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Panel Challenges NASA Over Shuttle Safety
Uttini writes "NASA skipped some shuttle safety improvements as it tried to meet unrealistic launch dates for the first flight since the Columbia tragedy, some members of an oversight panel said in a scathing critique. Poor leadership also made shuttle Discovery's return to space more complicated, expensive and prolonged than it needed to be."
They need to keep people thinking that their program is deserving of taxpayers' money. The best way to do that is to launch the shuttle, especially after something like columbia.
They did what they with what they had; the government keeps cutting nasa funding, and THAT is what lead to columbia -- too little money, too much to do.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
All these spacecraft seem like such an awkward and impractical way of transporting things through space. Wouldn't it be much easier to develop teleporter technology like you see in the science fiction shows and just send objects and astronauts to other planets that way?
You can get all sorts of things over the wireless internet these days, music, movies, all kinds of software. Since dna is just information too, it seems to me that it shouldn't be too hard to figure out how to broadcast people and things from one place to another. NASA should get to work on this instead of silly space shuttles.
I was contracting for a Rockwell division the day the Challenger blew up, and 20 minutes after it went down, we had an office pool going: "How long will it take them to figure out that it was caused by some middle-manager (somewhere in the supply chain) screaming "Whaddaya mean I can't ship on schedule??!!??""
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
If we simply are 100% as perfectly careful as possible, fearing to tread anywhere but our exact previous footsteps, taking forever to inspect and re-inspect, we will never learn how to do it differently.
It is through our mistakes that we learn. Anybody willing to go up in a space shuttle knows they run a strong risk of death. Personally, I'd be excited to have the chance to risk my life in that noble work. Instead, for the sake of those who love me (okay, and for lack of ability or opportunity), I toil with my daily work, contributing my bit to the economy, so indirectly supporting the space program.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
>>> What if that one chunk hadn't fallen off
>>>right in view of the camera?
Dude.... they are using HUNDREDS of cameras now.
It didn't fall right in view of '*the* camera'. They just relesed the best view to show what happened.
>>The return-to-flight mission would have been
>>declared an outstanding success. Regular
>>launches would have resumed. We would be back
>>on track again.
So if you don't see the problem it doesn't exist? Sounds like you're NASA material!
The failure of Columbia was not a failure of engineering. Successful rocket launches occur often in Japan, Europe, and Florida.
The failure of Columbia was a failure of management. Managers wanting to show results to their superiors ignored the "grunt" engineers when they warned of a potential problem with tragic consequences for Columbia. The warnings became reality.
People seem to forget that space travel is freaking dangerous. The whole concept of a lit rocket attached to your ass is probably never going to be as safe as walking to the store.
At some point, NASA will do as much as can be reasonably be expected and allow a volunteer to climb in the shuttle and hope for the best.
People who can, do. People who can't, sit on committees and complain.
Those people need to get out of the way and let NASA do their job.
To think, the inherent problems with the shuttle have finally snowballed to the point where launching is next-to-impossible now that they are finally trying to hurry up and get something done (ISS).
Kinda makes you even angrier about the countless, 600 million dollar "We're growing some more fucking crystals, dammit" missions we've had for the past 20 years. Talk about time wasted. Let's not even get started on how the constant redesigns of the ISS have left it borderline useless (and how the costs of the redesigns and the station we have now equal the cost of the original proposal)
How many of you drive old cars, trucks, vans, or SUV's that say they are a joy to drive and run like the day they were brand new? No one would say that. Why NASA is using a shuttle that is 20 years old is beyond me. When I was 16 my parents gave me the old family '81 Datsun 310. I was grateful and even a bit excited to have it. I even thought I was "the man" because I had a car and most of my friends didn't, but it was a 13 year old car by the time I got it and had plenty of quirks. It had more than 300K miles on it when I got it. It ran pretty well and didn't cause me any major malfunctions, (Other than a clutch) but as soon as I could afford it I got a newer car! The car made it a year or two for my brother before giving up. I think it finally died in '97 with well over 400K miles on it. Those Damn shuttles have TONS more miles on them than that stupid car. Plus they are in a tad more hostile condition than the local freeways and roads. It baffles me that they are still willing to send astronauts up in them? Beyond that, I'm just as perplexed by the fact that there are astronauts blinded by the "I'm going to be in a text book one day" mentality that they are willing to ride up in the damn thing! Just plain stupidity if you asked me. It's time to produce something new with new seals, gaskets, and gap filler, and maybe a satelite dish. (Weather shouldn't affect their picture up there being so close to the satelites themselves.) If they plan on putting a man on Mars they've got a long way to go with those shitty shuttles they're still nursing along.
I mean, how many of you would really rather be sitting at say a 20 year old computer right now versus the one you're on reading /. on at this moment? I mean c'mon, be honest with yourself!
-- My Rant is now over, we'll return you to your regularly scheduled blah.
