New Columbia loss report out today

On Tue, 20 Jan 2009 08:55:20 -0500, in a place far, far away, "Jeff
Findley" made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:


"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
hdakotatelephone...


Greg D. Moore (Strider) wrote:

You know, I've always wanted to capitalize my numbers. Don't ask me why,
but sometimes I figure SHIFT 1979 would be more approriate than just
plain old 1979. But every keyboard I try that on it comes out as !(&(.
Someone needs to fix that.


What's really spooky is that now we don't have to say "back in the last
decade" or even "back in the last century"... but rather "back in the last
millennia".
Boy, you want to talk about feeling _old_. :-D

Saying "back in the last millennia" when you mean back in the 1990's may be
accurate (to the measure of a millennia), it surely isn't precise.

Actually, it's back in the last millennium (singular).

From Fred J. McCall:
Stuf4 wrote:

:From Mary Shafer:: wrote:

: How's this for a major epiphany... *If you don't design your
: spacecraft with any way for your crew to survive a huge range of
: mishaps, when those mishaps occur then the crew is expected to die.
:
: Acceptable risks. *The nation has changed its attitude toward what is
: acceptable since the Orbiter was designed, including people here, but
: those of us in the community mostly haven't. *The STS was never
: intended to be perfectly safe. *Killing off a crew and losing a
: vehicle now and then was expected from the moment pencils first
: touched paper. *The same is true of aircraft, which is why the USAF
: has the Air Force Flight Test Center and the USN has the Naval
: Aviation Test Center.
:
: As I said in about 1989, perfect safety is for people who don't have
: the balls to live in the real world.
:
: Mary "Thirty years later and it's still the stone truth."
:
:Surely you're aware that egress systems *are* designed in from the
:beginning, even with the space shuttle. *Mercury, Gemini, Apollo,
:early Shuttle and even the X-15 were all designed with egress
:systems. *And Edwards and Pax River don't go around putting pilots in
:vehicles on hazardous missions without having a reasonable egress plan
:for when things go bad. *A great visual for this was that *piloted
:cruise missile testing where the dude strapped on top of the missile
:had a parachute. *It is not a plan for perfect safety. *It is a plan
:for reasonable safety.
:

It's not even a plan for reasonable safety. *Until the development of
0/0 ejection seats, there were big pieces of flight envelopes in early
jets that were simply considered non-survivable. *So yes, Edwards and
Pax River DID "go around putting pilots in vehicles on hazardous
missions without having a reasonable egress plan for when things go
bad". *This is why in the early days, they killed about 7 test pilots
a year.

Zero-zero covered you from brake release til sometime prior to
rotation speed. I don't see ACES II as all that huge an advance in
technology. But yes, they certainly killed a lot more crew dogs back
in the early days. It's quite depressing if you go around Edwards
with the realization that all those street names and such were named
after people who planted themselves.

Now as for whether you consider the egress plan to be reasonable or
not, I see it to be extremely important to analyze how well the
probability for catastrophic failure per regions of the flight
envelope matches the capability of the egress system to give you hope
of surviving such failure.

THAT is where I see a huge disconnect between even the dark days of
1940s-50s-60s flight test at Edwards versus the shuttle. Notice that
people like Mel Apt and Mike Adams perished while having some *hope*
of survival. There was an egress plan for large parts of their
envelope around where the situation went bad.

(Notice too that Edwards did not send school teachers and Congressmen
on board such flights.)

:AFTER you've made the decision that you aren't going to give your crew
:any hope of survival in that part of the envelope, it is incredibly
:stupid to put all of this report's effort into detailing how they
:died. *It reeks of adding insult to fatal injury.
:

Heaven forfend they actually try to LEARN anything from it!

The saddest part of that report is that they completely ignored the
biggest lesson learned: If you care enough about your space crews,
you will design your spacecraft for crew survival.

So what is that report actually trying to teach us? Put on your
gloves and helmet, close your visor, lock your inertial reels and
prolong your death. Right? So what does replacing those inertial
reels buy today's shuttle crews? Absolutely nothing in the Challenger/
Columbia regions of catastrophe, except a few extra minutes of
'entertainment' being fully aware that you have no hope of surviving.

