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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.'"
the relatively short time between the 2003 loss of Columbia and the end of the shuttle program could avoid a repeat of such behavior.
So could replacing the shuttles. Even if we keep the basic design, make one or two that are built for more frequent service and toss the rest. The only reason to "end" the shuttle program is that it became stagant.
We are all just people.
god bless you all.
I first read the headline as "NASA Commemorates Space Shuttle Trajectories" and immediately saw (in my minds eye) a bunch of nerds in white collared shirts standing around toasting the outstanding flight paths of the last 25 years. What a strange thing to commemorate.
I thought the same thing. They should keep the vehicles and a single pad and launch them unmanned. It is a great capability.
an ill wind that blows no good
For the heroic efforts of the astronauts who died for enhancing our knowledge of the universe, I salute you all!!! I just wish our governments would turn to peaceful efforts and get the space program back into space -- and further than ever before.
We aught to get out of stupid wars, recover a little financial sanity and work on getting NASA going full tilt to warp drive...
With safe, cheap access to Earth orbit.
With a permanent human presence on the Moon.
With human exploration of Mars.
And with a long-range, focused, ambitious programme for human involvement in space exploration that will take us to all the major planets in our solar system, pushing science and technology for the benefit of the whole human race.
Sorry, I've been at the malt whisky.
Stick Men
They are already violating their own "rules". One important factor in both shuttle losses was the mindset of "We need to get this done, we don't have time to do it right." 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.
... that's just amazing.
Yet, NASA continues to insist it will retire the fleet not when it is actually good and ready to do so (i.e. when it is truly safe to, when the station is done, not just rushing to an arbitrary deadline) in 2010. Every time this is brought up, they say 2010.
Why, if they claim to have learned from these deadly accidents, are they continuing to be inflexible and continuing to cite the same hard date?
The correct answer is, "When the station has been safely completed according to all our rules, including safety requirements."
I've been a space buff for years and their repeated failure to learn even though they've lost THREE CREWS is mind-boggling. Going to a new design that doesn't have the design flaws (sidemount etc.) the Shuttle system does may help. But continuing to make the same mistakes, even after all this
i am a soviet space shuttle
Sorry, I've been at the malt whisky.
It's really unfortunate that in this day and age you'd have to qualify a beautiful sentiment like the rest of your post like that. There was a time in this country, and not too long ago where you could say something like that and not have to cover your ass.
I think what you said stands just fine on its own. If we really want to honor these people, we need to show them and the world in general that their sacrifice was not in vain. And the best way of doing that is to continue their work.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
'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.'"
In other words: "Basically, we're gonna keep on doing the same unsafe shit as always, but now it doesn't matter since the odds only seem to catch up with us every 20 years or so and the shuttle won't be around that long."
With that attitude, good luck finding suckers to strap into whatever manned launch vehicle is in use in the 2020's. Maybe they should just use humanoid robots that decade.
~Philly
Do not fly between Jan 27 and Feb 1, since all three accidents occur with in those days.
Let me clue you in. Rockets manned or otherwise are unsafe, and not as reliable as your laser mouse. They've taken unprecedented steps in recent shuttle missions to ensure the integrity of the ceramic tiles, the O-Ring debacle, rest assured, will not be repeated and Apollo was completely re-engineered with a herculean effort after the fire aboard Apollo 1.
After all the emotional and engineering investments that are made into the one vital manned program that NASA has left, I'm sure the last thing they want is to have to hear pessimistic snide remarks from the likes of you if disaster happens.
My parents have a time-share in Orlando during the first week of February. On our way to the time-share from the airport, on January 31, 2003, my parents told me and my siblings, "We have a surprise for you guys. We bought you tickets to Kennedy Space Center to see Columbia land tomorrow."
Columbia was due at about 9:16am, and the tour bus dropped us off at about 8:55am. There was a crowd of maybe 200 people outside the main entrance of the space center looking up at the sky and listening to mission control's updates on a speaker mounted outside. 9:16 came and went, and the PA system went silent. At about 9:25 my dad called my cell phone and told me that they had lost communication with Columbia.
At this point, we didn't know if they were going to close the space center to the public, so we redeemed our passes to get into the place. Kennedy staff members were crying, but they continued to be helpful. We made our way to the Shuttle Pavilion, where there was a feed from mission control indicating that there had been a "contingency," and that people who found parts of the orbiter should keep their distance due to potential hazardous materials.
As the day went on, people flowed to the Space Center. At 1:00 or 1:30 there was a ceremony at the astronauts' memorial, and the flag was lowered to half mast.
