Yeah lumber sizes can be a bitch. But where i live we still have lumber yards with there own saw mills. You can get modern sizes, but you can also get anything you dream. They carry normal ruff sawn lumber there thats is around 2x4 but it varries. But if your working on a old house you just take them the sizes of your studs and they will cut and plan them to your size for not a whole lot extra. And they can do pretty much any size. Say you need a 12x7.5 in barn beam 25 feet long. They can do it, though you may need to supply the tree. I suppose if you live in a city such a place would be hard to find, but I know this place has people drive for over an hour to go there.
Frankly I just can't picture going to a lowes or home depot for lumber, they just don't seam to have what one needs. Many people feel this way, or it is just it is that way. I think many of you classic lumber yards are in no worry about chain stores because of this.
Actualy us engineers tend to make sure stuff never hits the dumpsters. Actully a good source is anything that sits in the halls on a campus marked for salvage. 4am smorgus board
I have some knowlegde on trains. I have worked on series hybrid vehicles that work on the same basis of trains, only the vehicles have batterypacks where trains do not.
Your right trains are electric drive. And it's that low speed torque that alows them to get moving. I don't know the power rating for the motors though. The engine in them are normal a massive 2 cycle 16 cylinder diesel engine that puts out around 5000 hp at 1000 rpm. GE is the main maker of trains, with GM the second big maker. GE's website has a fair bit of info on them last time i looked.
>>Perhaps you'd care to go into more detail as to how an electric motor produces ANY torque when it's NOT moving.
Your thinking power
P=power T=torque r=moment arm F= Force w=angular velocity
T=Fr P=Tw
If I grab hold of a lever and pull on it and it doesn't move I'm appling a force to it, and the lever has a lenght, this would be it's radius from it's pivot point, or mount. I'm not moving it but I am causing a torque about it. Now when I start moving it, and it revolves around it's pivot i'm still applying the torque as before, but now I have an angular velocity. Now there is an amount of power I am applying.
In theroy Electric motors can put out full torque at zero rpm. If I put a arm off the end of the motor and had it hitting a block, if the block required 500N of force to move it, but the motor only could produce 499Nm of torque and the arm was 1 meter long it would not move the block, but it would still be at full torque.
Now in reality do to efficencies and stuff motors don't always have so much torque at zero rpm, but the do still have massive amounts of low end torqu at very low speeds. This is why EV's can accel. so fast. Also one of the reasons electric motors are nice in machine apllications.
>> I went to a school that used MAC addresses to "register" your computer on the network (well get anything not local to the school). If you did swap out a card and needed to get the new one to work, you call them, they clear your entry, and then you go to this registration page on the school's web page that let's you register (it grabs the # of the nerw NIC for you)
Indeed penn state does this. It was anoying since i switched computers and cards some, and since they tied you to your room jack you had few options. But it makes good sence. They can know whats going on. The only big down side was if you lived on campus and say had a laptop you wouldn't be able to connect at the library since your using your one connection. At any rate these type of restriction are nothing new. I think most schools do this. And for good reason. The network when i lived on campus was ground to a halt, partly by to much ussage and partly by old crap hardware. After much bitching some of the hardware was upgraded. But still, yes students paid a lot for these highspeed connection. But just because you paid for it doesn't mean that gives you full right to ruine it for others. When people paid for highspeed and can't even check there email there is a problem. and it's people who think they pay for it so they should be able to use every last byte.
>> You had something to put the punchcards in? I had to play tetris with the punch cards. Whenever I cleared a row I ripped them up or burned them. I had to tape punch cards together to make the pieces. Hurt like hell at level 9.
In my day we had to click an installer and then click start/programs/tetris
>> Another difference- Iraq is under orders from the United Nations to prove that it has disarmed, and so far (12 years) it hasn't cooperated. The United States is under no similar order from the UN.
If I say to you you have to prove your not an alien or you didn't smoke pot when you were 17 or i will kill you, your screwed. Those resolutions are an impossible thing. You could never come up with a way to prove you didn't do it or arn't. What ever you try to useto prove innocense I can just say is a lie or a fact or your hiding something. Thats why they wrote those resolutions that way. Because it's impossible for them to prove they don't have weapons. If they let use swarm the country and look at everything and do eveyrthing they can to prove it to us they have nothing we would still come back and say they are hiding something, or similar. It's a resolution to fuck a country no matter what.
>> yea and liberals who loved clinton going into kosovo because he was freeing people from a dictator now think the US has no right to police the world..