I see extremely little value added by that report. And what substance
may be there strikes me as far outweighed by the salt-in-wound effect.

:Imagine that the NF-104 was built with no ejection seat. *Such a
:design decision (for whatever reason) would have made for a starkly
:different ending to that Chuck Yeager scene in The Right Stuff. *If
:the Air Force subsequently published a 400 page report on how they
:sifted through the rubble and performed months of simulations and such
:to determine exactly how Chuck died, that report would strike me as
:about as silly (tragically) as this latest NASA report.
:
:...or maybe I'm not giving Chuck Yeager enough credit here. *It's not
:hard to picture him insisting on a redesign of the egress system
:before strapping into such a death trap.
:

You're kidding yourself. *Yeager tended very much toward the "kick the
tires, light the fires, and GO" mentality. *He had an almost
preposterous confidence in his ability to fly his way out of trouble.

One thing he must get credit for is that he lived through it all. He
passed on opportunities like the space program. He passed on many
choices that led to a path toward death. Certainly there is a large
random element to his survival, but for all of the conscious choices
that he did make during his long career, it is hard to argue with the
fact that he is still around to this day to tell us about it.


~ CT

Stuf4 writes:

So what is that report actually trying to teach us? Put on your gloves
and helmet, close your visor, lock your inertial reels and prolong
your death. Right? So what does replacing those inertial reels buy
today's shuttle crews? Absolutely nothing in the Challenger/ Columbia
regions of catastrophe, except a few extra minutes of 'entertainment'
being fully aware that you have no hope of surviving.

Clearly, yes. Still, there are scenarios where small changes *can* help.
Think of a landing accident were working restraints can make the
difference between being injured and being dead. *Not* taking this data
from the Columbia accident and trying to learn from it would be silly.

Or think of the Challenger crew: If they would have had pressure suits
and chutes, they might have had a slim chance of survival. But even this
would have been torpedoed by non-working restraints if they would have
their necks broken or skulls smashed instantly.

To take such accidents as "test to destruction" and to try to learn as
much as possible from them is just reasonable. You can't do what you
can't but you can do what you can.


Jochem

--
"A designer knows he has arrived at perfection not when there is no
longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)" writes:

"Reunite Gondwanaland (Mary Shafer)" wrote in
message ...

No, it was a typo. I've never been very good at using the top line on
the keyboard.


You know, I've always wanted to capitalize my numbers. Don't ask me why,
but sometimes I figure SHIFT 1979 would be more approriate than just plain
old 1979. But every keyboard I try that on it comes out as !(&(. Someone
needs to fix that.

Stick to Baudot....

--
A host is a host from coast to
& no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX
Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433
is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433

OM wrote:

:On Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:08:05 +0000 (UTC), David Lesher
wrote:
:
:You know, I've always wanted to capitalize my numbers. Don't ask me why,
:but sometimes I figure SHIFT 1979 would be more approriate than just plain
:old 1979. But every keyboard I try that on it comes out as !(&(. Someone
:needs to fix that.
:
:Stick to Baudot....
:
:...If Bridgette was used as a spokeswoman for that mode, more guys
:would have been receptive to learning Morse.
:

Bridgette Baudot? Ouch!

"OM" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:08:05 +0000 (UTC), David Lesher
wrote:

You know, I've always wanted to capitalize my numbers. Don't ask me why,
but sometimes I figure SHIFT 1979 would be more approriate than just
plain
old 1979. But every keyboard I try that on it comes out as !(&(.
Someone
needs to fix that.

Stick to Baudot....

...If Bridgette was used as a spokeswoman for that mode, more guys
would have been receptive to learning Morse.

OM

***GROAN****

I liked that.....I really did.

OM wrote:

On Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:08:05 +0000 (UTC), David Lesher
wrote:

You know, I've always wanted to capitalize my numbers. Don't ask me why,
but sometimes I figure SHIFT 1979 would be more approriate than just plain
old 1979. But every keyboard I try that on it comes out as !(&(. Someone
needs to fix that.

Stick to Baudot....