The tours of the facility were closed, but the displays, including the magnificent Rocket Garden, were available.
It was an unreal day, one I'll never forget. I could have learned a lot more about what happened at home on CNN, but I'm glad I was there.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
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.
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This will likely dash the hopes of those with a romantic outlook on space exploration, but for the foreseeable future robots will be able to explore space faster, cheaper, and better.
The complications with sending humans into space are all too obvious and too many to list here. In short, humans need to be packed inside an "earth simulation" wherever they go (air, food, water, exercise, sleep, protection from high-energy particles, etc). All that expense with very little, if anything, in return (from a scientific standpoint).
The advances in robotics and computers in the next ten years will convince you. Just to mention one feasible scenario off the top of my head, a robot on mars can record a highly detailed 3D model of its environment and send it to earth, where humans can get inside a computer simulation from the robot's point of view. The obvious issue is time lag, which is handled partly by the robot's "autonomous" mode and partly by a person sending commands via recording his actions in the virtual-reality simulation. This is already being done on a less sophisticated level.
Sending humans into space will not help us to discover warp drive technology. Robotics and computers are advancing at a good pace, while our knowledge of the fundamental laws of physics has been relatively stagnant. Barring some tremendous breakthrough in physics (like the discovery of a bug in the implementation of meatspace), humans will be confined to near-earth orbit for a long, long, time.
Take a station wagon and a Jeep, mash them together, and you get a vehicle that is too expensive to take into the woods, and is too inefficient and rolls over too often on the road. There was some blog that I read a couple years back that showed how it was financially cheaper to own both a family car and a Jeep Wrangler, than to own a certain SUV. Can't remember which one. Even if it proved more expensive to own both, the benifits of having the right tool for the job are always worth it.
so, you got your flying car yet? me neither :-(
These are all problems of Human Nature. Nobody "wants" to solve them, for all kinds of reasons. People flourish when there is a positive goal to work towards, however.
Perhaps GW should have overthrown the likes of Robert Mugabe instead of Saddam Hussein?
We need to explore. These things may look futile just now, but I assert that it is stupid to write off an entire avenue of research and exploration because people of limited imagination can see no benefit at present.
Political problems are never solved by sitting around for decades and centuries examining individual clauses in agreements and arguing over wording and punctuation.
Africa will have it's day, as soon as human greed is done with China and India.
In the mean time, while the petty dictators and politicians squabble over the decaying present, some of us would like something to look forward too. We'd prefer not to have to look for it in the bottom of a bottle of malt whisky.
Stick Men
...and another thing. I'm British. When I say "we" I mean "we humans," not Americans. I'm not saying that exploring space should be entirely up to you Americans, merely acknowledging the great work and sacrifice some of you have put in.
And yes, I agree, your country is terribly 200-year-ago when it comes to social policy.
Stick Men
The loss of the astronauts serves as a reminder that exploration is dangerous - and complacency kills. In absolute terms, or even as a percentage, the exploration of space has been made with remarkably fewer deaths than other explorations. The body count for exploring the world, the seas, and the polar regions dwarfs that of space exploration.
It's when we forget just how dangerous it is, that we get sharply reminded. Even more unfortunately, when the people who sent them there forget it. Even with the best of preparation, the absolute attention to detail, something you didn't think of can go wrong, or something can go wrong anyways. It's when you did think of it, blew off something, or just didn't bother and it went wrong that it's inexcusable.
The sad reality is that people are going to die exploring space. The goal is to make sure that they don't die because the people who sent them were complacent and more interested in CYA than in doing it right. Which is the lesson to take from the shuttle tragedies.
Having gone to schools honoring two of these men (Roger Chaffee Elementary and Virgil Grissom High), I've had a deep respect for the Apollo 1 crew my entire life. (There is also an Ed White Middle, and all three are in Huntsville, AL)
Indeed. For orbital operations there were few realistic ways to lose a crew on an Apollo flight, because most fatal accidents would have required multiple failures of redundant systems... a lot more ways when going to the Moon and back, but the shuttle doesn't do that so it's an invalid comparison.
Aside from the spectacular view and parlor tricks, why?
The single biggest technological hurdle keeping us from the rest of the universe is the cost of putting something in orbit.
The moon was a chuck of dust. We learned next to nothing from it, except that golfballs can be hit really, really far.
I'm far from impressed with NASA's manned lunar missions and their value, but if that's all you can see then it's a perception problem on your part. We do know a lot more about the early solar environment and how the Moon formed, the Lunar environment, what resources the Moon has, and even have a decent idea of what else lies in the Solar System.