If Bush wants to go into Iraq on the basis that Hussian is a barbarian and killing all his people that would be fine, and he would get lots of support. Heck just saying we are going in because Iraq shot down some of our planes in the no fly zone would be good. But no Bush is using the case for war that no one is down with. All he does is make the US look like some dumb blood thirsty war country. Just because it's Bush's destiny to have a war with saddam doesn't mean the world should just let him. I'm sure Saddam has weapons to, but to go around trying to get him on anything to launch a war when we can't even come up with anything big is nuts. You don't go in and have a war based on what you think, and play prove it so later. You have a war on what is blattenly obvious. If Bush simple re-directed his attack on being human rights issue he would get support. But instead he goes for weapons we don't see, tries to connect Iraq to ben-laden which makes no sence and is no proof, and tries to make it sound like without Iraq's oil the Western world will collapse. Also wanting to have a war just to distract people from a piss poor economy of his doings, and to try to boost approaval numbers is going to backfire.
People will support him if he does it for the right reasons.
>> Perhaps a more '2000' reality based vampire show is in order, where the vampires vote each other off the show:)
Unfortently, there would be many ugly vampires that you wouldn't want to see in a tight cape. And there would be some really anoying one, like stuck up, or arrogant. Though the backstabbing could take on a whole new perspective.
The best way to honor it is to let it keap going. Just cause we haven't heard from it or won't doesn't mean it's job is done. It's out there and traveling even if all systems are dead. Some day something will find it. That's another part of it's mission. You wouldn't pull the statue of liberty down and put it in a mueaseum because it's done a good job. It's still doing it's job. Yeah I would like to see it to, but it's busy working right now.
>> 2 million years eh? Ok, here's a thought to ponder. Think some...thing from Earth will go get it before it gets to the next local star?
Very good chance, though i think by pass you mean go farther out. I just can't see one pulling up and going by it in the passing lane. Make for fun video though.
Anyways. This is the problem with earth ship ideas and such. You build a huge ship and start leaving earth today, then 10 years later another group does. They by then have developed a faster earth ship, and soon pass you by. Thus you wasted years in space you could have been on earth.
We have much faster probes today. Ion engine powered one could probably catch up to it fast. I remember a TLC episode or similar talking about them and how fast they go. They don't start fast but they just keap accelarating forever (pretty much) so they hit insane speeds. The thing we sent to that astoroid and landed on had an ion engine. It traveled way faster then anything else we ever put out there.
You can take your own, just gonna need one big telephoto:)
Actully would be a fun thing to try. They find astoroids out that far, but then again they are far bigger then Pioneer 10. But just for a challenge just see if anyone can locate it as is, via photo observation or some sort of detection system. I'm sure it could be done, but it would be one very hard challenge.
>> It makes me feel old to know that I was alive when this thing launched!
Makes me sad to know i missed it's launch, and moon landings, and everything fun. Only think I got is launch of the POS.... I mean Shuttle. And the mars pathfinder. NASA back in the day built stuff that went above and beyond the call of duty (granted at a huge cost) and now their stuff can't even get through a mission, without crashing into a planet or becoming lost.
well the computer had to be taught how to do square root of 1337, if you worked at it a lot i'm sure you could do it in your head. I'm sure there are people who can.
What you forget is all the automatic things the brain computers.
Picture throwing a ball from atop a hill to a person below who is running and there is a wind coming from the north and some rain falling. A human can just pick up a ball and throw it to the person below and get it right on or very close. Your mind does all those computations without you even thinking. Think of all the classes you might have taken in physics to try and figure out how to do it. Even then with your very own brain which computes it automaticly you struggle to solve it and and use a calculator and all sorts of info and equations and laws we have figured out. But you brain can just do it. The simple reason is we don't think like out brain works. We don't think in it's language. If we could actully use the processing power your brain uses for automatic things we could do some impressive things. This is probably how some people are very smart and very good at intuitive guess on things. They are able to use their natural computer more effectively by some means they probably don't know.
Re:NASA needs more people, not LESS
on
More on Columbia
·
· Score: 1
>> The truly sad part of the Challenger 'catastrophic disassembly' was this: on first ignition of the SRBs, a huge plume of solid fuel was seen ejecting from a massive leak in an o-ring seal. No one saw this, of course, because the images were taken on FILM! Not processed till later, when it did absolutely no good except to verify why the accident occurred. If ONE PERSON had been watching a -live- monitor, the flight could have been aborted safely.