Generation Trance: What generation are you?
"he is willing to oust as many as 50 senior managers in a housecleaning rivaling the purge after the 1986 Challenger explosion."
Pretty harsh...
Ocean is land, covered with water.
I am not oa rocket scientist but, looking at the present external tankdesign, it doesn't appear to be vacuum insulated.
I know it would add weight, but couldn't they have inner chambers to hold the fuel that are separated from the outer wall by a vacuum layer (like a thermos bottle)?
I think the weight difference would be offset by a safety factor -- namely less ice build up on the foam.
Ignorance is not a crime; neither should it be a way of life
Congress control $ = inmates run the asylum
I heard a news report that said that gap fillers had been known to come loose in the past and no one worried about it too much. We're now hyper-sensitive to any damage to the tile system, probably way beyond what we should be. The fact that it took them so long to decide whether to go out and fix the problem shows that the associated risk was low, especially when compared to the risk of screwing something up if they accidentally pulled off a tile during the repair.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
In light of that, I can see no reason for NASA's own safety panel to NOT issue these kinds of complaints. That is what they are paid to do - look at what is going wrong and SAY something. They looked, and they spoke.
Now, as for anyone else - you've a point. Outsiders don't have the information needed to make the kinds of observations needed. Well, to an extent. There were several teams that had offered NASA solutions that would have guaranteed zero foam loss, but received no feedback from NASA. Those teams went public and I can understand that. Again, that's their area of expertise.
Now, do I think NASA should have chosen those solutions? I don't know. The safety panel didn't mention them, so maybe there were good reasons for declining. On the other hand, as a public organization, NASA might help themselves (and us) a lot by saying WHY those solutions were declined.
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)
Unavoidable risk: a rocket is an enormous explosive just barely controlled by exotic, expensive and difficult technology.
Avoidable risk: doing stupid things in your design to endanger lives.
The laws of physics, and many realities of engineering, are exactly the same today as they were in 1960.
For instance: what is the right place to locate the humans?
On the very top, because then they are the furthest away from the really dangerous bits. And delicate stuff needed for re-entry can be shielded and be far away from the immensely violent launch and debris and whatever is coming out of the ground and shaken off the rocket.
Corollary: where do you put the fuel tanks? On the rear end, dummy.
There's lots of reasons the Saturn V looked like it does. And how it looks like a whole lot of other rockets, except the shuttle. Ain't a coincidence.
These problems were known and solved, and the shuttle un-solved them.
Obviously, we need some more Nazi rocket scientists.
So a plane which can fly back is supposed to be 'cost effective'. But why does it have to be so big? You generally take big fat cargos up and then work on them. So take them in a big fucking can, which sits UNDER your small, human sized space plane which re-enters and holds the people, tools and control bits. You throw away the can. And under the cargo, you put the fat ass rockets.
You make them as cheap as possible, with metal-wrangling shipbuilding level technology, not ultra-high tech fancy pants stuff. That stuff is use 'once or twice', if it's still OK when you get it back off the ocean. Only the engines are the big monetary per-launch loss, but even now they have big solid rocket boosters which are one-use only.
They should make a big Saturn V style launcher with cheap ass solids strapped around the bottom for the initial heavy lift, like the Soyuz, then a cheap ass liquid booster module. Then a cargo can, and on top, the orbital and re-entry vehicle.
And also put that doohickey on the very top like with the Saturn V. What's it for? It's a little escape pod rocket and parachute to get the people the fuck away from the big explosive bits if something really bad happens.
If the Challenger worked like that, the crew might have been able to walk away, depending on circumstances.
I keep hearing that if they used environmentally unfriendly foam (CFC's I would suppose). Does anyone know the veracity of this or shed any light on the situation with the foam?
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Alright, I've got a question that I haven't seen addressed, at all, anywhere.
We've spent God knows how many hundreds of millions of dollars trying to make the shuttle safe enough for human spaceflight. Maybe that just isn't going to happen. Not with the shuttle, not with the fact that we're looking at band-aids and not limb replacement solutions here.
So, what would it take to make the shuttle run on autopilot? Rockets fly to space all the time, Russian Progress vehicles even dock with the space station, although I'm not sure if they do it alone or via teleoperation.
Either way, why not invest a certain amount of money in an autopilot (or teleoperation) system so the shuttle could fly up, dock with the station, and then could be entered by ISS crew who could use the shuttle's robotic arm, etc., to set up the next component of the station. If manpower's an issue (and with 2 on board the station, it probably is) you could do it when there was a crew change and there were more people at the station, or you could really, really hurry with the CEV and wait until you could have enough people at the station to do the job.
Or, for that matter, you could just HOLD on station construction until the CEV was ready and you could squeeze enough people into the station to make this work.
