New Columbia loss report out today

On Jan 13, 9:14�am, Neil Gerace wrote:
Fred J. McCall wrote:
Yep. �The problem is we started treating the Shuttles like they
weren't experimental vehicles, putting teachers and such on them.

I think putting anyone on it is OK if they have the brains to acknowledge in advance that things can go wrong. You don't
have to be a test pilot to know that.

yeah BUT the astronauts fly assuming others are doing their job.

obviously challeger and columbia were management failures.

in both cases schedule pressure before safety.

both accepting critical one problems as routine maintence issues

O ring burning and foam loss

Pat Flannery wrote:

Since none of them locked, this was either a severe inherent design
flaw, or some endemic maintenance problem regarding them

ISTR from the report that a design flaw in the inertial reels was
strongly implied.

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

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

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

Pat Flannery wrote:

Derek Lyons wrote:

But then I've been in a semi dangerous profession where the chance of
getting killed was part of the allure - weaklings didn't make the
club.

Total fatalities in the US nuclear submarine force have been very low,
given the total number built and total number of hours spent at sea on
patrol.

Like the first 24 flight of the Shuttle - just because it didn't
happen, doesn't mean it can't or won't. And even though we didn't
lose any, we had a number of very close calls. (Used to be a website
documenting them, too bad it's gone.)

Now, you get aboard a _Russian_ nuclear sub sometime. ;-)
Their newest missile sub hasn't even started sea trials yet, and already
needs repairs to its reactor:
http://www.en.rian.ru/russia/20081230/119234378.html

Our sea trails (post overhaul) were delayed for weeks because a major
screwup (nothing dangerous, just something that had been done wrong)
and a number of materiel issues. It happens in something as complex
as a warship.

But you are right about the similarity between subs and the Shuttle;
both operate in environments very hostile to life, and in both cases you
can have something go very wrong in a big hurry that will be inevitably
fatal no matter what you do.
That collision of the San Francisco (SSN-711) with the undersea mountain
was a very close call:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US...drydock_Sm.jpg
I was just looking at that photo... that damage went clean back to the
port torpedo tube doors.
They were lucky the tubes weren't driven right back into the torpedo
room, flooding it... and probably the whole sub in short order after
that given the depth they were at when the collision occurred.

A friend of mine worked on reparing her at PSNS, and he agrees with my
original assesment - the difference between survival and loss came
down to a difference in damage to the bulkhead between the ballast
tanks that you could cover with your hands.

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

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

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

"Jeff Findley" wrote:

"Fred J. McCall" wrote in message
.. .
Yep. The problem is we started treating the Shuttles like they
weren't experimental vehicles, putting teachers and such on them.

Some of us remember the statement (and the argument it was made
during) and agree with it. At some point, it's time to kick the
tires, light the fires, and GO...

True. And if you look hard enough, you'll see that the STS is still being
tweaked. That just *screams* experimental vehicle.

The 747 is still being tweaked too. So is the 726 class submarine.

If you have to "look hard enough" to justify the designation of
'experimental vehicle' because of 'tweaks' - you're looking too hard.

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

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

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

In article ,
"Reunite Gondwanaland (Mary Shafer)"
wrote:

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."

Uh, Mary . . .

It's only 20 years later. But still the stone truth, of course.

--
Kathy Rages

"Derek Lyons" wrote in message
...
"Jeff Findley" wrote:

"Fred J. McCall" wrote in message
. ..
Yep. The problem is we started treating the Shuttles like they
weren't experimental vehicles, putting teachers and such on them.

Some of us remember the statement (and the argument it was made
during) and agree with it. At some point, it's time to kick the
tires, light the fires, and GO...

True. And if you look hard enough, you'll see that the STS is still being
tweaked. That just *screams* experimental vehicle.

The 747 is still being tweaked too. So is the 726 class submarine.

If you have to "look hard enough" to justify the designation of
'experimental vehicle' because of 'tweaks' - you're looking too hard.

The shuttle's design seems to be tweaked a bit after each flight. Something
gets added, or deleted, or modified.

Certainly 747's are still being tweaked a bit, but after each flight?

Jeff
--
"Many things that were acceptable in 1958 are no longer acceptable today.
My own standards have changed too." -- Freeman Dyson

Pat Flannery writes:


[...]

As the report mentions, when the vehicle was breaking up it was at very high
altitude and low atmospheric pressures, and two of the main components of
_that_ atmosphere are oxygen and atomic oxygen (ozone).

I think you've got your oxygen molecules mixed up (if atomic oxygen can
be said to be a molecule). Ozone is Osubscript3/subscript (i.e. a
molecule consisting of 3 oxygen atoms) while atomic oxygen is just O (a
single oxygen atom).

On Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:27:43 -0600, Pat Flannery
wrote:



Scott Stevenson wrote:
In a discussion in another group, I pointed out once that if you told
people today that we could go to the moon, but we'd kill one crew on
the ground, and almost kill a couple of others in flight,


Other than Apollo 13, what was the other close call? The lightning
strike on Apollo 12? If worse had come to worse, they could have used
the LES.

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

Chris Jones wrote:
I think you've got your oxygen molecules mixed up (if atomic oxygen can
be said to be a molecule). Ozone is Osubscript3/subscript (i.e. a
molecule consisting of 3 oxygen atoms) while atomic oxygen is just O (a
single oxygen atom).


I knew I should have checked that before posting. :-[
Anyway according to the report it's the atomic oxygen that's the
suspected culprit in the titanium burning, although ozone will break
down into O2 and atomic oxygen, which gives it its highly corrosive
properties.

Pat

Neil Gerace writes:

Pat Flannery wrote:

I'm still surprised that the problem with the inertial locks on the
shoulder straps wasn't spotted at some point.

Perhaps it was the kind of problem that only manifested itself during
the sort of event that actually happened.

The report states that they were designed to lock at a certain
acceleration in a certain direction (eyeballs-out) and the real
accelerations were changing and in multiple directions, so they may in
fact have worked as designed and still failed in this case.


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