Well not really. You can't turn the SRB's off, so once it's going your in for the ride, even if you haven't left the pad yet (since SRB lighting and launch are one in the same). thats why they fire up the main engines first and make sure there running good, then they light the SRB's and they are off. They want to make sure all the engines are going. After launch there is the possibility of doing a crazy Emergance seperation. I belive this is planned, but the odds of pulling it off are low. Just try to picture the shuttle blowing off the SRB's at a few thousand feet and trying to manuver to land, it wouldn't be pretty. Yes it's better then nothing but still. The SRB's are by far the biggest suck factor on the shuttle. They have no mercy.
The biggest factor on the challenger is it just shouldn't have gone up. The idea of no one watching the tape bothers me much less then the heads ignoring the engineers.
yeah, i almost put the whole only 2 people would go up part in there and forgot. I messed up. Also good point on the blowing the last guy out the escape hatch. I don't know if they have a way to de-pressurize the cabin though. You woulnd't want to just blow that hatch. You'd probably tear the ship to shreads trying to get out doing that. Thus destroying yourself. Or you would get sucked out of it and flung into who knows where.
I would think NASA has thought this through a whole lot, I think if they thought it was a feasible plan they would have done more with investigating and implementing it.
I did read the article and i read those. But as NASA has pointed out before they all ready try to take the best path and such they can. The reentry angle is very risk and may even be worse then the way they came in. Now your over loading one wing and the other is still screwed.
I also imaging any soaking they do is always done. The shuttle keaps it's top towards the sun and uses the bay doors as radiators. so i belive the tiles are always away from it. also the amount of heat you would have removed from the tiles verse the amount going in on re-entry is pretty insignificant. Yeah i'm sure they might try and get every little bit, but it would probably have no effect in this.
The article was ok but i would not read it as being absolute.
Re:nothing they could have done..
on
More on Columbia
·
· Score: 1
There is a few things you forget. NASA far as I know cannot support two shuttle flights at once. So Launching Atlantis would be very hard. Also If you just sent one shuttle up and it had something go wrong your not really going to want to send another up without figuring out how to make it not happen. You would then be risking 7 more astronauts. Finaly even if you get columbia up How are you going to get people over to atlantis? There is no shuttle to shuttle docking peice. The closest thing you could do is uses space suits back and forth. But there would be many problems there to. Many of them probably had no space suit training, getting the two shuttles close enough would be very tricky. You would need some sort of tether or something to get them from one to the other. Also there are only so many space suits on the shuttle. On this mission there may have been none since they didn't do space walks. So you would have to get them to them somehow. Also how would the last person get out of colombia without someone inside to work the air lock. I don't even think columbia had a hatch to space for this mission. I belive it had one of the science labs on board. So there would be no air lock to go through.
NASA has said many times there is no systems in place to be able to do such a mission. It's just not something that could be done.
Shit happens. That's reality. Things are going to go wrong. Once that thing left the pad, (and at that point everything seamed as right as could be) there is nothing any engineering analysis could do. Even If they had worked 24/7 for the flight with every engineer at boeing and NASA working the issue and they had found there would be a problem there is nothing they could have done. The could have thought about it for the flight or have thought about it for 5 minutes and went to lunch, it would have had the same results. Everything will fail in time. And complexity accelerates this. NASA has list of plenty of single failures that will doom the shuttle.
Far as engineers saying something during the flight in emails. Well I could send out lots of emails saying it will blow up every time it goes up. Some day I would be right, but that wouldn't mean I warned them. If an engineer thought differant about the sitution it doesn't mean NASA ignored them and some is at fault. There were others who didn't agree with him. NASA has to make a call, and the might make the wrong one. This wasnt' preventable far as we know. Maybe it will come back to being some pre-flight thing that was done wrong of neglected, then it's differant, but if it's something that went wrong after launch it very well may be no ones fault. Things like challenger were differant. There engineers told officals before launch about the O-rings. Bulk of the engineers knew there was an extremely high chance it would fail on that day. When it blew they didn't even have to ask why it failed, they knew. They just had to investigate to show they were right. That was a preventable accident that was the fault of not listening to engineers.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah lumber sizes can be a bitch. But where i live we still have lumber yards with there own saw mills. You can get modern sizes, but you can also get anything you dream. They carry normal ruff sawn lumber there thats is around 2x4 but it varries. But if your working on a old house you just take them the sizes of your studs and they will cut and plan them to your size for not a whole lot extra. And they can do pretty much any size. Say you need a 12x7.5 in barn beam 25 feet long. They can do it, though you may need to supply the tree. I suppose if you live in a city such a place would be hard to find, but I know this place has people drive for over an hour to go there.