Mars is almost equally barren and inhospitable. We can't fix the problems on our own planet, but we presume that we can terraform Mars into something people could live on easily?
Name an Earth problem "we can't fix". Seriously. Universal healthcare? It's been done. Education? Feeding the children? The US does both right IMHO. CO2 emissions? A lot of alternate technology is being developed at an adequate pace. And the disabled, disadvantaged? We are steadily improving their lot. There's a number of things that no longer generate disabilities (like diabetes) and we're steadily mitigating the effects of disabilities. At some point, we probably will figure out how to grow back limbs and fix (or at least render livable) most psychological problems.
It's unpopular to point out that we have a host of pretty important (and solveable) problems that need good minds and resources, but I don't care. Maybe some day slashdotters will start listening, learn that as a society we need to have some priorties, and stop abusing the moderation system to suppress opinions they don't agree with.
The thing that bugs me here is that we're supposed to pull money from NASA, while ignoring vastly larger sources like US Social Security or the Medicare/Medicaid programs which already are supposed to address these problems. And these problems are solvable. It's just a matter of putting in place good enough solutions.
By the way: for all of you who say we need human "space exploration" to escape and settle other planets- I hope you realize that, should it come down to doomsday and there are ten thousand seats available (seems kind of unlikely) and a world-wide lottery: you have a roughly 1:650,000 chance of getting a seat (assuming current earth population statistics.) That's assuming the tickets are distributed completely evenly, and those in government don't put themselves and their families first in line.
That's another reason why you don't wait till the last minute to put together a space industry.
Heard about the hundred-million-dollar school Oprah built in Africa, for African girls? The continent has a HUGE problem with disease in general, malnutrition- even access to clean water, and the idiot drops $100M on something that has questionable benefits. Friday morning, NPR had an interview with a woman who works for a health organization that works in Africa, and she described how AIDS is getting all the money in Africa. Her voice trembled when she said, "Babies don't die from being HIV positive. Babies die from diarrhea. Where is the money for fighting diarrhea?"
As another poster noted, you can't elimate corruption by throwing money at it. Disease, hunger, and the like in Africa is in large part due to failed, corrupt societies. I agree that Oprah has found a way to permanently change that. Africa may be difficult because of the large number of poor people, but it's at a similar stage to China and India at some point during the last century. My take however is that unless these societies clean themselves up, Africa will still be a basketcase at the turn of the next century. There will still be disease, hunger, and war. Throwing money at these problems now doesn't keep them away.
Frankly, I don't think that NASA does an adequate job. It should be doing far more t
In 2003 everyone said get rid of the space shuttle. It was too dangerous. Build a new launch vehicle.
Then the Earth science projects started getting cancelled. People started losing their jobs. It was time to bring global warming back. Now we suddenly needed those earth science projects. Those low Earth orbit projects the Clinton beurocrats said weren't doing anything for us actually were doing everything for us.
Then came new medicare entitlements, new social security entitlements. NASA's 2007 appropriations got cancelled in favor of new medicare bills. Now the Ares vehicles are on hold. The space shuttle is back. It's now seen as a victim of Dubya's stupidity. Flakey tiles, flakey boosters, and flakey managers are here to stay.
Don't forget that some of the people who are great at aeronautics might not be the best at educating or doctoring people. Just not all resources are equal.
NASA, which is and always has been nothing more than a civilian-esque slushfund on top of military appropriation and R&D budgets, accomplishes nothing for science or national defense that just directly funding science or defense wouldn't accomplish. The single usable accomplishment of the space program qua space program (as opposed to space program qua billion dollar R&D fund) is that we can now launch satellites cheaply in the private sector, and have no more need to do it through NASA.
I am deeply sorry so many astronauts have perished in the pursuit of the space program's mission, but their sacrifices do not add value to the space program. Indeed, one would normally assume that losing distinguished individuals as a "cost of doing business" would be a reason to cancel the business.
For your reference, here are the science projects Challenger was carrying when it had its accident. I challenge you to articulate a single reason why any of these were worth the sacrifice of a life:
1) Deploying the Tracking Data Relay-2 satellite, a process which is accomplished dozens of times per year without needing to send humans into space.
