NASA Commemorates Space Shuttle Tragedies

eldavojohn writes "Space.com is covering NASA's commemoration of the Apollo 1 crew & the last shuttle crews of both the Challenger and Columbia orbiters. The Apollo 1 crew was lost forty years ago yesterday to a fire while testing their spacecraft on a launch pad. From the article: 'While the nearly two decades separating NASA's three space disasters allowed room for the agency to grow complacent, the relatively short time between the 2003 loss of Columbia and the end of the shuttle program could avoid a repeat of such behavior.'"

Comments

Re:Lessons being forgotten already

[Y-Crate]

Challenger had to get off the ground as soon as possible. Columbia's loss was in part due to "we don't have time to check that" attitudes from those who could have looked for damage while the orbiter was still in orbit (i.e. photography from other spacecraft) and the assumption that there was no real problem. Challenger, yeah. Columbia? Not so much. Even if they did take the time to get satellite pics of the damage, there was nothing to be done. There was no feasible plan for rescuing the crew. Not enough fuel to fly to the ISS, not enough supplies for them to wait for Atlantis to be prepped for launch, and no means of resupplying them. NASA put all their eggs in one basket, and then broke the basket. Once that foam hit and they reached orbit, they were screwed. The shuttle is simply overly complex and delicate. The problem is more that they went out of their way to not find out if Columbia was OK. Engineers were worried and put in a routine request with the DoD to have one of their birds take a few shots of the orbiter, but NASA managers found out and had it canceled. They were adamant that everything was fine and there couldn't possibly be a need to take a closer look at what happened, despite the fact it wasn't any skin off their back to evaluate the situation further. It wasn't like they were really putting the DoD out in any way, they would have gladly taken some pictures and then resumed whatever it was they were doing with the satellite.

It was a case of "My theory is 100% infallible and don't you dare counter it even if it can be done effortlessly and for free"

Re:Lets hope NASA takes more from than...

[AugustZephyr]

I think this has more to do with the temperatures at launch site on those days than the date of the year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challen ger_disaster#Pre-launch_conditions_and_delays

Anticipating "Shuttle sucks/Apollo great" comments

[SETIGuy]

Before someone starts bemoaning how great and safe Apollo was compared to the shuttle, I'll say what everyone will subsequently ignore:

If the Apollo program had gone to 117 launches, the best (max likelyhood) estimate is that there would have been 15 loss of vehicle accidents with 30 crew lost. While the error in that estimate is large, there is no evidence that Saturn launch vehicles were any safer than the shuttle, and it's a better than 1-sigma bet that they would have been worse.