Frankly I just can't picture going to a lowes or home depot for lumber, they just don't seam to have what one needs. Many people feel this way, or it is just it is that way. I think many of you classic lumber yards are in no worry about chain stores because of this.
Actualy us engineers tend to make sure stuff never hits the dumpsters. Actully a good source is anything that sits in the halls on a campus marked for salvage. 4am smorgus board
I have some knowlegde on trains. I have worked on series hybrid vehicles that work on the same basis of trains, only the vehicles have batterypacks where trains do not.
Your right trains are electric drive. And it's that low speed torque that alows them to get moving. I don't know the power rating for the motors though. The engine in them are normal a massive 2 cycle 16 cylinder diesel engine that puts out around 5000 hp at 1000 rpm. GE is the main maker of trains, with GM the second big maker. GE's website has a fair bit of info on them last time i looked.
>>Perhaps you'd care to go into more detail as to how an electric motor produces ANY torque when it's NOT moving.
Your thinking power
P=power
T=torque
r=moment arm
F= Force
w=angular velocity
T=Fr
P=Tw
If I grab hold of a lever and pull on it and it doesn't move I'm appling a force to it, and the lever has a lenght, this would be it's radius from it's pivot point, or mount. I'm not moving it but I am causing a torque about it. Now when I start moving it, and it revolves around it's pivot i'm still applying the torque as before, but now I have an angular velocity. Now there is an amount of power I am applying.
In theroy Electric motors can put out full torque at zero rpm. If I put a arm off the end of the motor and had it hitting a block, if the block required 500N of force to move it, but the motor only could produce 499Nm of torque and the arm was 1 meter long it would not move the block, but it would still be at full torque.
Now in reality do to efficencies and stuff motors don't always have so much torque at zero rpm, but the do still have massive amounts of low end torqu at very low speeds. This is why EV's can accel. so fast. Also one of the reasons electric motors are nice in machine apllications.
Well I have had my name on slashdot for like 3 years, long before this. It was suppose to be DoughnutShapedUniverse but that didn't fit.
Homer Simpson was right
>> I went to a school that used MAC addresses to "register" your computer on the network (well get anything not local to the school). If you did swap out a card and needed to get the new one to work, you call them, they clear your entry, and then you go to this registration page on the school's web page that let's you register (it grabs the # of the nerw NIC for you)
Indeed penn state does this. It was anoying since i switched computers and cards some, and since they tied you to your room jack you had few options. But it makes good sence. They can know whats going on. The only big down side was if you lived on campus and say had a laptop you wouldn't be able to connect at the library since your using your one connection. At any rate these type of restriction are nothing new. I think most schools do this. And for good reason. The network when i lived on campus was ground to a halt, partly by to much ussage and partly by old crap hardware. After much bitching some of the hardware was upgraded. But still, yes students paid a lot for these highspeed connection. But just because you paid for it doesn't mean that gives you full right to ruine it for others. When people paid for highspeed and can't even check there email there is a problem. and it's people who think they pay for it so they should be able to use every last byte.
Well maybe someone should alert the life on Europa that it's in doubt. It might want to know this, and adjust any plans it has.
>>A friend of mine is building a personal server.
:-)
I'm not sure I'd use the word friend after this. I hope he's not paying for his bandwidth!
Quote from the bottom of his page
"!!! THIS IS NOT MY SERVER !!!" So i think he is ok
So it's a P4 apple ][ ?
>> When TTS technology has near perfect recognition without need for training, is my guess.
I needed no training to recognize how to operate TITS...........oh no "I", never mind
>> You had something to put the punchcards in? I had to play tetris with the punch cards. Whenever I cleared a row I ripped them up or burned them. I had to tape punch cards together to make the pieces. Hurt like hell at level 9.
In my day we had to click an installer and then click start/programs/tetris
>> Another difference- Iraq is under orders from the United Nations to prove that it has disarmed, and so far (12 years) it hasn't cooperated. The United States is under no similar order from the UN.