2) "Shuttle-Pointed Tool for Astronomy (SPARTAN-203)/Halley's Comet Experiment Deployable, a free-flying module designed to observe tail and coma of Halleys comet with two ultraviolet spectrometers and two cameras." This was a nail developed because we already had a hammer and needed something to bang on -- it could just have easily been done with an unmanned craft (and even if it couldn't, "Pictures of the tail of Halley's Comet" is something mankind can do perfectly fine without).
3) FDE Fluid Dynamics Experiment. No need for a human, and no real need for the experiment either.
4) Comet Halley Active Monitoring Program CHAMP (see #2, also 100% accomplishable from the ground).
5) Phase Partitioning Experiment (PPE)
6) three Shuttle Student Involvement Program (SSIP) experiments. These are essentially high-school science fair projects with low gravity added (i.e. the purpose is PR, not science as most of us would understand the term).
7) a set of lessons for Teacher In Space. This is another program which has no existence other than providing PR to justify continued funding for NASA. Plus for the price of one Teacher In Space we could afford a couple of hundred of Teacher In Inner City Classroom, where they would be at less risk (quiet, you, that isn't funny) and in a much better position to measurably improve education in this country.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
It should be news. It's better than complete apathy like it was throughout the 90s. This isn't commercial airline travel; with respect to space exploration, we're not even to 1492 yet.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
On January 28, 1986 I was a 12yo boy in Florida staring out of my math class day dreaming as a I watched that oh so familiar arc of light streak into the sky. I was a boy who had been building spacecraft with Legos since I was 4. I was never a normal boy. I always did things like build airlocks into my spacecraft. It just seemed obvious. From the time I was 4 my mother has been terrified that I would get my feet off the ground.
On February 1, 2003 I had given up my first career as a software developer and had returned to school at the University of Central Florida to study Aerospace Engineering. I was early in my second semester and I was sitting in the Engineering atrium between Engineering Buildings 1 and 2. I was studying Calculus (calc 2 specifically) and I looked up at the flat screen monitors hanging from the walkway. I was sitting there staring at the screens watching the multiple pieces of debris streaking across the Texas sky. I sat and paused but I didn't cry. Challenger had hardened that in me. I thought for a moment and went back to my text book.
On May 6, 2006 I graduated UCF with a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering. Two weeks later I had moved to Seattle and began working at Boeing on the 787 as a Systems Engineer. I spent my senior year mastering orbital mechanics and satellite design.
Am I there yet? No. But my own history has taught me two things: the road is long and others will be lost. Morbid? possibly.. But I never gave up a dream and I never will. Someday my career will take me there, to insure that I will do what I need to do.
For some people it is natural to dream and then move on. For others, that dream never quite dies.
Planetes
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promo Ad
"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" - Adolf Hitl
We've been sending people into space for half a century. Has this:
Given us universal healthcare? (Most of the rest of the industrialized nations have it. Please don't post "but universal healthcare often sucks" unless you've lived without ANY HEALTH CARE INSURANCE and needed health care.)
Helped us educate our children, and feed the poor ones?
Helped us cut CO2 emissions in industry and power generation?
Helped turn the disadvantaged (disabled, undereducated, homeless) into productive members of society - or at least fed, clothed, housed, and cared for them medically?
It's unpopular to point out that we have a host of pretty important (and solveable) problems that need good minds and resources, but I don't care. Maybe some day slashdotters will start listening, learn that as a society we need to have some priorties, and stop abusing the moderation system to suppress opinions they don't agree with.
I'm really interested in knowing who died and left you the spokesman for "we as a society". The last time I checked, I was as much of a member of "society" as you or anyone else is, and to be blunt, your list of concerns are mostly matters I don't give a shit about. I'll take a good space program over any of them any day.
As per the problems requiring "good minds" to solve them, may I remind you it isn't the obligation of the owners of those minds to provide you with the kind of world you want to live in. If you think those problems are urgent enough to require a solution, feel free to take a crack at them yourself. The rest of us have other priorities.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
The escape tower does not help with reentry failures, failures in orbit, or catastropic failure near max-q (the most likely place for a structural failure during ascent). About the only thing it is really good for is loss of enough engines that orbit cannot be acheieved or catastropic failure at fairly low speed. It only works in certain flight envelopes where aerodynamic loads would not still destroy the crew module or make parachute deployment impossible. The reentry system isn't designed for every possible reentry trajectory, and once you use the escape tower you've thrown away the engines you need to adjust your trajectory. If you use it at hypersonic speed in dense air, once the escape rockets are spent, you've got an unstable body pointing in the wrong direction. It won't stay that way for long before it turns into a pinwheel. I highly doubt that the reaction control system on Apollo could have stabilized it.
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