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Old January 30th 17, 05:27 PM posted to sci.space.history
Greg \(Strider\) Moore
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Default The Space Race was about Power Projection - Miles O'Brien

"Scott M. Kozel" wrote in message
...

On Sunday, January 29, 2017 at 8:48:04 AM UTC-5, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
says...

On Saturday, January 28, 2017 at 5:39:54 PM UTC-6, Stuf4 wrote:
My original speculation in this thread about how the shuttle
might have been used in brewing up any kind of attack plan
was referring only to the planners. It was their job to
dream up crazy things.


As it was, the only shuttles that were disintegrated happened
as a result of lack of care, rather than anything intentional.

Correct, they were management failures, not technological failures.


To be fair, middle level shuttle managers were put in a bad spot by the
higher ups. They had to manage what amounted to an experimental program
and pretend it was an "operational" program after five test flights.
The higher ups put a huge amount of pressure on middle management to
increase the flight rate. This created the management culture of "if
we're going to ground it, you have to prove to me it will fail", which
doomed the Challenger crew.

Middle managers were also forced to do this with a budget which was
smaller than it should have been. An example of this was right before
Challenger there was a distinct lack of spare parts. They were pulling
parts from recently returned orbiters so they could be installed on
another orbiter which was being prepared to fly. Imagine if you had two
cars and had to pull the cylinder head from one and install it on the
other when you wanted to use it. Insane, right?

To begin with, the SRBs ought to have been replaced with reusable liquid
boosters, but that would have been *quite* expensive to develop (which
is why SLS is still using solids). Other improvements, like non-toxic
OMS/RCS propellants and replacing the APUs and hydraulics with
electrically operated actuators would have improved the turn-around time
and reduced the risks to ground crews.


It was an avoidable disaster, they should not have launched on such a cold
day, and that precipitated the failure of the O-rings.


Except... the engineers thought they better understood the issue than they
apparently did and cold was only ONE of the issues. It wasn't JUST the cold
day, it was length of the cold-snap. AND the wind shear at the precisely
wrong time.

As Jeff says, really the proper solution was to stop launching. But,
engineers did what they're supposed to do: optimize to the best of the
ability given a bunch of competing variables. It's like the old cliché, "if
black boxes can survive plane crashes, why not build the entire plane that
way?" Well then the plane would be too heavy to fly.
NO system is perfectly safe. They're simply "safe enough". Safe enough
depends on a number of factors, including mission needs and outside
pressures.

Here, the outside pressures included a very real attitude that the shuttle
was an operational system. That was a bad attitude, but one well beyond the
engineers' ability to change.
They were asked, based on all the flight data various questions such as if
they thought they understood the problems and the issues.

Yes, the O-rings should NEVER have been compromised according to design.
BUT, the reality was, NO ONE was building SRBs this big. No one really knew
100% to get the system to operate as desired. So it became an issue of, "do
we understand HOW it's working, given the current design." They normalized
the deviance. The problem isn't that this necessarily happened (it happens
everywhere to some extent in engineering, especially cutting edge projects)
it's a matter of how much.


Columbia could have been saved; if they used ground based telescopes to
find the damage, then they would have had 2 weeks to come up with a patch
from either material on board or material sent up on an expendable rocket,
then EVAs to apply the patch. The ability to patch would have been
marginal, but they would have had a good shot at a safe landing.


If if if. Again, the bigger problem was the failure to stop and think.
Rather than solve the problem of foam/ice lose, they decided, "well we think
we understand the problem and we have missions to fly." Given the size of
the problem, perhaps the ONLY answer would have been to ground the fleet.
But that wasn't politically possible. Losing Columbia was a result of many
decisions, not just ones after launch.



--
Greg D. Moore
http://greenmountainsoftware.wordpress.com/
CEO QuiCR: Quick, Crowdsourced Responses. http://www.quicr.net