launch/no lauch decision with crew?

Happened to be watching something about Challenger on Discover which had
Roger Boisjoly on it.. anyway got to doing a little digging on the web and
stumbled across this snipped -

"Boisjoly subsequently won the Prize for Scientific Freedom and
Responsibility from the American Association for the Advancement of
Science. The final launch/no launch decision now rests with the
astronauts, and they have stopped two launches since the Challenger
disaster."

Which are the two launches mentioned?

regards
Paul
--
paul at spamcop.net

From Paul Hutchings:
Happened to be watching something about Challenger on Discover which had
Roger Boisjoly on it.. anyway got to doing a little digging on the web and
stumbled across this snipped -

"Boisjoly subsequently won the Prize for Scientific Freedom and
Responsibility from the American Association for the Advancement of
Science. The final launch/no launch decision now rests with the
astronauts, and they have stopped two launches since the Challenger
disaster."

Which are the two launches mentioned?


Not -107.



~ CT

Not -107.



~ CT
Well OBviously - since there was nothing wrong with the final launch
countdown what-so-ever.

From John (john2375):

Not -107.

Well OBviously - since there was nothing wrong with the final launch
countdown what-so-ever.

Nothing wrong? ET foam impact has been taken as an "acceptable risk"
from the very beginning of the program. One of those Russian Roulette
bullets turns out to be a foam bullet. Here's a link to the CAIB
report if you want to have a closer look at what they had to say:

http://www.caib.us/news/report/default.html

From p127 of CAIBvI, section 6.1 A HISTORY OF FOAM ANOMALIES:
________

One debris strike in particular foreshadows the STS-107 event. When
Atlantis was launched on STS-27R on De-cember 2, 1988, the largest
debris event up to that time significantly damaged the Orbiter.
....
Mission Commander R.L. "Hoot" Gibson later stated that Atlantis
"looked like it had been blasted by a shotgun."18 Concerned that the
Orbiter's Thermal Protection System had been breached, Gibson or-dered
that the video be transferred to Mission Control so that NASA
engineers could evaluate the damage.
....
Damage was concentrated outboard of a line right of the bipod
attachment to the liquid oxygen umbilical line. Even more worrisome,
the debris had knocked off a tile, ex-posing the Orbiter's skin to the
heat of re-entry. Post-flight analysis concluded that structural
damage was confined to the exposed cavity left by the missing tile,
which happened to be at the location of a thick aluminum plate
covering an L-band navigation antenna. Were it not for the thick
alumi-num plate, Gibson stated during a presentation to the Board that
a burn-through may have occurred.
_______




More from p122:
________

Discussion of Foam Strikes
Prior to the Rogers Commission

Foam strikes were a topic of management concern at the time of the
Challenger accident. In fact, during the Rog-ers Commission accident
investigation, Shuttle Program Manager Arnold Aldrich cited a
contractor's concerns about foam shedding to illustrate how well the
Shuttle Program manages risk:

On a series of four or five external tanks, the thermal insulation
around the inner tank … had large divots of insulation coming off and
impacting the Orbiter. We found significant amount of damage to one
Orbiter after a flight and … on the subsequent flight we had a camera
in the equivalent of the wheel well, which took a picture of the tank
after separation, and we determined that this was in fact the cause of
the damage. At that time, we wanted to be able to proceed with the
launch program if it was acceptable … so we undertook discus-sions of
what would be acceptable in terms of potential field repairs, and
during those discussions, Rockwell was very conservative because,
rightly, damage to the Orbiter TPS [Thermal Protection System] is
damage to the Orbiter system, and it has a very stringent environ-ment
to experience during the re-entry phase.

Aldrich described the pieces of foam as "… half a foot square or a
foot by half a foot, and some of them much smaller and localized to a
specific area, but fairly high up on the tank. So they had a good shot
at the Orbiter underbelly, and this is where we had the damage."
_________



....and Columbia's "nail in the coffin", so to speak, is found on p125:
_________

STS-113 Flight Readiness Review: A Pivotal Decision
....
The Board wondered why NASA would treat the STS-112 foam loss
differently than all others. What drove managers to reject the
recommendation that the foam loss be deemed an In-Flight Anomaly? Why
did they take the unprecedented step of scheduling not one but
eventually two missions to fly before the External Tank Project was to
report back on foam losses?
....
_________



Take this foam impact history and reconsider the original quote at the
top of this thread:

"The final launch/no launch decision now rests with the
astronauts, and they have stopped two launches since the Challenger
disaster."

....and see how much glowing praise you want to give the astronaut
corps.

Remember, this is the same organization that pushed so hard to get the
exorbitant MEDS upgrade, even if it meant that the Wing Leading Edge
MMOD upgrade fell below the funding cutoff line.


I fully expect that there were astronauts who protested such backward
priorities. But they clearly failed to protest *enough*. This was
the same failure of Roger Boisjoly. And we have 14 dead astronauts as
a result.


....so let's give them prizes and awards and move on. That's just
peachy.

When the astronaut office gets absolved from culpability in -51L and
-107, then they learn that they don't have to be accountable for these
mistakes.

....unless, of course, they happen to be riding on that particular day.
Ironically, Willie McCool was heavily involved in the MEDS upgrade.
I have a hunch that sometime after viewing the "launch anomaly", he
had a wish that he could have traded in his MEDS for stronger WLEs.






I just now had the strange thought that "WLEs" can be pronounced
"willies". How horribly sad.


~ CT

(Stuf4) wrote in
om:

Remember, this is the same organization that pushed so hard to get the
exorbitant MEDS upgrade, even if it meant that the Wing Leading Edge
MMOD upgrade fell below the funding cutoff line.