...If Bridgette was used as a spokeswoman for that mode, more guys
would have been receptive to learning Morse.

groan

You owe me a keyboard.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

OM wrote:

On Thu, 22 Jan 2009 22:32:13 GMT, (Derek Lyons)
wrote:


...If Bridgette was used as a spokeswoman for that mode, more guys
would have been receptive to learning Morse.

groan

You owe me a keyboard.

...Isn't that like three of them now?

At least three.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

From Jochem Huhmann:
Stuf4 writes:
So what is that report actually trying to teach us? Put on your gloves
and helmet, close your visor, lock your inertial reels and prolong
your death. Right? So what does replacing those inertial reels buy
today's shuttle crews? Absolutely nothing in the Challenger/ Columbia
regions of catastrophe, except a few extra minutes of 'entertainment'
being fully aware that you have no hope of surviving.

Clearly, yes. Still, there are scenarios where small changes *can* help.
Think of a landing accident were working restraints can make the
difference between being injured and being dead. *Not* taking this data
from the Columbia accident and trying to learn from it would be silly.

I agree with that. And I don't see why simple recommendations like
that were not part of CAIB. Have a short sentence or two saying
"inertial reels did not function properly", "recommend replacement"...

....and spare us the extra verbiage of 'here's how we buffooned our way
through burning crew boot soles' (for no apparent productive purpose)-
parts of that 400-page embarrassment.

Or think of the Challenger crew: If they would have had pressure suits
and chutes, they might have had a slim chance of survival. But even this
would have been torpedoed by non-working restraints if they would have
their necks broken or skulls smashed instantly.

I wholeheartedly agree with that (and I've posted at length here in
the past to how close the 51-L crew was to surviving).

To take such accidents as "test to destruction" and to try to learn as
much as possible from them is just reasonable. You can't do what you
can't but you can do what you can.

I don't agree with that. I see it as completely pointless to pursue
the Columbia mess as an experiment in testing to destruction. Had
their boots been designed to withstand Mach 10+ heating, then yes, it
would be important to learn why they failed. Had the cabin been
designed to separate in a stable mode from a disintegrating orbiter,
then yes, it would be important to analyze its dynamics and figure out
why it tumbled.

Consider a car crash where a driver plunges off a canyon wall and
impacts fatally into a granite floor at 150 mph. I do not consider it
to be a smart exercise to spend big bucks analyzing why the airbag
didn't save her life, or why the inertial reel failed to lock, or why
the helmet and gloves were left in the passenger seat.

The incident is *so far out* of the region that is designed to be
survivable, and orders of magnitude more so for the -107 crew. That
isn't to say that NASA couldn't design a car that can survive a canyon
plunge. It would be easy to do. It's just that in the case of
shuttle, NASA decided that it wasn't worth the effort. But that
somehow reporting the details of the fatal consequences of that tragic
decision *was* a worthwhile exercise.


~ CT

"Scott Stevenson" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:27:43 -0600, Pat Flannery
wrote:


There was also a concern that the strike had damaged the pyros that
would release the parachutes. Admittedly, that was a concern that came
up once 12 reached its parking orbit, and the controllers had time to
think about things, and not at the time of the incident. But had they
been damaged, an abort wouldn't have helped them any.

Also, remember on 15, they had a parachute fail. If that one had
fouled one of the remaining two, I'm not sure what would have
happened, but I'm guessing that the CM wasn't designed for a one chute
landing.

take care,
Scott

I read somewhere, sometime ago, that the CM would survive a single
chute landing on water with the crew surviving perhaps with minor injuries.
The couches were designed to collapse and absorb the impact. I also
remember that Apollo 7 almost did not fly because it was using crew couches
from a Block I CM, and did not give much protection in a land touchdown. On
launch day the wind was blowing across pad in an inland direction. The wind
would not prevent a succesful launch, but if the booster failed in the first
moments of flight and the CM performed an abort, the CM would landed inland
on the hard ground, seriously injuring the crew (as if they did not have
enough problems).

I am typing from memory and may be wrong on the details, PLEASE, PLEASE
correct me if I am wrong.