Author Topic: PBS Nova: Space Shuttle Disaster  (Read 31398 times)

Offline pathfinder_01

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Re: PBS Nova: Space Shuttle Disaster
« Reply #40 on: 07/01/2011 03:44 pm »
Hog another aspect is human nature. The shuttle had been hit with foam on every launch yet managed to land safely over 100 times till the accident.

It is sort of like ignoring that strange noise coming from your car until one day it breaks down or not replacing the batteries in your smoke detector till one day you have a fire. They did not appreciate the danger and the only way to gather data was not that appealing.
You could have ordered pictures taken from satellites and ground telescopes.

One problem is that in the past whenever they took this action the pictures in the past they never resolved anything. I kind of doubt the hole would have been easy to see from ground or space.

You could order a very risky spacewalk. This would have been the best way to do it. Unfortunately Columbia didn’t have the robot arm and the area you need to inspect isn’t easy to get to (and even inspecting it risks damaging the shuttle’s heat shield.) When I saw an animation and description of this spacewalk, I wasn’t so sure I would have to guts to order someone to do it unless I was 100% sure that there was danger.

Offline Blackstar

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Re: PBS Nova: Space Shuttle Disaster
« Reply #41 on: 07/01/2011 04:25 pm »
How do you feel NASA treats it's foam issues now?  Do you feel that they have band-aided it just enough to make it to the end of STS?

I'm going to start with a caveat: the simple answer is that I don't know.  One of the things that bugs me about forums like this one, as well as blogs and particularly commentary on blogs, is that quite often people voice their opinions with almost no knowledge of what is really going on.  I've been in situations where I've sat in meetings where decisions were made and gotten tons of knowledge and understood what was happening, and then I read somebody post on the net that they think it happened because of X or Y, and they're completely off-base.  I try to warn myself to be cautious every time I go and voice an opinion about something where I have little direct knowledge (which is, like all of us, about 99% of the time).

I haven't been involved in anything remotely shuttle-related since the CAIB, so the reality is that I don't know how they treat foam issues.

However... I will say that it was blatantly obvious after the CAIB report came out that the agency DID take foam issues totally seriously.  They spent tens of millions of dollars--if not more--trying to understand foam liberation and related issues.  They put as much effort into it as they possibly could.  They now claim that they know exactly why foam still comes off the tank.  And they claim that they've done everything physically possible to prevent that from happening during the dangerous part of the ascent.  And it is clear by their various actions that they've been very cautious.  So, even though I don't have any inside knowledge, I think they've probably done all that they can do.

But that leads to the next question--what else is there?  Is there something else that they're missing?  Maybe something associated with the software or the SSMEs?  Dunno.

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