If I say to you you have to prove your not an alien or you didn't smoke pot when you were 17 or i will kill you, your screwed. Those resolutions are an impossible thing. You could never come up with a way to prove you didn't do it or arn't. What ever you try to useto prove innocense I can just say is a lie or a fact or your hiding something. Thats why they wrote those resolutions that way. Because it's impossible for them to prove they don't have weapons. If they let use swarm the country and look at everything and do eveyrthing they can to prove it to us they have nothing we would still come back and say they are hiding something, or similar. It's a resolution to fuck a country no matter what.
>> yea and liberals who loved clinton going into kosovo because he was freeing people from a dictator now think the US has no right to police the world..
If Bush wants to go into Iraq on the basis that Hussian is a barbarian and killing all his people that would be fine, and he would get lots of support. Heck just saying we are going in because Iraq shot down some of our planes in the no fly zone would be good. But no Bush is using the case for war that no one is down with. All he does is make the US look like some dumb blood thirsty war country. Just because it's Bush's destiny to have a war with saddam doesn't mean the world should just let him. I'm sure Saddam has weapons to, but to go around trying to get him on anything to launch a war when we can't even come up with anything big is nuts. You don't go in and have a war based on what you think, and play prove it so later. You have a war on what is blattenly obvious. If Bush simple re-directed his attack on being human rights issue he would get support. But instead he goes for weapons we don't see, tries to connect Iraq to ben-laden which makes no sence and is no proof, and tries to make it sound like without Iraq's oil the Western world will collapse. Also wanting to have a war just to distract people from a piss poor economy of his doings, and to try to boost approaval numbers is going to backfire.
People will support him if he does it for the right reasons.
>> Perhaps a more '2000' reality based vampire show is in order, where the vampires vote each other off the show :)
Unfortently, there would be many ugly vampires that you wouldn't want to see in a tight cape. And there would be some really anoying one, like stuck up, or arrogant. Though the backstabbing could take on a whole new perspective.
I never said it would be easy :)
The best way to honor it is to let it keap going. Just cause we haven't heard from it or won't doesn't mean it's job is done. It's out there and traveling even if all systems are dead. Some day something will find it. That's another part of it's mission. You wouldn't pull the statue of liberty down and put it in a mueaseum because it's done a good job. It's still doing it's job. Yeah I would like to see it to, but it's busy working right now.
>> 2 million years eh? Ok, here's a thought to ponder. Think some...thing from Earth will go get it before it gets to the next local star?
Very good chance, though i think by pass you mean go farther out. I just can't see one pulling up and going by it in the passing lane. Make for fun video though.
Anyways. This is the problem with earth ship ideas and such. You build a huge ship and start leaving earth today, then 10 years later another group does. They by then have developed a faster earth ship, and soon pass you by. Thus you wasted years in space you could have been on earth.
We have much faster probes today. Ion engine powered one could probably catch up to it fast. I remember a TLC episode or similar talking about them and how fast they go. They don't start fast but they just keap accelarating forever (pretty much) so they hit insane speeds. The thing we sent to that astoroid and landed on had an ion engine. It traveled way faster then anything else we ever put out there.
You can take your own, just gonna need one big telephoto :)
Actully would be a fun thing to try. They find astoroids out that far, but then again they are far bigger then Pioneer 10. But just for a challenge just see if anyone can locate it as is, via photo observation or some sort of detection system. I'm sure it could be done, but it would be one very hard challenge.
>> It makes me feel old to know that I was alive when this thing launched!
Makes me sad to know i missed it's launch, and moon landings, and everything fun. Only think I got is launch of the POS.... I mean Shuttle. And the mars pathfinder. NASA back in the day built stuff that went above and beyond the call of duty (granted at a huge cost) and now their stuff can't even get through a mission, without crashing into a planet or becoming lost.
well the computer had to be taught how to do square root of 1337, if you worked at it a lot i'm sure you could do it in your head. I'm sure there are people who can.
What you forget is all the automatic things the brain computers.
Picture throwing a ball from atop a hill to a person below who is running and there is a wind coming from the north and some rain falling. A human can just pick up a ball and throw it to the person below and get it right on or very close. Your mind does all those computations without you even thinking. Think of all the classes you might have taken in physics to try and figure out how to do it. Even then with your very own brain which computes it automaticly you struggle to solve it and and use a calculator and all sorts of info and equations and laws we have figured out. But you brain can just do it. The simple reason is we don't think like out brain works. We don't think in it's language. If we could actully use the processing power your brain uses for automatic things we could do some impressive things. This is probably how some people are very smart and very good at intuitive guess on things. They are able to use their natural computer more effectively by some means they probably don't know.