At least you are honest enough to include the "MMOD" acronym with the name.
That's good for partial credit. For the rest of the credit, how about
telling us:

1) What MMOD stands for
2) What this particular WLE MMOD upgrade would have involved

and most importantly:

3) Why this particular upgrade would have been utterly useless in the STS-
107 entry scenario.

...unless, of course, they happen to be riding on that particular day.
Ironically, Willie McCool was heavily involved in the MEDS upgrade.
I have a hunch that sometime after viewing the "launch anomaly", he
had a wish that he could have traded in his MEDS for stronger WLEs.

There was no WLE upgrade, either proposed or in-work prior to STS-107, that
would have prevented the 107 accident. You are postulating a false choice
here.

There are proposed WLE upgrades now, but even those do not come close to
the level of impact resistance required to resist a 107-size impact. They
are intended to protect against small impacts, with the assumption that
larger ones would be handled by either in-orbit repair, or by ISS safe
haven.


--
JRF

Reply-to address spam-proofed - to reply by E-mail,
check "Organization" (I am not assimilated) and
think one step ahead of IBM.

From Jorge:
Remember, this is the same organization that pushed so hard to get the
exorbitant MEDS upgrade, even if it meant that the Wing Leading Edge
MMOD upgrade fell below the funding cutoff line.

At least you are honest enough to include the "MMOD" acronym with the name.
That's good for partial credit. For the rest of the credit, how about
telling us:

1) What MMOD stands for
2) What this particular WLE MMOD upgrade would have involved

and most importantly:

3) Why this particular upgrade would have been utterly useless in the STS-
107 entry scenario.

Each of your three points have been covered extensively and are
available in the archives. A quick GoogleGroups search on [stuf4
meteoroid] will give direct hits, so to speak. And here's a link if
you want to go to my first post on the topic:
http://tinyurl.com/2kd8v

...unless, of course, they happen to be riding on that particular day.
Ironically, Willie McCool was heavily involved in the MEDS upgrade.
I have a hunch that sometime after viewing the "launch anomaly", he
had a wish that he could have traded in his MEDS for stronger WLEs.

There was no WLE upgrade, either proposed or in-work prior to STS-107, that
would have prevented the 107 accident. You are postulating a false choice
here.

False choice? For all I know, Willie could have been wishing to have
his teddie bear to hold on to. I would see nothing false about that.

No one is saying that upgraded WLEs would definitely have saved
Columbia. The point was that it would have been a safety improvement
designed to help deal with a known threat. And that MEDS was a tragic
misprioritization of limited funding.

Your rebuttal strikes me as curious...

Perhaps you support the strategy of taking a widely known threat, and
then neglecting that to invest huge sums of money into upgrading a
cockpit that has been of little safety concern to pilots and
engineers.

Perhaps you support Gehman's decision to *not mention* the cancelled
WLE MMOD upgrade in his "extensive" report.

Now if instead you, like many NASA engineers, see MEDS to have been a
horrible waste of money... and that you see it as a gross oversight
for Gehman to fail to mention the WLE MMOD upgrade in his report, then
I would find it refreshing for you to voice agreement here.

There are proposed WLE upgrades now, but even those do not come close to
the level of impact resistance required to resist a 107-size impact. They
are intended to protect against small impacts, with the assumption that
larger ones would be handled by either in-orbit repair, or by ISS safe
haven.

No one is arguing for making a perfectly indestructible shuttle. The
issue here is smart funding decisions vs fatal funding decisions.

There are many people throughout NASA who recognize MEDS as a tragic
waste. I expect that Gehman himself was profoundly baffled when he
learned about the wing upgrade getting cancelled, and *why*.

We could go all the way back to the fatal design decision of not
giving the shuttle a crew escape module. But that mistake happened
back in the early 70s. The MEDS funding just happened to be the one
that Willie got heavily involved in.


~ CT

Nothing wrong? ET foam impact has been taken as an "acceptable risk"
from the very beginning of the program. One of those Russian Roulette
bullets turns out to be a foam bullet. Here's a link to the CAIB
report if you want to have a closer look at what they had to say:


What I mean is, during the countdown leading to the launch of STS-107,
there was nothing wrong - ET foam impact could not be predicted during
the countdown - Husband and McCool couldnt' look out the window and
say "oh ****, looks like the bi-pod ramp foam may fall and I think
this time it may hit one of the RCC panels - OK, 'Houston, HOLD THE
COUNTDOWN!'"

"John" wrote in message
om...

Nothing wrong? ET foam impact has been taken as an "acceptable risk"
from the very beginning of the program. One of those Russian Roulette
bullets turns out to be a foam bullet. Here's a link to the CAIB
report if you want to have a closer look at what they had to say:


What I mean is, during the countdown leading to the launch of STS-107,
there was nothing wrong - ET foam impact could not be predicted during
the countdown - Husband and McCool couldnt' look out the window and
say "oh ****, looks like the bi-pod ramp foam may fall and I think
this time it may hit one of the RCC panels - OK, 'Houston, HOLD THE
COUNTDOWN!'"

I'd be really scared if they could look out the window and see the bipod
ramps. :-)

In article , Paul
Hutchings wrote:

"Boisjoly subsequently won the Prize for Scientific Freedom and
Responsibility from the American Association for the Advancement of
Science. The final launch/no launch decision now rests with the
astronauts, and they have stopped two launches since the Challenger
disaster."

Which are the two launches mentioned?

Hmm. Jenkins lists many, many scrubbed or delayed launches, almost
invariably due to last-minute techical hitches ("that computer's dead,
go fix") or waiting for a break in the weather.

There are none explicitly given as due to crew decisions, at least not
on a quick read-through; there were a few particularly small problems
which caused a hold or a scrub, however, and it's quite possible that
the crew had the final say in not flying. Someone probably does know...

--
-Andrew Gray