This would solve the main issue: that the shuttle isn't safe for humans due primarily to reentry problems. In the future, you could even have the CEV dock with an in-space, unmanned shuttle and complete shuttle missions, such as a Hubble servicing mission, then undock, let the shuttle make its way home (or, in an unfortunate, but no longer life-threatening event, crash) and the CEV, with crew, would return to earth safely (as I can't recall a SINGLE EVENT where a capsule has burned up and people have died in reentry.)
Anybody know why this hasn't been suggested, at all? I think it may be cheaper and faster, certainly if we'd done this after the Columbia disaster, but even fi its not, it allows us to keep on using the shuttle for YEARS relatively cheaply.
Tim
sooner or later gives you shit... ;-)
Oh well, what the hell...
is to sit on a panel and bitch and complain and nitpick and attack people who actually do work.
So what the hell have they been doing for the last 2 1/2 years? They're still using the non-freon based foam for environmental reasons even though they have an EPA exclusion to use freon. They should have just gone back to the old foam formula and been back up to flight status in 6 to 12 months. As it is they essentially did nothing to improve the problem in 2 1/2 years because for some reason I can't fathom they won't go back the formula they know works, but instead slap on a bunch of other remediation fixes that didn't work.
Seriously someone should loose their job over this, someone high up that should have known to go back to the old formula which they've know since 1999 worked better.
Am I missing something? It would seem like a no brainer to go back to the freon formula. Especially since they fleet is on the fast track to be retired anyway -- then no more freon anyway.
Letter To Iran
Many is the excuse that NASA simply isn't getting enough money. They need passionate scientists that can construct the program as something taxpayers are interested in and demanding more support. It doesn't start with money, it starts with a vision.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Most of this work was under O'Keefe. Griffin will take a while to get hold of all this and change it, but the shake up is occuring. Thank God. O'Keefe was a disaster as he appointed a bunch of managers/politicians (read PHBs) under him rather than engineers.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=freon+s huttle+foam+nasa&btnG=Search+News
From the first site returned (and similar to several others)9 .htm
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAD0
If I'm misinformed, I'm not alone. Regardless of which exactly which formulas were used on which flights, we know that there are better formulas and we choose not to use them despite knowing how critical this is to a safe mission. Your facts have the stench of butt-covering and obviscation trying to deflect from the core fact that freon based foams should have been used when it was known they had suppior characteristics.
Letter To Iran
"I'd think private industry probably has a better system of checks&balances than most government agencies these days."
Oh, really?
Let's take a look at the methodology used by the FAA AND the aircraft industry to weigh the need for new safety systems.
A commercial aircraft crashes. The FAA and the aircraft manufacturer determine that a new safety device will be required that costs $100 Million USD in R&D, $5 Million USD per commercial aircraft installed, and $1 Million USD per aircraft for lifecycle maintenence -- for a total cost of (WAG) $2,000 Million USD. But the statisticians determine that the odds of the very same accident occuring again are 1 in 1x10^6, while the industry-wide accepted liability is figured at $2.5 Million USD per life lost. The break-even point for justifying the expense of the new safety device requires odds of 5 in 1x10^6, so the device never gets installed.
The commercial interests have weighed the cost (better safety) versus benefit (reduced liability exposure) and determined that this particular new safety device, which would save lives, really is not needed after all. Manned travel into space is a risky business, as it essentially puts the human body into a completely hostile environment with safety reliant upon 5 million components from 10,000 vendors who won their contracts by being the lowest bidders. That being said - I would still rather risk a flight on the STS (shuttle) to the ISS than on a commercial aircraft cross-country.
If you look at how small the budget is, compared to the (illegitimate) war in Iraq is costing and how much it will cost in the future. I reckon that an 'economy' based on how Earth runs in StarTrek would be great. I know that managers would be bored, coz everyone else would tell them to get stuffed :D
It must be pretty irritating for NASA to watch the reds sending their old heap of scrap up into space without a glitch since 1971. The Souyz is like an old truck while the shuttle is like a Ferrari, great tech but very delicate and error prone.
HTTP/1.1 400
No, it isn't. It's a direct reply to your question, which was, "why do so many news sources report the theory". That's the question I replied to, not the question about the foam. The fact that something is written up in a news story doesn't make it true.
[snip further rant]
You obviously still haven't read the CAIB report. I didn't bother to respond to your original message because it would be a waste of time until you've read the authoritative source already linked in a previous post. The issue of whether changes to the foam composition somehow made worse foam is completely moot, as you'll see if you ever actually read the CAIB report, because the foam that fell off columbia's ET was attached prior to the reformulation. The question of bad foam is worth studying, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the Columbia disaster. Tying the two together is nothing but junk science.
Your post is a rant about the evil EPA that makes a lot of assertions utterly without regard to the facts of the case. You ask leading questions like "do we have to bow to the...incentives to never find that environmental controls...do have negative...effects" which are pointless (the answer is obviously no) but which are intended to cast doubt on any conclusion that the columbia tragedy simply doesn't fall into that category.