>> The truly sad part of the Challenger 'catastrophic disassembly' was this: on first ignition of the SRBs, a huge plume of solid fuel was seen ejecting from a massive leak in an o-ring seal. No one saw this, of course, because the images were taken on FILM! Not processed till later, when it did absolutely no good except to verify why the accident occurred. If ONE PERSON had been watching a -live- monitor, the flight could have been aborted safely.
Well not really. You can't turn the SRB's off, so once it's going your in for the ride, even if you haven't left the pad yet (since SRB lighting and launch are one in the same). thats why they fire up the main engines first and make sure there running good, then they light the SRB's and they are off. They want to make sure all the engines are going. After launch there is the possibility of doing a crazy Emergance seperation. I belive this is planned, but the odds of pulling it off are low. Just try to picture the shuttle blowing off the SRB's at a few thousand feet and trying to manuver to land, it wouldn't be pretty. Yes it's better then nothing but still. The SRB's are by far the biggest suck factor on the shuttle. They have no mercy.
The biggest factor on the challenger is it just shouldn't have gone up. The idea of no one watching the tape bothers me much less then the heads ignoring the engineers.
yeah, i almost put the whole only 2 people would go up part in there and forgot. I messed up. Also good point on the blowing the last guy out the escape hatch. I don't know if they have a way to de-pressurize the cabin though. You woulnd't want to just blow that hatch. You'd probably tear the ship to shreads trying to get out doing that. Thus destroying yourself. Or you would get sucked out of it and flung into who knows where.
I would think NASA has thought this through a whole lot, I think if they thought it was a feasible plan they would have done more with investigating and implementing it.
I did read the article and i read those. But as NASA has pointed out before they all ready try to take the best path and such they can. The reentry angle is very risk and may even be worse then the way they came in. Now your over loading one wing and the other is still screwed.
I also imaging any soaking they do is always done. The shuttle keaps it's top towards the sun and uses the bay doors as radiators. so i belive the tiles are always away from it. also the amount of heat you would have removed from the tiles verse the amount going in on re-entry is pretty insignificant. Yeah i'm sure they might try and get every little bit, but it would probably have no effect in this.
The article was ok but i would not read it as being absolute.
There is a few things you forget. NASA far as I know cannot support two shuttle flights at once. So Launching Atlantis would be very hard. Also If you just sent one shuttle up and it had something go wrong your not really going to want to send another up without figuring out how to make it not happen. You would then be risking 7 more astronauts. Finaly even if you get columbia up How are you going to get people over to atlantis? There is no shuttle to shuttle docking peice. The closest thing you could do is uses space suits back and forth. But there would be many problems there to. Many of them probably had no space suit training, getting the two shuttles close enough would be very tricky. You would need some sort of tether or something to get them from one to the other. Also there are only so many space suits on the shuttle. On this mission there may have been none since they didn't do space walks. So you would have to get them to them somehow. Also how would the last person get out of colombia without someone inside to work the air lock. I don't even think columbia had a hatch to space for this mission. I belive it had one of the science labs on board. So there would be no air lock to go through.
NASA has said many times there is no systems in place to be able to do such a mission. It's just not something that could be done.
Shit happens. That's reality. Things are going to go wrong. Once that thing left the pad, (and at that point everything seamed as right as could be) there is nothing any engineering analysis could do. Even If they had worked 24/7 for the flight with every engineer at boeing and NASA working the issue and they had found there would be a problem there is nothing they could have done. The could have thought about it for the flight or have thought about it for 5 minutes and went to lunch, it would have had the same results. Everything will fail in time. And complexity accelerates this. NASA has list of plenty of single failures that will doom the shuttle.
Far as engineers saying something during the flight in emails. Well I could send out lots of emails saying it will blow up every time it goes up. Some day I would be right, but that wouldn't mean I warned them. If an engineer thought differant about the sitution it doesn't mean NASA ignored them and some is at fault. There were others who didn't agree with him. NASA has to make a call, and the might make the wrong one. This wasnt' preventable far as we know. Maybe it will come back to being some pre-flight thing that was done wrong of neglected, then it's differant, but if it's something that went wrong after launch it very well may be no ones fault. Things like challenger were differant. There engineers told officals before launch about the O-rings. Bulk of the engineers knew there was an extremely high chance it would fail on that day. When it blew they didn't even have to ask why it failed, they knew. They just had to investigate to show they were right. That was a preventable accident that was the fault of not listening to engineers.