a few bordered on the impossible, and others have been largely overcome by events, especially with the decision by the President to retire the Space Shuttle by 2010.
The Return to Flight Task Group (RTF TG) was chartered by the NASA Administrator in July 2003 to provide an independent assessment of the implementation of the 15 CAIB return-toflight recommendations. An important observation must be stated up-front: neither the CAIB nor the RTF TG believes that all risk can be eliminated from Space Shuttle operations; nor do we believe that the Space Shuttle is inherently unsafe. What the CAIB and RTF TG do believe, however, is that NASA and the American public need to understand the risks associated with space travel, and make every reasonable effort to minimize such risk.
Since the release of the CAIB report, NASA and the Space Shuttle Program have expended enormous effort and resources toward correcting the causes of the accident and preparing to fly again. Relative to the 15 specific recommendations that the CAIB indicated should be implemented prior to returning to flight, NASA has met or exceeded most of them - the Task Group believes that NASA has fully met the intent of the CAIB for 12 of these recommendations. The remaining three recommendations were so challenging that NASA could not completely comply with the intent of the CAIB, but conducted extensive study, analyses, hardware modifications, design certifications and made substantive progress. However, the inability to fully comply with all of the CAIB recommendations should not imply that the Space Shuttle is unsafe.
General Products' #3? Oh, please. Let me count the problems with that:
Anyone seen where I left Kobold?
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
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")
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
If they loose another ship, it will shut down NASA manned flight for 20 years. NASA has always been a difficult sell in Congress, and world is still too immature for international cooperation in projects of this magnitude. If you don't believe that, spend a day at the UN.
They couldn't document even the placement of wires in the wings. I got the impression most of the IT projects I've worked on have better documenation, and that's scary. This guy compared NASA's documenation to the US Navy's documentation of reactors on submarines. Where the Navy has a record of every piece of plumbing that's ever been changed on any of their reactors, NASA didn't have hardly anything.
My first reaction at the end of the briefing was to think "that thing shouldn't fly again".
And I'm a raving space exploration nut and think the US should withdraw from the Space Treaty and claim half of the Moon and offer homestead rights to private citizens and companies.
And I fully accept there is always risk in space travel, but not THAT much risk.
And as others have pointed out, the risk is higher then ever now. One more accident and...
And Buran worked fine, and was in many ways superior to the Shuttle - it, for example, contained jet engines that allowed for a powered landing - Shuttle can't pull up for another landing attempt, Buran could.
The shuttle has at least proved that an unpowered landing is perfectly safe. It would be absurd to add the weight cost of engines and fuel just for a go around capability. A robust flight control system is far more efficient. Buran also had no viable electrical power generation. The vehicle was stuffed with batteries on its only flight! That is why it only ever flew a single orbit. So much for the "better" shuttle. It was a child's replica initiated by a paranoid Leonid Brezhnev. The Russians still do not use fuel cells 40 years after they were introduced on American Gemini spacecraft.
It also had no main engines - they were in the huge booster that mimic the shuttle main fuel tank.
..Making Buran one of the costliest and wasteful launch systems ever conceived. Each Energia flight threw away the 4 main H2O2 engines and 4 Kerosene/O2 boosters none of which was reused. Compare this to the shuttle where the SRB motor casings and the SSME's can be used many times.
Buran also had no firecrackers (solid rocket boosters), and instead used only liquid fuels - making challenger-style boom impossible.
Since Challenger, the SRBs have flown 176 times with a perfect safety record. I have always questioned why solid fueled boosters are looked down apon for human space flight. The new NASA administrator is almost certain to favor a derivative of the SRB for a CEV launch capability. You often hear that liquid fueled rockets are safer because they can be shut down. As a passenger in hypersonic I would not be happy to be flying hypersonically next to a highly pressurized fuel tank and have a malfunctioning engine shut down. That was ok on the Saturn because of the series staging and spare thrust capacity. But on the shuttle with parallel staging such a booster shutdown would be deadly. Such "firecrackers" will very likely be the basis of a launch abort system as well. That alone says something about the safety and reliability of solid fuel.
It only flew once, unmanned. A feat Shuttle can't do, by the way, as it can't land unmanned.
Another foolish and oft repeated misconception. The only reason the shuttle doesn't fly unmanned is the polical clout of the astronaut corps. Do you think a shuttle commander has a hand on the stick at anytime from launch to landing? NASA basically gives the stick over to the pilot when the shuttle is lined up with the runway and has enough energy to reach its end. If humans were not aboard the shuttle would be happy and capable of landing and rollout as well.
an ill wind that blows no good